This might not be what you think.
I'm not here to question the legitimacy of Alex Rodriguez's performance. I'm not smart enough to know what sort of drugs Babe Ruth might have been using, or how many steroids-laced pitchers Alex Rodriguez might have faced.
What I'm saying is that while "officially" Rodriguez might have just passed Ruth on the all-time American League RBI list, thus taking over the top spot on that list, this is essentially a record-keeping fiction, one of foolish consistency and convenience.
As you might have heard by now, Runs Batted In wasn't an official American League statistic until 1920. Ruth played in the American League before 1920. But we're going to ignore that because ... why, exactly? We consider all sorts of statistics before they were official. Because, you know, they happened.
And in fact, we know that Ruth did indeed drive in some runs before 1920. What's more, we know almost exactly how many he drove in.
Are there probably a few glitches in Ruth’s pre-1920 numbers? Yeah, maybe. We’ve got him with 224 pre-1920 RBI, and maybe the figure should be 222 or 225 or something. But here’s a dirty little secret that Major League Baseball and the Elias Sports Bureau don’t want you know to know about ... there are hundreds, probably thousands of glitches in the post-1920 data.
In the late 1960s, when a team of people were compiling the numbers that would be included in Macmillan’s first massive Baseball Encyclopedia, their source was (largely) the day-by-day statistical logs for each player. But there were dozens, hundreds, thousands of errors in those logs. Which meant, for example, that things didn’t always match up. But they had a finite amount of time and they used what they had, and we’ve been forever grateful.
Which doesn’t mean the “correct” numbers couldn’t someday be found. It’s just a lot of work. I mean, a lot of work, mostly a rigorous, incredibly time-consuming study of old newspaper accounts and original scorebooks.
A great deal of work has been done, though. Retrosheet’s researchers have uncovered thousands of errors, and recommended corrections. Some of those have been adopted, but many have not (the wheels of justice at Elias, and hence Major League Baseball, turn slowly). A few researchers have made pet projects of the big stars: Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig … and yes, Babe Ruth. I’m not saying we know everything about Ruth’s career. But I’ll bet we’re really, really close. One thing we do know is that the Babe drove in more runs than anybody else in American League history. And it's only stubbornness that keeps everyone from acknowledging this, officially.
