Baseball-Reference.com-- Baseball's History: 1871-Now

A note about statistics from 1887 and 1876

1887 - During this year, Major League Baseball and the guides reporting on that season decided that a walk was equivalent to a hit. This was the only season in which this was true. Total Baseball and other encyclopedias, have at different times decided to honor and at other times has decided not to honor this scorekeeping method of the time and compute a player's batting average with walks as hits and at bats for that season. I had originally decided to go along, but now have changed my mind and have changed back to the standard method of computing batting averages and other stats.

1876 - Additionally, TB has at times recognized the convention that a walk was a charged at bat in 1876, so a player with four walks in four plate appearances will be credited with an 0 for 4 batting. I have decided to backtrack on this as well and restore the stats to as they were previously.

Thank you for your interest.

Sean Forman
December 2, 2001

Stats updated through October 30, 2008.

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