Melky Cabrera DQ's himself from batting title

Well, this would be factually wrong since .346 wouldn't have sufficient plate appearances to qualify, according to the agreed upon rules of the sport.

 

When the "Tony Gwynn exception" was passed in 1967, it was specifically intended so as not to punish injured players. I'm not even sure if suspended players were mentioned in 1996 when Gwynn actually did win a batting title that way.

Of course, if you look at the history of rate-stat minimum qualifications, it's all completely arbitrary anyway.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/about/leader_glossary.shtml#min_req

Still doesn't mean they should change the rules in mid-season. The PR nightmare already happened — Cabrera being suspended. Now they have two PR nightmares on their hands, and if they had taken their normal "see-no-evil" approach, it could have been avoided outside of maybe a day's worth of articles at the end of the regular season when some moral-authority columnist rips the fact that a cheater won the batting title. The Giants and Cabrera could have settled any performance bonus he had coming to him.

Just add the "suspension" exception at the Rules Committee meeting this winter and realize everyone's gonna forget about Melky.

 

This is probably where I would ultimately come down, too, even after all my pretzel logic to make the present course of action more palatable.

Sixty years from now, Melky's batting title would have been a quirk of baseball history. A fun piece of trivia about the "dark side of the game."

Of course, since humans think that what's happening presently is the most important thing to ever happen ever, Melky winning the batting title felt like the Biggest Deal in Sports History. And, admittedly, I'm somebody who did find it off-putting. But, you know, perspective.

 

Of course, it all comes down to what Sean Forman rules, since really nothing else matters.

http://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2012/09/how-i-think-well-handle-melky-and-the-batting-title/

 

Forman seems to be trying to create drama where none exists.

Cabrera doesn't have "the highest batting average based on the rules" and certainly not "irrefutably." That would be to say that he doesn't believe the sport's governing body has the right to change the rules. It isn't baseball, it's Major League Baseball, which is a baseball product. Anyway, Forman neglects to support how he arrives at this conclusion.

Again, the math doesn't change; just the eligibility requirement, which is entirely up to the governing body.

 

Based on the rules agreed upon at the start of the season, and that have been in place since 1967? Seems pretty irrefutable to me.

 

MLB's governing body -- the only group that counts in this equation and the holder of the only official records of the industry -- allows changes in the rules in midseason.

I'm sorry if Forman and others don't agree with the governing body but MLB doesn't need the approval of stat websites for its rules changes.

 

Yes, that's obvious.

But it also makes MLB look foolish when, for instance, it ignores overwhelming evidence and common sense that an "official" record is wrong.

The most famous example, of course, is Ty Cobb's career hit total, which appears as 4,191 at MLB.com but 4,189 in literally every other credible reference book and website for the last 30 years. It's been known since the late 1970s, when SABR member Pete Palmer found the error, that a 2-hit game for Cobb in 1910 got double-counted in the "official" hand-written league records.

Cobb has 4,189 hits. MLB refused to acknowledge the error then because Pete Rose was chasing after a hallowed record. Why it still refuses now, I have no idea.

4,191 may be "official", but it doesn't make it right. And it doesn't mean the rest of us have to pretend that "official" means anything other than its proper definition: "from the office."

http://sabr.org/content/not-chiseled-stone-baseball-s-enduring-records-and-sabr-era

Same goes with Cabrera. If MLB wants to change the rules mid-stream and pretend Melky didn't hit for the highest average this season, go right ahead. But he did.

 

The difference is that MLB didn't acknowledge what is apparently a clear mistake in the math in Cobb's case while in Cabrera's case it has simply modified a qualification rule to prohibit players suspended for drug cheating from adding phantom plate appearances. There's no distortion of fact or mathematical error. Clearly very different situations. The things that should most bother the statistics crowd is the recognition of these fictional plate appearances in the first place. The real victim was Ellis Burks!

 

Melky won't play in the postseason, should be a good time to start another cycle.

 

Changing the rules in mid-season is a joke. It is far worse than having a cheat win the batting title. Hell, according to MLB, Ryan Braun shouldn't be in position to lead the National League in home runs or RBI. Maybe they should find some excuse to change the rules and stop that from happening, too?

 

if they had a moron who could correctly label a container of piss and get it to the lab in the correct time he'd have no shot at the hr or rbi titles this season.