A lot of talk is being made about Derek Jeter approaching 3000 hits, but he passed that milestone a year ago. Including the postseason, Jeter has 3179 hits. I’ve never understood why postseason numbers aren’t included in career statistics. I get why they don’t include them in year to year stats, but why ignore stats that are put up against the toughest competition the sport has to offer? Those are official games. Just like the regular season games.
Pete Rose is the all-time hits leader with 4342.
Comments
Well, for one thing, they might drag down people’s career rate stats. Lumping a person’s playoff OBP with his regular season OBP without adjusting for context would be misleading.
The other thing is that people who care about all-time records (I don’t) want to know what the player did in the regular season, not counting the extra opportunities afforded to him because he has good teammates/luck/etc. Jeter, of course, has been unusually fortunate in that regard.
ACTQuote Reply
mb, I think it’s unfair because it gives an advantage to players on good teams. The Yankees went to the playoffs many times, so did Pete Rose’s teams. Ichiro racks up tons of hits but has never had the postseason opportunities that Jeter has had.
BerseliusQuote Reply
I don’t buy that, b. There’s an unfair advantage to players whose careers are 20+ years, but nobody cares about that. Albert Pujols has an unfair advantage because he’s better than everyone else.
It’s also misleading if those rates aren’t adjusted for era.
I wouldn’t count postseason performances with regular season stats, but I see no reason not to include them for career statistics. Adjust if you must or want, but the additional games that some other player didn’t get to play isn’t a big deal because people don’t care about that. If that really mattered to people, we’d adjust the stats on a per season basis or something. Instead, those who care about the records (not me) compare the accomplishments of Nolan Ryan to those of Mark Prior. Obviously Ryan has an unfair advantage seeing as he played for 300 years.
mb21Quote Reply
That’s simple enough; just say he had so many hits in this time period, and you can easily compare him to other hitters who played at the same time. If you want to compare him to someone of a different time period, you can use the league average as a baseline. When you take playoffs into account, you have to treat a subset of his career totals differently, and it makes things more complicated and unintuitive (instead of a career OBP, you have a career OBP, with the postseason OBP adjusted according to some formula that most people won’t understand).
I also don’t consider having a long career to be an unfair advantage, since playing a long time is an achievement itself (it may be “unfair” in some cosmic sense, but not in comparing achievements). When people talk about career hits (or strikeouts, homeruns, etc.), they want to compare apples to apples.If people want to find out the best home run hitters of the 90;s (or born in the 60’s, or whatever), they’re going to look at regular season totals.
To put it another way, when you combine a person’s career stats for both regular season and postseason, the first thing most people (including me) will want to know his what the regular season and postseason totals are. It’s more informative this way, and easier to contextualize. I don’t see what is gained by simply adding them together.
ACTQuote Reply
That’s only because they’re trained to look at that. For awhile everybody wanted to ignore the 155th game and so on. Eventually we came ignore that. There’s no reason the same can’t be true here.
Your objections don’t address the most important aspect of including postseason numbers: they’re achieved against the very best competition in baseball. It’s harder to get hits, home runs, etc in the postseason than it is in the regular season. I’d also add that the MLB season is defined as the Championship Season. It runs from Opening Day until the final out of the World Series. The full season, as defined by MLB, already includes the playoffs. The stats people have been using include only a partial season as defined by MLB.
As for how it affects someone’s rate stats, don’t care. If it means a career regular season .270/.330/.400 hitter is now a .260/.320/.390 hitter, big deal. That’s just not something I care about. If I want to look at only a portion of the seasons, I can do that. Besides, most players don’t actually play that much in the postseason so it’s irrelevant for the majority of ballplayers. Even Derek Jeter has played in just 147 career postseason games. Few players come close to that.
Playing a long career is a combination of skill (achievement) and luck. Playing in the postseason is a combination of skill and luck.
Not sure if I said it earlier, but I’d include the hits Ichiro has from the NPB. In my opinion, Ichiro is closing in on 4000 career hits. He’s currently 4 hits shy of 3600. Decent chance he gets to 4000.
mb21Quote Reply