Larry Stone / Baseball reporter
Inside pitch: The important number isn't 154

AP, 1920 George Sisler of the St. Louis Browns had a record 257 hits in 1920. He set the mark in a 154-game season; Ichiro will have 162 games.

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If Ichiro is going to break George Sisler's hits record this season, he'll be doing it in more than the 154 games that constituted a season in Sisler's day. The Mariners played their 154th game out of 162 last night, with Ichiro still a tad shy of Sisler's standard of 257 hits in 1920.

But despite the howling of purists who say Ichiro's record will now be tainted — the same breed that emerged when Roger Maris was going after Babe Ruth's single-season home-run record in 1961 — there will be no asterisk by Ichiro's name.

"It's a great record, and 154 games doesn't have any impact here," declared Steve Hirdt, executive vice president of the Elias Sports Bureau, the official statistician of Major League Baseball. "One hundred and fifty-four games has no official meaning. There is no asterisk.

"It's an advance in civilization made from 1961 until now — cellphones, computers, and there's no longer rigid insistence on breaking records in 154 games."

That viewpoint wasn't clarified in major-league baseball until 1991, when then-commissioner Fay Vincent chaired an eight-man committee on statistical accuracy that voted to eliminate the figurative asterisk. Maris was declared the sole single-season home run champ, regardless of length of season, and Ruth, who had hit 60 home runs in 154 games in 1927, was eliminated from the Elias record book.

Hirdt said that, similarly, if and when Ichiro breaks the hits record, the Elias record book will have no mention of Sisler's 1920 season.

In July of 1961, when Maris had rocketed ahead of Ruth's pace, commissioner Ford Frick made his infamous decision to recognize Maris' record only if it was achieved in 154 games.

It wasn't; Maris didn't hit his 61st homer until the Yankees' final game, their 163rd of the season because of a tie game.

The result was the mythical asterisk, which never actually appeared in print. Instead, Ruth's record was listed alongside Maris, with the notation that Ruth's was achieved in a 154-game season, Maris' in a 162-game season.

That distinction always ate away at Maris, who felt he never got the credit he deserved. Vincent, reached at his Connecticut home, said he decided to get involved after reading an article in the New Yorker by noted baseball writer Roger Angell.
 
"Roger wrote a wonderful piece called 'Homeric Musing,' which only he could write, that said, 'If Fay Vincent was a real commissioner, he'd do away with the silliness,' " Vincent recalled. "Steve Greenberg, the associate commissioner, brought it in and said, 'Roger has a point. Why don't you do something?'

"I said, 'Fine, let's call a committee together.' We all agreed it was getting ridiculous, that the asterisk on Maris was crazy, and so we did away with it. I have no regrets. It was the right thing to do."

Vincent said he based his reasoning on the fact that there are too many elements differentiating the eras to focus on length of season.

"I think a season is a season," he said. "You could end up with asterisks beyond the size of a page. You'd have one asterisk if it was done before the introduction of artificial turf, two asterisks if it was done before the introduction of night baseball, asterisks if it was done before the introduction of black players.

"Come on. Baseball has a wonderful, and I think essential, affection for statistics, but it gets ridiculous. You can say guys hit .406 before Wheaties. Nutrition changed, eyeglasses, bifocals.

"There's going to be a problem with steroids; everyone will have to say 'before steroids' and 'after steroids.' That's stuff baseball has to avoid. A season is a season; you can't get too caught up by it."

That 1991 committee also included Rich Levin, director of public relations for the commissioner's office; Michael Bernstein, manager of publishing of Major League Baseball Properties; Seymour Siwoff, president of Elias; Jack Lang, executive secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America; Jerome Holtzman, Chicago Tribune sportswriter; George Kirsch, professor of history at Manhattan College in New York, and David Voigt, professor of sociology at Albright College in Reading, Pa.

While Elias immediately struck Ruth from its record book after the ruling, baseball's other record book, published by The Sporting News, continued to list the Ruth and Maris records with notations about the length of the respective seasons.

The Sporting News, in fact, still lists 154-game and 162-game marks for other records as well, and will do so with the hits record if Ichiro breaks it in more than 154 games, according to John Rawlings, their editorial director and senior vice president.

"Whoever has the most hits, we list as the person with the record," Rawlings said. "The record holder would be Ichiro. But we would continue to list Sisler with the notation that that's the record for 154 games.

"That's the way we've always done it. That's the way it was done with Maris; we were doing it the same way in 1961. We listed Maris as having the record, and then we listed Ruth in 154 games — never with an asterisk."

Rawlings said he was in on the discussions in 1991, but that The Sporting News — which, unlike Elias, is not officially associated with Major League Baseball — ultimately decided to keep things the way they were.

"We thought the way we did it made sense," he said.

So Ichiro, assuming he gets the necessary hits in the next eight games, will be asterisk-free in baseball's eyes. Whether his mark will be somehow less valid than Sisler's is in the eye of the beholder.

Larry Stone: 206-464-3146 or lstone@seattletimes.com.