One Hundred Years of

The Numbers They Kept

Five record categories, drawn as lanes. Players positioned along each by stat value. Flip the switch. Watch the leaderboard correct itself — slowly, the way the record book did in May 2024, seventy-seven years late.
Section   04 / 07
Categories   5
Source   MLB · 29 May 2024
New entries   2,300+
Fig. 04 · Five categories, drawn as lanes

The names on the left held the records. The names on the right always earned them.

Each lane is a category. Each dot is a player, placed at the position his number puts him on the axis. Pre-2024, the lanes carry only Major League players. Flip the switch, and the dots appear that the bookkeepers had not been counting. None of them moves. They were already there.

Include Negro Leagues
Fig. 04b · How the rankings rearranged

These numbers were always true.
We just weren't looking at them.

SEAN GIBSON
great-grandson of Josh Gibson
quoted on the May 2024 merger