Great day for baseball yesterday: The Tim Raineses play side-by-side in the Baltimore outfield, Barry Bonds ties Mark McGwire’s single-season home run record, and Rickey Henderson breaks Ty Cobb’s career mark for runs scored. Or does he? Almost every source available credits Cobb with 2246 runs.

You know what else is funny? Cobb is almost universally credited with 4189 hits. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me, but didn’t Pete Rose break Cobb’s record of 4191 hits?

Well, I put in a call to the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, and a very patient young woman confirmed the discrepancies, and said that Elias Sports Bureau is the official keeper of records for MLB and that sometimes the old records aren’t entirely accurate.

So I called Elias, and they claim that someone at SABR went back and found a game (in 1912, I believe) where Cobb wasn’t credited with a run and should have been. The gentleman I spoke with also said that when Elias looked through all the records, they found that the single run added was balanced out by another run that was improperly added to Cobb’s record at some other point. He also suggested that MLB and various other sources are receiving faulty information from whomever maintains the databases that contain all this information. Why Elias isn’t providing these databases is beyond me, but that, in a nutshell, is the scoop.

So, Rickey either broke or tied Ty Cobb’s mark for runs scored yesterday at the Q. And tonight he has the chance to either break or extend the record (I’ll be there, so I was kinda hoping they screwed up and Rickey would pass Cobb tonight). Whatever happens, there’s a good chance we’ll never know how many runs Cobb really scored.