There has been some controversy as to whether Anson should be considered the first player ever to reach the 3,000 hit milestone. For many years, official statistics credited him with achieving that goal. When the first edition of Macmillan's "Baseball Encyclopedia" was published in 1969, it disregarded a rule in place only for the season which counted base-on-balls (walks) as hits and times-at-bat instead of zeroes in both categories as they were before and have been since. Anson's 60 walks were removed from his 1887 hit total, resulting in a career mark of 2,995, though later editions of the encyclopedia still added five more hits to exactly 3,000.