MLB has integrated Negro Leagues stats. Is
it too little, too late?
Josh Gibson, nicknamed the Black Babe Ruth, is belatedly recognized as the all-time hit king
and a tribute game will be held in Alabama today – but only 5.7% of players are now Black
Americans
Andrew Lawrence
Thu 20 Jun 2024 11.00 EDTLast modified on Thu 20 Jun 2024 11.15 EDT
As Bob Kendrick, president of the Kansas City-based Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, tells
it,
baseball’s all-time hit king had eyes like Ted Williams and power like Babe Ruth.
“For me, his greatest feat of all is hitting a ball into the right-field upper deck at Yankee
Stadium,” says Kendrick. “They say he was circling the bases and just giggling. He was the
kind
of guy who was so strong that he could poke you in the arm and it would hurt, but he didn’t
know he was hurting you.”
The indomitable Josh Gibson, nicknamed the Black Babe Ruth, managed all this while
swinging
a bat that measured 40 ounces and 41 inches – about 25% bigger than today’s big leagues
bats.
“You got to be a
man
,” adds Kendrick, “to swing that kind of lumber.”
Officially, Gibson is now
the
man, after Major League Baseball announced the incorporation of
records from the Negro Leagues, even though he never had an at-bat in the majors. The
decision
late last month to include more than 2,300 players followed a three-year research project, led
by
a special committee of Negro Leagues experts and statisticians.
MLB’s new stats database will formally launch before a special tribute game between the St
Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants on Thursday at Alabama’s Rickwood Field, home
to
the Birmingham Black Barons, the team that launched Willie Mays, perhaps the finest player
to
ever pick up a bat and glove. Until his death on Tuesday at age 93, Mays – AKA the “Say
Hey
Kid” – was one of three surviving Negro Leagues players and baseball’s oldest living Hall of
Famer. MLB had already planned to pay special tribute Mays at a Negro Leagues
commemorative game in absentia.
MLB’s statistical integration rights a wrong that had endured since Major League Baseball
accepted Black players into its ranks in 1947, precipitating the Negro Leagues’ slow death
the
next year. Why it took nearly 80 years to integrate the stats is a matter of ongoing
controversy,
with critics accusing MLB of going woke, and some Black baseball fans feeling it all comes
far
too late in the day. Nevertheless, 77 years since he last swung his bat, Gibson, an imposing
catcher and slugger once relegated to the shadows, now stands above the rest.
A gentle giant who loomed large behind the plate, whether crouched in front of the umpire or
rolling up his sleeves to show off his massive biceps, Gibson overtook Ty Cobb in career
batting
average, surpassed Ruth in on-base plus slugging (a prominent advanced stat that measures a
hitter’s ability to reach base and hit for average and power), and topped Barry Bonds’s
single-season slugging percentage record, in two different years.
No US sport is more serious about its stats than baseball. Learned fans call up the most
hallowed
marks – Hank Aaron’s 755 home runs, Pete Rose’s 4,256 hits, Bob Gibson’s 1.12 earned run
average (ERA), Mays’s 660 homers, 339 steals and 7,769 putouts (from centerfield!) – as
easily
as their own phone numbers. Statistics for Negro Leagues players were just as painstakingly
kept
among teams and the Black press, which was no mean feat in a league where no set schedule
was
guaranteed to play out as planned.
“They had to scramble to keep afloat,” says John Thorn, the MLB house historian who
chaired
the 17-person committee that decided baseball’s stat integration. “If they played two or three
games in a day and one was a league game and two were against integrated semi-pros, well,
it
was a paycheck.” Negro Leagues players barnstormed the country to make ends meet. They
were
forced into that hustle, adds Thorn, because of “MLB’s racism”.
A 1969 committee on baseball records recognized six major leagues dating to 1876 – but
excluded the Negro Leagues “for no reason”, Thorn says. “But while settling on those
defunct
rival leagues as equivalent of the major leagues, the subject of the Negro Leagues’ caliber of
play was not really much of a question. Everyone agreed it was pretty darn good. That’s why
I’ve taken to use the trope of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to describe the attitude toward
Black
baseball. It wasn’t so much racist animus as it was the feeling that they weren’t there.”
The Negro Leagues weren’t just an alternative pastime born from the two Americas that
sprang
up from segregation. As Sam Pollard shows in his 2023 documentary The League, the Negro
Leagues teams were obvious indicators of thriving Black enclaves in major American cities.
“We
couldn’t go to major league games,” Pollard told me, “and if we did, we had to sit isolated,
segregated from white audiences. So we created our own Black baseball teams, and that kept
money circulating within our stores and funeral homes and the like, helping the community
survive.”
It wasn’t until 2020, when Covid restrictions forced MLB to cut its schedule from 162 games
to
60 (the baseline for an average Negro National League season) while making clear that the
records generated during that span would be treated the same, that the league announced the
integration of Negro League stats to correct “a longtime oversight”. Over the course of six
meetings, Thorn’s MLB committee – which included representatives from the Negro
Leagues
