As MLB records change, Josh Gibson, not Ty Cobb, becomes the all-time leading hitter

It has been a creed for nearly a century, as if Abner Doubleday himself had inscribed it on a tablet of stone: “The greatest hitter in the history of Major League Baseball is, and will always be, Tyrus Raymond Cobb.”

But history evolves. We know Doubleday didn’t invent baseball. And as of Wednesday, Josh Gibson will replace Cobb as the leading hitter in baseball’s official record. Gibson’s career batting average is .372, six percentage points higher than Cobb’s.

Major League Baseball will release the results Wednesday of a new consolidated statistical database covering the records of the Negro Leagues, which operated from 1920 to 1948. The formal recognition of the data comes three and a half years after MLB officially recognized the Negro Leagues as major league baseball in December 2020.

“People may be uncomfortable — I don’t know if outrage is the right word — seeing Negro League stars now on the career and season rankings,” said committee member Larry Lester, a writer and longtime Negro Leagues scholar.

“Some stubborn people may not accept the statistics, and that’s OK. I welcome the conversation in the bar, the barber shop and the pool hall. That’s why we do what we do.”

MLB’s official historian, John Thorn, said the timing was right to release the committee’s findings because the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants play next month at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala. Thorn estimated that about 75 percent of all Negro League box scores have been recorded, and he said MLB would update its records as more are discovered.

To some extent, Negro League numbers are constantly changing. They don’t include road games, which are essential to the financial lifeline of Negro League teams.

“For example, the Kansas City Monarchs will travel to Chicago and play as many games as they can once they get to town,” Lester said, “so instead of a three-game series they’ll play five games. And on the way there, they might stop in Moline and play a local team to make some extra cash.”

“According to the players I interviewed, they played almost every day, sometimes two or three games a day, and never in the same place. That means they probably played 150-175 games a year, but only 60-80 of them counted towards the league table.”

In a release announcing the change, MLB noted that a shortened official season would naturally lead to “extreme rankings on the leaderboard,” but the league has approved a 60-game season during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Thorn said that if that’s a recent precedent, it makes sense to approve a Negro League season as well.

“The irregularities in the league schedule, which were decided in the spring and then improvised by the summer, were not of their making but were the result of MLB’s exclusionary practices,” MLB said in a statement.

The committee used the same statistical minimum standard for Negro league leaders as the American and National Leagues: 3.1 at-bats or one inning pitched per scheduled team game, with the number of scheduled games ranging from 26 (Negro American League, 1942) to 91 (Negro National League I, 1927).

With this new calculation, Gibson not only set the career batting average record, but also a season average of .466 in 1943, second only to Chino Smith’s .451 in 1929. The previous record was .440, set by Hugh Duffy with Boston in 1894, dropping him to third place.

However, Baseball-Reference does not bold Gibson’s .466 batting average on his career stat sheet because another hitter in Gibson’s league, Tetero Vargas of the New York Cubans, batted .471, which the site considers a career record.

Vargas had 136 at-bats that season, but because MLB counts the number of games played in the league as 47, Vargas did not reach the MLB minimum of 146 to be recognized as a league leader.

Following Vargas and Gibson on Baseball-Reference’s season batting average rankings is .466 hitter Lyman Bostock Sr., a star outfielder for the Twins and Angels who was murdered after a game in Chicago in 1978.

Bostock Sr.’s batting average of .466 is recognized by baseball-reference as the top batting average of 1941 (which is why Ted Williams’ legendary batting average of .406 for the Red Sox in 1941 is not italicized on the site), but MLB is not recognizing Bostock Sr.’s batting average on its new season leaderboards because he achieved that number in just 84 at-bats.

“Here’s the difference,” said Sean Forman, president of Sports Reference LLC. “There are games that are missing from the Negro Leagues stats. You have the game scores, but you don’t have the box scores.”

“So, let’s look at Bostock in 1941. He recorded 23 games and the Birmingham Black Barons (Bostock’s team) that season recorded 45. So Bostock with 84 at-bats is under 45 x 3.1 (the threshold). The thing is, in games with box scores, he’s over 3.1 per game. We use that number to set the floor.

“There are good reasons why we made the choice that we did and there are good reasons why MLB made the choice that we did.”

Ty Cobb’s career batting average has long been the best in MLB. (Photo reproduction: Transcendental Graphics / Getty Images)

Baseball-Reference uses Negro League statistics from the Seamheads database. Lester said the project began with a grant from MLB in 2000. Researchers Gary Ashwill and Kevin Johnson conducted an exhaustive search of verified box scores, and although they are both members of the committee, it took years for MLB and Seamheads to agree to implement the data.

“The negotiations were difficult,” Thorne acknowledged. “Part of the difficulty wasn’t financial – we pretty much agreed on that, but how the statistics would be used and how much ongoing involvement Seamheads would have. It took a long time to reach an agreement, but once we did, we brought Retrosheet on board as an additional statistical partner. And of course we already had Elias on board as our official statistician in charge of auditing the data.”

It took more than two years for these groups to come together, but once they did, the pace seemed to pick up. Thorne said the committee was careful to rely solely on box scores and not just game records. For example, Gibson was reported to have hit four home runs in one game in 1938, but without the box score, the full numbers don’t add up.

“When you hit a home run, you hit somebody,” Thorne said, “so without the double-entry accounting required to balance the entire historical record of major league baseball, you can’t make exceptions for anecdotal evidence.”

Similarly, Thorne said, 1948 game records show Willie Mays hit a home run in Birmingham, but without the score to prove it, Mays’ career total remains at 660, all with the Giants and Mets.

The records are not perfect, but as far as MLB is concerned, what is recorded is accurate, as a result of thorough scrutiny, which is what is required.

“It takes about 30 minutes to enter one box score, line by line, number by number, and then we run a data integrity check at the end of the season,” Lester said. “We have about 16,000 box scores in the database, so this task took us years to perform.

“But it’s fun. I welcome criticism and doubters. But I know the numbers are solid.”

Lester said decades ago, people told him such numbers didn’t exist. “African-Americans were not interested in documenting baseball history,” he said. He’s proud to have helped overturn that stereotype and unearth the numbers that document the achievements of Oscar Charleston, Barrett Logan, Turkey Stearns and others.

Lester knows that corrected records, even if certified as official, won’t satisfy everyone, and no amount of meticulous record-keeping can ever resolve the “what ifs” of segregation.

“Pundits will say, ‘Gibson only played against black teams,'” Lester said. “Babe Ruth never hit a home run off a black pitcher, and Josh Gibson never hit a home run off a white pitcher. So my point is, the amount or lack of melanin is not an indicator of a baseball player’s greatness.”

(Top photo of Gibson statue in Washington DC: Simon Bulty/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)