To tell the history of baseball without including the Negro Leagues would paint an incomplete and narrow picture of America’s pastime. Baseball’s history is finally being revised.
Negro League statistics will officially become part of the MLB record book on Wednesday, a move that comes more than three years after MLB announced it was promoting the Negro Leagues to the major leagues.
2,300 players who played in the seven Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1948 will be integrated into the MLB database. A 1969 Special Baseball Records Commission denied the Negro Leagues major league status.
“This is a big day,” Negro Leagues Museum Director Bob Kendrick told Yahoo Sports on Tuesday. “What’s amazing, and we’ve said that so many times in the last few days and weeks when it comes to the Negro Leagues, is this: This is the result of a lot of hard work by incredible historians and researchers who worked tirelessly to try to accomplish something that probably never was thought possible.”
The news was first reported by USA Today’s Bob Nightingale.
“We are proud to now include Negro League players in the official historical record,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “This effort is focused on ensuring that the statistics and milestones of all the players who helped make the Negro Leagues possible are available to future generations of fans. Their accomplishments on the field will serve as a gateway to learning more broadly about this triumph in American history and the path that led to Jackie Robinson’s 1947 Dodgers debut.”
The Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee, comprised of baseball historians, Negro Leagues experts, former players, researchers and journalists, reviewed the data, box scores, statistics and additional information found by Seamheads, RetroSheet and the Elias Sports Bureau.
“We looked for historians, statisticians and stakeholders who we expected would have an interest in whether MLB gets the process and the product right,” John Thorn, MLB’s official historian and chairman of the Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee, told Yahoo Sports this week. “We weren’t looking for ‘like-minded people,’ but rather people who were likely to be controversial.”
What does this mean for MLB statistics?
One of the biggest questions baseball fans and spectators will have is how MLB determined which statistics can be used. The Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee looked at decades worth of box scores and data to find statistics for games that are considered league games. Negro League schedules typically feature 60-80 games, with an additional 40-60 games played as exhibition games. Statistics from so-called “barnstorming” or exhibition games do not count toward MLB’s recorded totals.
Similar to how MLB determines eligibility for statistical leaders, a similar formula was used in determining which players qualified for the MLB Leaderboard.
Negro League legend and Hall of Famer Josh Gibson now holds the MLB single-season records for batting average (1943, .466), slugging percentage (1937, .974) and OPS (1937, 1.474). Gibson, who played for the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays, now holds the MLB career record in all three categories. The previous season and career records for slugging percentage and OPS were held by Barry Bonds.
Negro League statistics will also be consolidated and updated for former Negro League players who played in the major leagues, such as Willie Mays, Minnie Minoso, Larry Doby, Jackie Robinson, etc. Statistics will continue to be reviewed and updated as more data and information is discovered.
Rules established by the SBRC in 1969 state that “for all-time records in a single season, no asterisks or official symbols will be used to indicate the number of games scheduled,” and thus new Negro League record holders and additions to the MLB leaderboard will not include asterisks.
MLB will pay tribute to the Negro Leagues on June 20 with a regular-season matchup between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama. Rickwood Field, home of the Birmingham Black Barons, is believed to be the oldest professional baseball stadium in the United States.
“Giving Negro League history a mainstream voice.”
The oral history of the Negro Leagues has been around for over 100 years, making players like Gibson the stuff of legend. As new data, documents, box scores and information is collected, it brings more concrete evidence to the stories that have been told.
Kendrick was one of the greatest advocates for the Negro Leagues to be recognized by Major League Baseball and to educate fans, new and old, about the impact the Negro Leagues had on baseball history.
“No sport values history more than baseball,” Kendrick told Yahoo Sports on Tuesday. “Baseball is romanticized a lot more than other sports, and it’s a sport that constantly compares stars of the past to stars of the present. And the united effort that we’ve undertaken over the last few years goes all the way back to the Negro Leagues’ inclusion in MLB The Show 23 last year. These events gave Negro League history a mainstream voice.
“We found that young baseball fans not only wanted to know about the Negro Leagues, but were obsessed with them. As a museum, as a cultural institution, that’s exactly what we wanted to do.”
Tuesday’s news highlights another chapter in baseball that was once ignored. The addition of Negro League statistics to MLB’s historical record doesn’t take away from MLB history — it just adds to it. As new generations of fans learn about baseball, baseball’s history will be told in a more complete and comprehensive way.
“I believe the past is living, breathing and influencing every moment of the present,” Thorn said. “No sport is more intimately connected to history and the heroes of the past than baseball, and now we have an opportunity to comprehensively tell the story of baseball and the nation.”
