Major League Baseball’s reclassification Wednesday of the Negro Leagues will correct “a longtime oversight in the game’s history” and officially recognize players and statistics from much of that segregated era.
MLB elevated the Negro Leagues to major-league status on the centennial of its official origination in 1920 — and now will add stats and records of more than 3,400 players from 1920 through 1948 to baseball’s official history.
“All of us who love baseball have long known that the Negro Leagues produced many of our game’s best players, innovations and triumphs against a backdrop of injustice,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement Wednesday. “We are now grateful to count the players of the Negro Leagues where they belong: as Major Leaguers within the official historical record.”
The Negro Leagues consisted of seven leagues during that timeframe and continued for several years following Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.
Those leagues combined to produce 35 Hall of Famers, meaning legends such as Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell and Oscar Charleston now will be considered Major Leaguers after decades of being denied such status.
Hall of Famers such as Hank Aaron and Ernie Banks also appeared in the Negro Leagues after the 1948 cutoff, so their career MLB statistics will remain unchanged.
Willie Mays, however, appeared in games in 1948 for the Birmingham Black Barons, thus likely changing his career hit total of 3,283 and .302 batting average. His first major-league hit also will no longer be considered the home run he belted off of Warren Spahn on May 28, 1951.
MLB said it will work with the Elias Sports Bureau – baseball’s official statistician — to determine how to incorporate validated Negro League statistics into baseball’s record books.
A Special Committee on Baseball Records convened in 1968-69 identified six official “major leagues” dating to 1876 – the American and National Leagues, as well as the American Association (1882-91), the Union association (1884), the Players’ League (1890) and the Federal League (1914-15).
The Negro Leagues were excluded from those findings, and MLB’s statement Wednesday said that “omission from consideration was clearly an error that demands today’s designation.”
“For historical merit, it is extraordinarily important,” Negro Leagues Baseball Museum Bob Kendrick said. “Having been around so many of the Negro League players, they never looked to Major League Baseball to validate them.
“But for fans and for historical sake, this is significant, it really is. So we are extremely pleased with this announcement. And for us, it does give additional credence to how significant the Negro Leagues were, both on and off the field.”
Legend has it that Gibson is believed to have belted more than 800 home runs in his playing career, but those that came in various barnstorming tours and exhibition games will not be counted by MLB. His official Negro League record of 238 – as confirmed by the leagues’ database, Seamheads.com – will be considered his Major League total.
Yet to be determined, though, are rate statistics such as batting average, since the typical Negro League season was shorter than the customary 154-game and 162-game schedules of the American and National Leagues.
Gibson’s career average of .365 and four others who finished above .348 would bump legends such as Ted Williams (.344) and Babe Ruth (.342) out of the game’s all-time top 10. Gibson also batted .441 for the Homestead Grays in 1943, which presumably would make him – and not Williams, who hit .406 two years earlier – as the most recent player to eclipse the .400 mark.
But all of that can be sorted out at another time following Wednesday’s historic announcement.
“For more than 3,400 players, very few of whom are alive, their families will now be able to say their records were included among white Major Leaguers of the period,” John Thorn, MLB’s official baseball historian since 2011, told mlb.com. “There’s no distinction to be made. They were all big leaguers.”
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