“We are proud that the official historical record now includes the players of the Negro Leagues,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement.
Josh Gibson will now become the MLB single-season leader in three categories.
From the article,…
I can see why it took them 3 years to compile the official stats. I’m sure that finding all the box scores was incredibly difficult.
It’s still an ongoing process. I follow a guy on Twitter that works for Baseball Reference (Adam Darowoski), and uncovering old forgotten box scores from the Negro League is his passion project. He’s been doing it for years and years and years. He’ll post about how he’ll get a scan of a pile of newspapers someone found in a basement, and he got one new box score out it, and it’s like he discovered a vein of gold in a mountain mine.
Any idea how good or not good the Negro League teams were overall? Occasionally a major-leaguer will go down to AA or AAA for a rehab assignment after coming off an injury. They are better than the guys they’re playing against for a few days.
Even the radio station asked would Babe Ruth have more or less homers if he played in the Negro Leagues.
Not all years and games are being counted. Part of the criteria for inclusion is competition that is considered on par with MLB at the time, as determined by MLB researchers and statisticians. It’s the reason Hank Aaron is not getting credited for the home runs that he hit when he played in the Negro Leagues.
As an aside, if you’re ever in Kansas City with some time to spare, this is worth a trip.
Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
I am by no means an expert on the Negro Leagues but I had heard that their unofficial stats were inflated due to barnstorming and exhibitions. Josh Gibson’s plaque in the Hall of Fame mentions something like 800 home runs. Now that I see how they complied the stats it makes more sense. It’s about as fair as you can get without integrated baseball.
Gibson was no doubt one of the best ever but the comparison in some categories is a bit apples and oranges. His .372 career batting average is now ahead of Ty Cobb’s .367 but Gibson has 602 official games. Cobb was able to maintain that average in over 3,000 games during a 24 year career. That’s mind boggling.
Yes, but…
Gibson played for 17 years. Many of his games were barnstorming against lesser tallent, so those don’t count. Many of his games were in leagues not recognized as MLB level. The “602 official games” were still over a career of 17 years. He ended his career in a “major” league. If we assume that, like most human beings, his talents diminished as he got older, that .372 is spread across young “learning” years, middle “mature” years, and late “declining” years, same as Ty Cobb. Yeah, Cobb played longer, presumably meaning more “declining” years. We will NEVER know definitively who was the better hitter.
Another huge factor in Gibson‘s numbers was the fact that in the barnstorming days, Negro League players would play double and triple headers most days they played. Those numbers aren’t reflected in the official stats that are being imported into the MLB, but it sure speaks to Gibsons longevity and durability. As a catcher.
It’s hard to say how much baseball Gibson played outside of major league talent. Official games Gibson average around 40 a year. Cobb more than tripled that most years. The years Cobb hit over .400 he played 146, 140 and 137. At 41 his final year he still averaged .323. When you raise the amount of games played by that much, doing what Cobb did was remarkable.
That doesn’t take away from how good Gibson was. He was able to hit the way he did while being a catcher. And the last few years he racked up impressive stats with a brain tumor. That’s pretty damn remarkable.
Comparing eras is always difficult. It’s more difficult when it’s not even the same league. Cobb’s career ended right before Gibson started. They were playing a different type of baseball with literally a different baseball. In 1909 Ty Cobb led the American League in home runs. He hit 9 of them.
I can’t see how the 2 leagues can be compared.
Sadly, the Negro League was badly underfunded. Many promising players took regular jobs instead of playing pro baseball. The overall level of competition wasn’t as high compared to MLB. They had a few players like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron that excelled and played in the Majors.
MLB had excellent facilities and equipment. Top paid coaches and trainers. Transportation was more comfortable. MLB has a solid minor league system that attracted the best athletes from high schools.
It’s really 2 entirely different circumstances that players experienced.
It would be like Comparing Double-A baseball to the Majors.
Double-A has competitive games and a championship team. It can be fun to watch. I’ve attended Arkansas Travelers games and had a great time. They’re Double-A.
Tennis had a similar problem. You can’t compare players from the 40’s and 50’s to the more modern game of the 60’s and 70’s. The prize money went up dramatically and that attracted better coaches and players. It elevated the game.
The National and American Leagues were not exactly swimming in cash in that era, either.
It was very common, through the 1940s (and even later) for MLB players to have offseason jobs, simply because they did not make big salaries playing baseball. Even the stars didn’t make a ton of money. And that persisted even into the 1950s and 1960s.
Source: New York Times
No, it’s really not.
Double A ball consists of farm teams for MLB teams; their rosters are controlled by their MLB parent clubs. Only about 10% of minor-league players ever make it to the majors; while that percentage is undoubtedly somewhat higher for Double A ball, very few players who are on a Double A roster are, at the moment they’re playing there, MLB-caliber. Those who are still in Double A who will make it to the majors at some point, are still in Double A because they still need more experience and training.
Certainly, not everyone who played in even the major Negro Leagues would have been MLB-caliber, but many were, and the only reason that they weren’t playing in MLB was discrimination, not because they were only Double A caliber.
I want to endorse your entire, excellent post, but the other thing to consider is that many players in the Major Leagues at that time were really AAA (or less) caliber. The only reason they made it to the Show was because they didn’t have to face a more competitive talent pool.
Willie Mays played a lot in both leagues.
He got everyones attention in the Majors. Great player that finished his career with a batting average of .302.
I think this excellently encapsulates what MLB is attempting to combat - widespread misunderstanding of the decades of talent that teemed in the Negro Leagues. Segregation is a stain on baseball not because a handful of players got kept out - it’s a stain because it kept generations of talent out of the majors.
You could say that Willy Mays’ stats were artificially high by virtue of not having to play against the likes of Babe Ruth… but you could also say that Babe Ruth’s stats were artificially high by virtue of not having to play against the likes of Willy Mays. When you’re trying to fill up two top leagues instead of one, both leagues are going to be stuck accepting a lower caliber of players, on the low end.
Apologies for a second post, but there are a few more things here that I want to note.
And this was probably true of white players, and MLB, as well. As I already noted, and certainly during the segregation era, MLB players didn’t make a lot of money.
In Ty Cobb’s era (I mention him because he’s been supplanted by Josh Gibson as the all-time batting average leader), there were several scandals around gambling, and players being paid off by gamblers to fix games. The 1919 “Black Sox” scandal is the best-known one today, but there were several other similar scandals in the 1910s. A big part of the reason why this went on – especially with the White Sox – is that the players were poorly-paid, making them vulnerable to financial incentives from gamblers.
Well, taking a train rather than a bus might have arguably more comfortable, but probably not by a whole lot. MLB teams typically traveled by train through the 1940s, often spending 24 hours or more on the train between cities (and then having to turn around and play the next day). And, due to the expense and time involved in travel, road trips were often several weeks long, which meant that the players were living on trains and in hotel rooms that entire time.
I’m glad the players from the Negro League are getting the well deserved recognition.
We’ll never know how to compare the pitchers in both leagues. That effects the hitting. Runs etc.
There certainly were some great pitchers in the Negro League. Names that I’ve never heard.
I think everyone agrees there were great players that never got the proper recognition.
I’m okay with not being able to really compare. This is the sport that gave us 61*, at least four different eras, and so many changes in 150 years that some records can never be beat because the game and how it’s approached has changed so much. So I’ll say that Ty Cobb and Pete Rose were two of the best hitters in the majors, Gibson a hitter at or above their level, and it’s a shame that we can never really say what Gibson would have done in the majors.
The Negro League was a major league. The records are being examined carefully to rule out barnstorming and exhibition games. What’s left are Major League stats that are just as important as the other Major Leagues stats traditionally recorded.