Negro Leagues players finally get some measure of statistical justice from MLB

No sport has a closer relationship with statistics than baseball.  So welcome the news that Major League Baseball, after a decades-long statistical analysis, just integrated the hitting and pitching statistics of the Negro leagues into MLB’s statistics.

For decades major league owners had an informal “no Black players” agreement that lasted until 1947 and Jackie Robinson’s historic breakthrough with the Brooklyn Dodgers. So in 1920, Black entrepreneurs started the Negro Leagues, which became a showcase for great baseball players most fans have probably never heard of, such as Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Satchel Paige, and Mule Suttles.

The end of baseball’s statistical apartheid is long overdue. But some baseball fans, the kind who argue over who was baseball’s best hitter — “it’s Ty Cobb, dummy, he batted a career .367!” — will grumble because now the answer is Negro Leagues catcher Josh Gibson, who batted a career .372.

They may complain that this is a “what if” exercise, since we can never know how the Negro Leagues’ players would have done if they had to pitch to Babe Ruth or hit against Dizzy Dean.  Nor can we ever know how Ruth or Dean have done if they had had to go through what the Negro Leagues players endured,

The Negro Leagues players were paid a fraction of the salaries earned by white major leaguers. They were turned away by restaurants, and when hotels wouldn’t let them in they had to sleep in the team bus. They played in ballparks rented from white teams, who let them use the field but not the lockers or showers. Players had to change into their hand-stitched uniforms behind the scoreboard.

But they played the game with a verve and energy lacking in the white major leagues. The white players mainly wanted to hit long balls like Babe Ruth. The Negro Leagues played “scrappy” baseball — lots of stolen bases, hit and runs, and spiking.  According to Sam Pollard, the director of the 2023 documentary ”The League,” it was  “energetic, punchier, aggressive — a kind of baseball which Major League Baseball is trying to bring back.”   

And it’s not a “what if,” because Negro Leagues players and white teams from the majors did play against each other in “barnstorming” games — offseason traveling games where players earned extra money. In 1934, the colorful Satchel Paige pitched for a Black barnstorming team against the legendary Dizzy Dean, pitching for a white team. They played six games, and Paige’s team won four.  Dean later said that Paige was “the best player I ever seen.  It’s too bad those colored boys don’t play in the big leagues, because they sure got some great players.”

But the major leagues commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, did not like interracial matchups, and limited his league’s barnstorming to ten days. Under Landis’ tenure, the closest a Negro Leagues player could get to the major leagues was if a scout happened to see him play and whisper, “I would like to sign you, but I can’t.”

After Landis was gone, Jackie Robinson, who had started in the Negro Leagues, opened the door to the majors for other Negro Leagues players, such as all-time greats Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. The loss of talent eventually doomed the Negro Leagues. Josh Gibson died the same year Robinson broke the color line, but Satchel Paige played in the majors well into his 40s. When asked for advice on how to defy time, he said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

The players in the Negro Leagues are mostly gone and nothing can make up for what was done to them. But Major League Baseball has finally given them statistically meaningful justice.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.