Negro Leagues stats update by MLB a sobering reminder of challenge to maintain Black history

“Records and stories and stats are not all the same thing” — John Thorn, MLB historian

On Tuesday, it was confirmed that Major League Baseball will be updating all of their official records to reflect the stats of Negro Leaguers, dating from 1920 to 1948. That includes over 2,300 players from an era that while largely celebrated and idolized around the game, did not hold any actual standing until MLB decided to recognize them in 2020. The fruits of that labor are now borne.

Most directly, the change affects several prominent historical marks. In terms of single season records, Josh Gibson’s who batted .466 batting average for the Homestead Grays in 1943, now holds the highest mark in Major League history. San Francisco Giants legend Barry Bonds’ single-season slugging record of at .863 is now behind FOUR players: Gibson in 1937 (.974); Hall of Famer Mule Suttles in 1926 (.877); Gibson in 1943 (.871); and Charlie “Chino” Smith in 1929 (.870). Also, Satchel Paige’s 1.10 ERA in 1944 for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League is now third best in history.

As for career marks, Gibson is now atop the leaderboard for all major hitting stats. Batting average, slugging and OPS are now his. He passed Ty Cobb, Ted Williams and Babe Ruth, respectively, in those categories. That fact alone is sure to send a certain percentage of the baseball history community into a complete galaxy brain meltdown, as they’ve certainly been unchanged for so long.

The 17-person group tasked with this charge was a veritable who’s who of names from around the Black baseball history community, known as the Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee. The entire process is a fascinating one. According to MLB, the stats are only 75% complete. Meaning, as we learn more, baseball fans will too.

Which is where this really becomes a fascinating story of history and documentation as much as it is any sort of prompt to argue about old ballplayers. There isn’t just some trove of documents lying around waiting for an easy transfer over to the bigs, then boom, you’ve got an update ready and waiting. Not only do you have to figure out what to include, you have to find the actual evidence to corroborate.

“I believe that standards are objective, not subjective. We use the example of John Paciorek, who went 5-for-5 in his lone baseball game in 1963,” Thorn said Tuesday. “You could say he had the highest on-base percentage ever. But that defies logical minimum standards for qualifying for a title. And the standards that we established for qualifying or within the accepted guidelines have 3.1 plate appearances per scheduled game for batters and one inning pitched per schedule game for pitchers. We have tabular material that indicates that the patterns shifted year to year, but tended to be in the range of 60 to 70.”

Once they set some standards for how they were going to judge who could be included, the verification process is often a frustrating one. It’s also where a reasonable amount of subjectiveness does come into play. While I personally am adamantly against the idea that the Negro Leagues were somehow less than, or in need of validation in terms of their collective value to the game — reminder: Black folks were playing baseball in Japan in the 1920s — that is arguably a separate discussion. To me, there’s a reasonable difference between calling Gibson a big leaguer and including a thorough examination of their statistical feats. You will never see this columnist doing the former.

When it comes to actual numbers, there is a method to the gargantuan conundrum that is certifying results.

“We didn’t have any trouble in getting [Sean Gibson] to agree that the 800 home runs or nearly 800 home runs attributed to his great grandfather on his Hall of Fame plaque were probably silly, and if not silly, then included a whole range of games that we could not possibly count as being a Major League Baseball quality,” Thorn explained. “We had a game account out of Zanesville Ohio, where Josh Gibson hit four home runs in a game, there’s no question that that happened. But we don’t have a box score. Likewise, Willie Mays hit a home run in mid-August of 1948 that is testified to in a game account, [but] we don’t have a box score. Therefore, we cannot count either Gibson’s for home runs, or Willie’s one home run. And he may have had a second, but we don’t have the box score. And the essence of the entire historical database is this double entry accounting system whereby if you record an out at the bat, it is mirrored by one that is made in the field, whether a pitcher strikeout, or whether a ground ball to short with an assist to the first baseman, so the shortstop gets assessed, the first baseman gets a putout. And this balances. So absent that balance, if we don’t find a box score, or we don’t find a detailed game account that enables us to reconstruct or decipher the box for, we don’t count it.”

An unfortunate byproduct of the roving nature of the leagues: it’s a common misnomer that there was just one big Black league when we were banned from playing in MLB. In reality, it was a mix of well-funded operations alongside other more desperate ones all over the country looking to find the financial wherewithal to stay afloat. Sure, they played for the love of the game, but it wasn’t a charity operation.

It’s the central plot of the 1976 movie “The Bingo Long Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings.” A star player basically decides to take his friends, the best ballplayers, on a barnstorming tour in an attempt to show up his team owner. A madcap comedy that features Billy Dee Williams picking potatoes in stylish outfits, cartoonish caricatures from Richard Pryor, and James Earl Jones driving a hearse straight onto a ballfield, it very well describes the environment around the leagues, not just the on-field play. As players moved on with their lives, chasing that history meant, in many cases, chasing actual ghosts — never mind artifacts.

While Bob Kendrick continues to do the Lord’s work as president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, people are still opening up trunks in their grandparents’ homes and finding previously unknown parcels of history in present day.

“[As a kid] I started researching the Black newspapers from all over the country and found more information than I would ever imagine,” Larry Lester, a baseball author and Negro Leagues expert, explained Tuesday. “Not only did I find box scores, I found play-by-plays and editorials by great Black writers like Sam Lacey and Wendell Smith and others. And it kind of jumpstarted my interest to learn more about these legendary players.

“As I got older, able to drive, one of the first things I did was drive to St. Louis and sit in Cool Papa Bell’s living room and talk to him. And, you know, other lesser-known ballplayers, they would just spend many years and in the living rooms of players before they became famous, before they were inducted into the Hall of Fame. So, I’ve been blessed in that regard.”

Think about that for a second. We’ve got land records dating back centuries that detail the transactions that sent enslaved people all over the place to build this country for free, but when it comes to being able to verify some of the greatest entertainment this country has ever seen, people who have dedicated their entire lives to the statistical forensics of the Negro Leagues are still on the chase.

While it’s marginally refreshing to learn that some of our legends will be replacing the names we’ve read for decades, it’s a sobering reminder of how hard it is to maintain one’s history, dignity and existence if you aren’t actively doing so in real time as it happens.

Lester, who attended the May 25 East-West Classic in Cooperstown, New York, organized by The Players Alliance — which featured former big leaguers paying homage to the Negro Leagues, along with the unveiling of Hank Aaron’s statue at the Baseball Hall of Fame — has found the entirety of the process quite satisfying, even if the work isn’t done. Not just the what, but the why, as well.

“We became serious about creating the database in 2000. I reached out to about 30 researchers across the country to access newspapers that I did not have access to. So, after five years, we were able to establish a very solid database of capturing Negro League stats,” he said. “We had data from more than 450 newspapers. There’s no app, there’s no software that can scan a box score, that will populate a spreadsheet or a database. All the numbers have to be inputted manually. So, this is why it’s taken us so long to create these solid stats. I think George Floyd and Trayvon Martin and other people of color who have been traumatized, killed, have encouraged Major League Baseball to revisit the social concept of why we need to include the Negro League stats.”

Ever the statesman, MLB certainly draws the straight line from this to Jackie Robinson. 

“We are proud that the official historical record now includes the players of the Negro Leagues,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “This initiative is focused on ensuring that future generations of fans have access to the statistics and milestones of all those who made the Negro Leagues possible. Their accomplishments on the field will be a gateway to broader learning about this triumph in American history and the path that led to Jackie Robinson’s 1947 Dodger debut.”

This doesn’t address the fact that the decline of the Negro Leagues is directly correlated to Robinson’s MLB debut, but that’s a discussion for another day. In the meantime, the hard work of quite a few people is finally out for public display.

Major League Baseball and the sport as a whole have found a way to attach a few generations to things beyond stats in dusty record books. But there is an argument that because racism was once the dominant flavor of the sporting world, this was a necessary reckoning for the assembled group who refuse to let Black American history die.

“I’m happy to finally have it out there for people to see the greatness of these ballplayers,” Lester said. “You know, find out about Bullet Rogen; he was the original Shohei Ohtani, you know that hit clean up and pitched every four or five days. I mean, it’s just so many legendary heroes that people will discover and learn to appreciate their struggles in segregated America.”

Oddly enough, for something that is likely to spark quite a bit of conversation in VFW and bingo halls across the nation, for the people in the room it wasn’t actually that complicated. Once I saw the list of people on the committee, I instantly felt better about all of this.

Once the goal was clear, it was a matter of working in concert, not bickering about the best ballplayers of their era.

“I think that the degree of comity on the committee was surprising to many of us, because we invited people who might be expected to be contentious or present difficult arguments with which we would struggle to agree,” Thorn said with some relief. “But we had six meetings, and each of them ended on a firm basis with an expectation of where we would move next. So. I think that the unanimity of the committee member could be regarded as … surprising. The general fan will accept stats as shorthand to stories. And if they don’t have the inclination to delve deep into the story, the stats we’ll have to do.”

And not dissimilar to the men and women who just wanted to play ball for a living, the stats are doing one thing for the legacies: the most.