The Negro Leagues were major
... The players whom this year’s major leaguers are honoring were not big leaguers themselves. The good news is that MLB is considering elevating the Negro Leagues to the big league level.
In August Major League Baseball celebrated the centennial of the founding of the Negro National League, the first of the seven segregation-era circuits formed during the 1920s or 1930s that have collectively come to be known as “the Negro Leagues.”
That is a wonderful gesture, but it also highlights one way that the Negro Leagues are still segregated and snubbed. Due to a prejudiced decision of a committee that met more than 50 years ago, the Negro Leagues are still excluded from the official list of major leagues, which includes not only the National and American Leagues, but also the American Association (1882-1891), Union Association (1884), Players’ League (1890), and Federal League (1914-1915).
So, according to Major League Baseball’s current records and classifications, the players whom this year’s major leaguers are honoring were not big leaguers themselves.
The good news is that MLB is considering elevating the Negro Leagues to the big league level.
In 1968 Baseball Commissioner William Eckart convened MLB’s Special Baseball Records Committee as part of an arrangement with publisher Macmillan to produce The Baseball Encyclopedia. The task of the SBRC, an all-white, five-man body that consisted of officials from the American and National Leagues, the commissioner’s office, the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, was to determine which leagues were considered major.
But the committee never even considered the Negro Leagues.
David Neft, who oversaw the assembly of the Encyclopedia, told The Ringer, “The one thing that I am absolutely certain about is that there never was any SBRC discussion about treating the Negro Leagues as major leagues.”
According to author John Holway, in 1971 Joe Reichler of the commissioner’s office, one of the SBRC members, told Satchel Paige, the first player inducted into the Hall of Fame as a Ne
gro Leaguer to “sit down” when Paige started talking to the press about the many other Negro Leaguers who deserved induction. That made Paige so angry that he never returned to Cooperstown.
John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball, told The Ringer that the league has never considered the Negro League’s candidacy in any official capacity until now.
He added, “If Negro Leaguers’ statistics were to be integrated into the MLB historical record, one might anticipate an objection that most players never competed against their MLB contemporaries. But that was not their doing.”
Author Todd Peterson noted that every one of the 16 MLB teams in operation between 1901 and 1960 played a Black club at some point in its history, and the Black players more than held their own.
From 1900 through 1948, Black teams went 315-282-20 against MLB teams. In comparison, from 1900 to 1950, MLB teams went 1690677 against minor league teams.
Sabermetric guru Bill James, when asked whether he supports the Negro Leagues’ case for inclusion, told the Ringer, “Oh, absolutely… My argument has always been that it is impossible for a league to produce that many players of that quality in that period of time, unless the quality of play in that league was not only equal to the white leagues, but probably superior to it. You just can’t reach that level of excellence while playing against minor league competition. So… designate it as major league.”
In terms of accuracy of statistics, Gary Gillette, co-editor of The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, told The Ringer that the Negro League stats “are as good or better than some of the 19th-century data which has gotten the official imprimatur of Major League Baseball.”
Thorn asked, “… if we can accept as official Ross Barnes’s .429 in 1876 (70game schedule), why not Oscar Charleston’s .433 over 77 games in 1921, or Josh Gibson’s .466 over 69 games in 1943?”
That argument is strengthened by this year’s pandemic-shortened 60-game season.
“If there ever was a season more erratic than 2020, I’d like to see it,” Gillette said. “There’s no moral justification for excluding the Negro Leagues, and the last rational arguments you could even advance have been destroyed.”
As Dan McLaughlin wrote in the National Review, “‘Majoring’ the Negro Leagues would be a further step — following the enshrinement of Negro Leaguers in the Hall of Fame — to remedy a true historic injustice and increase the recognition of players who were long denied their proper due.”
He concluded, “It remains somewhat awkward to reclassify men as major leaguers when such a large part of their life story and struggle was precisely their exclusion from the majors. Still, doing historical justice sometimes requires acting imperfectly and unevenly. As far back as Paige’s induction in Cooperstown in 1971, baseball has fumbled its way toward giving proper due to men who would and could have been major-league stars if not for the color of their skin. It’s appropriate to make that recognition official: they were big leaguers.”