It’s a brand-new day for Negro League players, whose stats are now ranked with all MLB players. Here’s a look at the new leaderboards.
The late baseball legend Oscar Charleston is in good company this morning. Eighty years after his retirement in 1941, Charleston moved into third place Tuesday among the career leaders in OPS+ at 1…
www.chicagotribune.com
The Chicago Tribune has a story on how MLB counting of Negro League stats has changed the leaderboard in several categories. A few excerpts:
Eighty years after his retirement in 1941, Charleston moved into third place Tuesday among the career leaders in OPS+ at 184 — behind Babe Ruth (206) and Ted Williams (191) and ahead of Barry Bonds (182) — as baseball-reference.com updated its statistical database to include the Negro Leagues as major leagues.
MLB’s decision in December to recognize the Negro Leagues as major leagues, officially putting Josh Gibson at the same level as Mike Trout, required a major undertaking to verify statistics from box scores that may or may not have been printed in local newspapers at the time.
Historian and researcher Larry Lester, chairman of SABR’s Negro Leagues Committee, called it a “long and bittersweet” journey for the recognition of Black ballplayers, many of whom were talented enough to play in the American or National leagues but were denied an opportunity based on their skin color.....Lester said almost all of the games from the 1920s were accounted for and about 60% to 75% of the games from the 1930s. The 1940s box scores were more difficult to find.
Some of the familiar leaderboards have changed, particularly single-season leaders. “Single-season slugging leaderboard, there will be a lot of new faces,” said Sean Forman, president of Sports Reference, whose sites include baseball-reference.com.
He wasn’t kidding. Gibson’s .974 slugging percentage in 1937 vaulted him over Bonds’ previous record of .863 with the San Francisco Giants in 2001. Mule Suttles, Charlie Smith and Gibson take up the next three spots, dropping Bonds to fifth place......the record belongs to Gibson, who holds three of the top nine spots on the single-season slugging leader list.
I am very ambivalent about this. It was both a societal and baseball crime that great players like Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell and many others never got the chance to play in MLB because of the color of their skin. It is a stain against MLB as well as our country that can never be removed.
But does counting Negro League stats in the MLB record books really address the wrongs that Black players suffered during the segregation of baseball era? Is the data used to tabulate the Negro League stats even accurate, as even the supporters admit that they do not have a complete set of box scores for many of the Negro League seasons, and they can not even verify the accuracy of those box scores that they do have.
Since both the Negro League and the White MLB did not play against the best competition that was available at the time - Negro League had no White players and MLB had no Black players, perhaps the record books should be divided. One set of records for the era prior to the integration of MLB and one set for the post integration.
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