Last Wednesday was a monumental day in baseball history as stats from the Negro Leagues officially entered the MLB record books. Hall of Famer Josh Gibson is now the all-time Major League batting champion with a .372 average, and there were several other important changes at the top as well.
MLB historian John Thorn joined WEEI’s Rob Bradford on the Audacy Original Podcast “Baseball Isn’t Boring” to talk about the integration and the history of the Negro Leagues.
“What surprised me was the unanimity of positive response. There are some friends on Facebook who will quibble about this or that, but the idea of recognizing the Negro Leagues as an equivalent Major League; if not to the National and American Leagues, certainly to the foreign defunct leagues that were admitted by the Special Baseball Records Committee in 1969,” Thorn said. “So to say that the Federal League and the Union Association and the Players’ League and the American Association are all major leagues and the Negro Leagues are not struck me as wrong.”
The leagues that Thorn listed only existed for a handful of years – if that – and were all before the modern era of baseball. So adding in the Negro Leagues, which played for decades, only makes sense.
“There are two original sins, I suppose, for which MLB can express contrition. One, of course, is segregation so that no African-Americans played in Major League Baseball between 1884 and 1947,” Thorn continued. “But the second and perhaps more significant omission was the Special Baseball Records Committee ruling in 1969 just referenced. It wasn’t that the Negro Leagues came up for discussion and then were dismissed because of erratic scheduling or paucity of records, it was that they never even came up.”
Thorn referred to the trope from Ralph Ellison’s novel “The Invisible Man” in how the Negro Leagues were dealt with in the past.
“It’s not that the Special Baseball Records Committee of five white men, for sure, rejected the Negro Leagues, it’s that they never came up. They were invisible to them. The proposition that the Negro Leagues might register as majors was absurd to them,” Thorn explained. “I believe that the global pandemic of 2020 was a major factor – at least for me personally – in turning around my view that the Negro Leagues seasons were too short and too erratically scheduled to include.”
The 60-game shortened campaign in 2020 was around the length of an official Negro League season. But there was more baseball being played as well.
“I believe the Negro Leagues seasons, in fact, were longer than those of the American League and National League but most of the games they played were exhibitions or barnstorming games that they needed from date to date between the dates to supply revenue.”
All in all, MLB has now made the right decision to include Negro Leagues stats in their official records, and it’s safe to say that baseball history is now more complete because of it.