Recently, the word “change” has had a negative connotation in the world of Major League Baseball. Most storylines about developments outside of the games themselves have been woeful, as a sport looking to regain momentum in a new generation has had as many, if not more, misses as hits. Just take the Oakland/Sacramento/Las Vegas A’s saga, or the see-through pants gaffes with the uniform updates from Fanatics and Nike.
This week, though, MLB made the headlines for the right reasons. Tuesday’s report by Bob Nightengale of USA Today that Negro League statistics are an official part of the MLB history books as of May 29 is a huge win for baseball. The decision feels simultaneously out of left field to the casual baseball fan and thoroughly sensible.
The implications are thrilling for a sport that, relative to other leagues, takes more of its essence from its history and tradition. More than 2,300 Negro League players will be incorporated into the MLB’s archive, spanning from 1920-1948. Among the changes on the MLB’s leaderboard: the ruling anoints Josh Gibson, the owner of a lifetime .372 batting average, as the all-time leader in that category and the single-season record (now .466), and moves Ty Cobb’s previous leading average of .367 to second place.
MLB announced its intentions for the move four years ago, but the extensive research required to uncover and incorporate Negro League statistics prolonged the project’s completion and kept it relatively under the radar in the fast-moving sports world. The completion of the project in itself is a triumph and provides long-overdue validation for some of the sport’s best athletes from past generations.
This announcement shines brightest as a spark for curiosity and avenue for further storytelling and research in addition to doing justice for the careers of Negro League stars. The MLB The Show video game did an excellent job of this in its 2023 iteration, building game modes that told the stories of Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Buck O’Neil and more in the immersive video game format. June’s MLB game between the Cardinals and Giants at Rickwood Field, a former Negro League stadium, is a tribute of a much greater scale with real resonance throughout the sports world.
As with those tributes, the promotion of these athletes’ career statistics to the official record books can’t rectify baseball’s past of segregation and comes posthumously for most of the affected players, but it offers potential for exploration of what made these athletes great. The change raised a lot of questions for me as a longtime baseball fan, from questions borne out of astonishment like “how could someone hit so well for so long?” to unanswerable ones like “how different would the World Series chase have looked without segregation dividing and diminishing the playing field?” With those questions comes a renewed appreciation and gratitude for athletes that broke down the color barrier and fought for a brighter future for the MLB.
Since the Negro League research isn’t complete at the time of the announcement (the reported percentage is around 72% of statistics), there’s potential for further updates. The project had to overcome considerable challenges, from the Negro Leagues’ condensed season lengths to conflicting records, but the updates should prove to be well worth the effort and a valuable resource for future generations of baseball fans.
What effect could a change to a virtual record book make? For a sport as tradition-rich as baseball, the impact is seismic.
After years of counting steroid-boosted home run numbers of the 1990s and 2000s and ancient 19th century statistics but excluding some of the game’s best mid-century stars’ numbers, MLB’s record books feel much more complete and accurate in their responsibility of documenting baseball’s complicated history. This project’s reverence for the sport’s past and likely future payoff should set the precedent for Major League Baseball’s overall decision-making and direction.
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