In December 2020, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred bestowed Major League status upon seven professional Negro Leagues that operated between 1920 and 1948. The decision means that the approximately 3,400 players of the Negro Leagues during that period are officially considered Major Leaguers, with their stats and records becoming a part of Major League history.
NOTE: This article first appeared in The Vacaville Reporter on September 15, 2020, several months before Manfred’s ruling.
In August 2020, 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.” While a wonderful gesture, 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 major leaguers are honoring this year 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-person body that consisted of American and National Leagues officials, 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 Negro 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 1690-677 against minor league teams.
Sabermetric guru Bill James, when asked by The Ringer whether he supports the Negro Leagues’ case for inclusion: “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 unless the quality of play in that league was not only equal to the white leagues but probably superior to it. You 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 (70-game 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 were 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.”
Dan McLaughlin: 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.
Matt Sieger, now retired sports reporter/columnist who worked for New York State and California newspapers, did his undergraduate work at Cornell University and received a master’s in journalism from Syracuse University. He is the author of The God Squad: The Born-Again San Francisco Giants of 1978.