MLB, including Negro League statistics, should make fans question our biases originally appeared in NBC Sports Boston
Major League Baseball will officially be recognize Negro League statistics in your all-time leaderboards. My gut reaction is nothing to be proud of: I hated math.
During the night, legendary catcher Josh Gibson he displaced Ty Cobb as the best hitter in baseball, .372 to .367. Ted Williams’ iconic .406 average in 1941 was suddenly 60 points behind Lyman Bostock Sr.’s production in just 23 games that same year. Five of the sport’s top 10 hitters are now members of the Negro Leagues, including unfamiliar names like Jud Wilson and Turkey Stearnes (both Hall of Famers, by the way).
What can I say? I grew up reading the Baseball Encyclopedia for fun, and it’s easy to consider the facts within to be immutable when you don’t know any better.
I share my reflective response in the interest of honesty and because I suspect I am not alone. It’s also an acknowledgment that embracing baseball’s incomplete history has always represented a form of white privilege. If Mookie Betts and I had been born 125 years ago, only one of us could have played in the big leagues, and it wouldn’t have been the 2018 MVP. The history books were written more for me than for him.
Here’s how I wish I had reacted without the benefit of reflection: Any list topped by Josh Gibson instead of the notoriously misanthropic Ty Cobb is a victory for baseball and represents not only long-overdue recognition for the Negro Leagues, but an explicit admission why they were ghettoized in the first place.
It remains baseball’s enduring original sin that a sport that calls itself the national pastime banned black players for nearly 75 years. Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays proved that the Negro League’s biggest stars ranked among the game’s best players, period, and there is no doubt that Gibson, Satchel Paige, Oscar Charleston and who knows how many others would have joined They had just been given the chance.
Legitimizing their accomplishments represents an important step toward elevating the Negro Leagues to its rightful place as equals to MLB.
Of course, Gibson’s records should appear on baseball leaderboards. If anything is tainted, it is the fact that all the white stars of the early 20th century compiled their numbers against partial and therefore inferior competition. How many hits could Cobb have missed if Cool Papa Bell or Charleston were patrolling center field? Babe Ruth reaches 60 home runs in 1927 if he faces Bullet Rogan and Martin Dihigo 20 times each? Could Barry Bonds be chasing Gibson’s lifetime home run record instead of Aaron’s?
These are the types of questions we should have been asking from the beginning, but as long as the Negro Leagues were relegated to a separate but unequal status (to distort the Supreme Court’s infamous opinion), everything about them could be marginalized – the players, the leagues, the numbers and especially the history. Even for a sport that reflects America’s segregationist past like no other, it’s a breathtaking act of whitewashing.
That made this week’s announcement significant.
“People will be, I don’t know if upset is the right word, but they may feel uncomfortable with some Negro League stars now on career and season leaderboards,” Larry Lester, author and longtime Negro Leagues researcher , told Atlético.
“The die-hards may not accept the statistics, but that’s okay. I welcome conversations at the bar, the barbershop or the pool hall. That’s why we do what we do.”
Either way, treating baseball numbers as sacrosanct never made much sense. MLB officially lists Cobb’s lifetime average as .367, but research has revealed that it is actually .366, which is as listed in Baseball-Reference. His 4,191 lifetime hits – for generations an iconic total that could be cited by any fan – have since been downgraded to 4,189. The numbers change and we adapt.
If baseball’s latest numbers lead us to challenge our implicit biases and recognize an integral and overlooked part of the game’s history, so much the better.
Until this week, I don’t think many fans had heard of Lyman Bostock Sr. But we know the story of his namesake, who was becoming an All-Star with the Angels when he was murdered in 1978. The tragedy takes on new shades of loss when consider the dream that a father never realized, but lived through his son until he died.
It deepens our understanding of the game and the place of those who have been officially kept at bay for decades. It’s past time for them to be hugged.
