Former Cy Young Award winner and longtime baseball analyst Steve Stone summed up the sentiment well when he tweeted Wednesday that “baseball did a good thing this week” by officially recognizing statistics from the Negro Leagues.
“My father shared the story of Satchel Paige with me. I loved the Negro League Museum in KC. What would Josh Gibson have achieved?” Stone said.
That Black players who competed in the Negro Leagues were exceptionally skilled baseball players is indisputable. For proof, look at the performance of many Negro League stars once the Major League Baseball desegregated in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The first, Jackie Robinson, immediate became a perennial all-star and one of the all-time greatest second basemen. Young players like Willie Mays, Hank Aaron and Ernie Banks carved out Hall of Fame careers, while even older players like Paige and Monte Irvin, who spent a number of years in the Negro Leagues, stood out for briefer periods once they got into the majors.
Longstanding questions about the accuracy of Negro League statistics have mostly been cleared up by decades of painstaking research by amateur baseball lovers who have combed newspaper box scores (remember those?) and other sources to compile trustworthy records.
So it was no doubt the right thing to do for MLB to accept those statistics as part of the national pastime’s official ledger.
Some have said the gesture could help draw more young Black athletes to baseball, which has seen the percentage of Black players drop from nearly 20 percent in the 1980s to 8 percent today, according to The Wall Street Journal. That trend can certainly be seen in Mississippi, where many of the majority-Black high schools struggle to field teams with experienced players despite thriving football and basketball programs at those same schools.
But those trends are part of America’s long shift from rural — baseball requires open space — to urban, particularly for Black people. Baseball statistics, although a revered American institution in themselves, can’t change that.
