MLB to rewrite record books with Negro League integration

[Famous Mortimer]

Josh Gibson did not play in MLB because of racism and discrimination by MLB. Why are we pretending he did now?

Do you think the statistics of players who played in the Union Association (1884), Players' League (1890), and Federal League (1914–1915) should be counted?

[WAR God]

Absolutely not.

[Popeye_Card]

Bad news then. They have been counted in official MLB statistics since 1969. That committee chose to not even review the Negro Leagues at the time.

[WAR God]

Stupid is as stupid does, I suppose.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

Josh Gibson did not play in MLB because of racism and discrimination by MLB. Why are we pretending he did now?

But all those white boys in MLB didn't have to face Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, etc. etc.

The best white players played against inferior talent just as much as the best black players. Can't you see that?

[sighyoung]

I apologize: I meant to follow up and respond to this thread, but I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time, or forget when I do have a free moment.

First, we need to acknowledge the problem of statistics and playing conditions in the Negro Leagues is not the fault of the men who played in those Leagues, but specifically with MLB, and more generally with the discriminatory society in which they lived. We certainly know that many of these players, if not necessarily all, were capable of playing in the National and American Leagues at the time, acquitted themselves admirably in head-to-head competition against NL and AL players in exhibitions (far better than, say, minor-league or Cuban League players), and some did go on to be starters, stars, and Hall-of-Famers in MLB. The Negro Leagues were, indeed, major leagues, and their stats need to be recognized as such, full stop. Additionally, working conditions were often worse for those Negro League players, which statistics don’t take into account—say, a star like Josh Gibson having to work a second job during the season, or Satchel Paige having to pitch year-round to make ends meet, unlike his MLB counterparts.
There are two issues here: whether statistics should be collected and posted, to which the answer is obviously yes.

1) First to collection: you give these men the same historical and statistical attention that you give any other group of professional ballplayers of the period, to the best of your ability, and even make special efforts to document or correct the historical record precisely because the society in which they lived erected barriers to creating, maintaining, and preserving a historical record. You also do this because a full documentation of the Negro Leagues is crucial to understanding baseball as a sport and cultural phenomenon—no story of American baseball is complete without it--and it is certainly important to understanding the emergence of such stars as Willie Mays and Hank Aaron.

2) You display the records, period. To fail to do so is to erase them a second time in history, and to pretend that they didn’t achieve any remarkable athletic feats at all. If you have to offer some historical context to interpret the record, so be it. But to hide the records in some sort of drop-down menu, or to place a special asterisk next to their achievements but not next to those of National Leaguers and American Leaguers who benefited from racial segregation for generations is simply not acceptable.

3) I recognize the problem of simple one-to-one comparison of MLB and the Negro Leagues due to park effects and clear differences in player development in different leagues, which is why I dislike counting stats alone, or arbitrary lists of “The Fifty Greatest Players Ever.”
To understand greatness is necessarily relative, and I do think that you can make clear comparisons of greatness within groups of players, as well as provide greater statistical clarity comparing different leagues—including information about parks, park effects, player development and positioning, and even style and kinds of pitching in the respective leagues.

This is partly due to differences in the player development and park conditions (ballpark conditions, positions where the best athletes were played, and so on). Although much is shared in the leagues (playing best athletes in the middle of the diamond—C, SS, CF), pitching did differ with a heavier reliance on breaking pitches than MLB. Satchel Paige stood out as a dominant fastball pitcher in a league in which many pitchers were not necessarily the best athletes on their teams, and who relied on cavernous parks and good defense.

Nevertheless, within that group of players, outstanding performance still stands out comparatively, so that we can clearly see which players of the era were excellent athletes.

4) Finally, I disagree with the general population hypothesis in the thread that assumes that, because of the relatively smaller African American population relative to the entire United States, the number of outstanding athletes in the Negro Leagues necessarily had to be small. I think this argument fails to keep in mind how racial discrimination profoundly warped America’s labor markets, severely limiting the economic opportunities and educational quality for African American men in the 1920’s through the early 1950’s and channeling those men into comparatively fewer kinds of jobs largely at the bottom of the labor market.

People forget that huge numbers of African Americans remained trapped in agricultural peonage through sharecropping and share tenantry in the rural South, were poor farmers because of exhausted soils in the South, or were at the bottom of the industrial proletariat in the Midwest, North, Pacific Coast, and the urban South, where they were migrating in ever larger numbers from approximately 1910 to the 1960’s. Many were locked out of white-collar jobs, whole unions discriminated against them and barred them entry into the labor market, and the Great Depression disproportionately harmed Black workers, so that while the national unemployment rate approached 25%, it was closer to 50% for Black workers in urban areas because of discrimination. This unemployment rate was exacerbated by the collapse of the Black business sector due to the Depression and lack of access to capital (discrimination in loans, as well as harmful banking reforms that prevented marginalized communities from creating their own banks). Job mobility was further harmed because of state-mandated or private housing discrimination.

Put simply, I argue that the Negro Leagues benefitted from a LARGER proportion of athletic talent in the Black male workforce than MLB did from its respective labor pool. (This is comparable to the large percentage of Black mariners and whalers in the early to mid-19th century—they went to where the best jobs were, often working at sea in disproportionately larger populations than male workers as a whole).

My reasoning is that 1) fewer jobs were open to Black male workers than to men in the general population, and most professional sports of the era were still closed to African American athletes. The Negro Leagues were, put simply, some of the best organized, best paying, and few available athletic opportunities to Black men in the early 20th century; 2) even though the Negro Leagues paid far below the comparable rates for MLB players, that pay far outstripped what Black agricultural workers earned at the time, and was often comparable to, or better than, the pay they could receive in the industrial North.

I could double-check these figures, but based on my memory of Jay Mandle’s book Not Slave, Not Free: African American Economic Experience since the Civil War, Black sharecropping families earned only 1/6th of what Black families earned in Chicago in 1930, only 1/8th of what Black families earned in New York City at the same time. Those NYC and Chicago averages were both below the standard pay of a Negro League player. On top of that, many believe that widespread racial discrimination and diminished educational and economic opportunities so distorted labor markets and job opportunities that the Negro Leagues likely attracted a larger percentage of good athletes than MLB could attract from its respective talent pool.

So I don’t think a convincing argument can be made that there wasn’t an abundance of athletic talent in the Negro Leagues, or that we cannot adequately measure the quality of that talent.

I do argue a head-to-head comparison is tricky because of clear league differences, especially because of parks, player development, and kinds of pitching.

[heyzeus]

That's a dynamite, informative post, @sighyoung, with interesting hypotheses to ponder. Thanks for sharing.

The "smaller African American population" theory to me is reminiscent of the Dominican Republic, a nation of only 11 million people that nonetheless produces a large and astonishingly talented pool of baseball talent. As you argue, there are economic and cultural factors that drive top athletes into certain sports, and you make a good case that that was true with African American baseball talent during the Negro Leagues era as well.