Recognizing the “major league” status of the old Negro Leagues seems like a fat pitch down the middle of the plate, but for 100 years Major League Baseball whiffed. So now, the attempt to retroactively integrate roughly 3,000 players into the MLB narrative is, if nothing else, statistically tricky. A real cold case for the sport’s esteemed Lords of Quantification.
Baseball, more than any other sport, reveres numbers, both for day-to-day evaluation and as a device to compare players from different eras. But the detailed scrutiny of numbers requires a complete accounting, and even the most competent of box-score archaeologists likely won’t be able to unearth all the Negro League totals known to be woefully lacking.
So the result, ESPN’s Howard Bryant said in a recent interview on PBS, is that an attempt to “retrofit” available stats into the record books likely could diminish—rather than enhance—the accomplishments of Negro League stars. In a thoughtful analysis for Slate, Owen Poindexter cited the yawning disparity between the oral history and the documented record of Negro League superstar Josh Gibson’s career home run total—800 in folklore, a mere 238 “officially.”
To go by the latter figure would reduce Gibson from being the all-time home run leader, Poindexter noted, to a middling rank of 264th. “Baseball history enthusiasts—even many casual ones—know that Gibson sustained a Paul Bunyan-like legend,” Poindexter wrote. “But statistics can outlast stories, and one wonders how a curious fan might view one of the 20th Century’s greatest sluggers upon seeing him buried in a sea of good-not-great players on the home run list.”
Similarly, the Negro League great Cool Papa Bell potentially would have his stolen base story dramatically downsized. While the standard tale is that Bell once stole a startling 175 bases in one season, the respected database Baseball-Reference.com records that Bell never surpassed a season-high of 21 stolen bases (three times) and amassed only 167 in 21 years. (Other sources put Bell’s stolen base total at 345 and say he was not thrown out a single time.)
Baseball-Reference does specify clearly that its totals for Gibson and Bell, among other Negro League players, are necessarily “incomplete,” and there is widespread agreement that those confirmed, patchwork numbers are no more marginally accurate than Negro League folklore.
Bryant’s primary point, in an ESPN column, was that MLB is “taking the easy way out” by “rewriting the history books” rather than admit that its longtime commitment to segregation was what necessitated the existence of the Negro Leagues in the first place, an arrangement that clearly was separate but not equal.
MLB casts its current decision as “correcting an oversight,” but Bryant argued that the Negro Leagues “were not the result of an ‘oversight,’ and to frame their exclusion as such is stunningly offensive. It was a deliberate system. The major leagues destroyed a half-century of Black baseball history, and baseball history in general, with one unrelenting purpose in mind: to do their part in reinforcing Black inferiority to the rest of the country.”
Negro League players “didn’t need baseball’s validation to be special,” Bryant wrote. “The legend that Josh Gibson perhaps hit 800 home runs carries more power than what is left of the shredded, surviving statistical record because it gave these Black men their poetry. It gave them their dignity. The legend was more important than being anointed legitimate 100 years later by the very industry that excluded them.”
The former Negro League star Buck O’Neil, 83 at the time and still scouting in the Majors, alluded to such poetry during a 1995 academic symposium considering the impact of Babe Ruth. “Before I ever saw Babe Ruth, I heard him,” O’Neil said, describing the sound of bat-on-ball that he never had heard before, and said he didn’t hear again until the first time he heard Josh Gibson smite a ball. “I’m still in baseball,” he said, “because I want to hear that sound again.”
Notice: No mention of statistics. Poindexter wrote, “The newly authenticated stats [to be accepted by MLB’s belated “major league” declaration] provide a minimum baseline of truth, but not the whole truth.”