Wednesday was a big day in the world of baseball statistics, albeit a more complicated one than initially met the eye. Major League Baseball announced that the statistics from seven professional Negro Leagues that operated between 1920 and 1948 have been officially incorporated into its database, the culmination of a process that began in late 2020, when MLB first recognized those circuits as major leagues. As a result, several longstanding seasonal and career records have officially changed hands; most prominently, Josh Gibson is now the single-season and all-time leader in batting average, slugging percentage, and OPS, supplanting Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth in the career categories. The grassroots effort to gather and audit the Negro Leagues data that made this possible has been laudable, even heroic. But while we can never do enough to acknowledge the greatness of Gibson and his peers — along with the pain and injustice that they faced both within and outside baseball — MLB’s announcement and the dissemination of the news did strike a few sour notes, just as in 2020.
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However, it is a mistake to confuse the provenance of those accomplishments as belonging to MLB, and a misrepresentation to brand them as such. As Shakeia Taylor, deputy senior content editor at the Chicago Tribune and host of the historically-focused Society for American Baseball Research podcast Ballpark Figures, succinctly put it on Twitter, “[I]t’s really as simple as referring to [Gibson] as the ‘major-league record holder’ instead of ‘MLB record holder.’ These two things are not the same.”

Again, the semantics and nuances matter. Major League Baseball (MLB) in its capitalized form refers to the corporate and legal entity created by the 2000 merger of the AL and NL, whose histories and records it subsumed, warts and all. Part of their histories is the systemic racism that excluded Black players within the aforementioned period, and so it should not simply call those records part of MLB, for however well-intentioned the gesture may be.
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Within MLB’s [press] release [announcing the statistical incorporation], the supportive statements of Thorn, Lester, fellow Negro Leagues expert Phil Dixon, and Elias Sports Bureau senior historian John Labombarda are thankfully much better [than that of MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, which elided MLB’s legacy in the creation of the Negro Leagues and the nuance of the maintenance of their statistics], with Thorn pointedly acknowledging the league’s role in creating the difficult conditions in the first place. “Shortened Negro League schedules, interspersed with revenue-raising exhibition games, were born of MLB’s exclusionary practices,” he said in the statement. “To deny the best Black players of the era their rightful place among all-time leaders would be a double penalty.”
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The designation of certain bygone leagues as majors dates back to 1968, when commissioner William Eckert convened a Special Baseball Records Committee. The effort was in conjunction with publisher Macmillan’s effort to produce The Baseball Encyclopedia, which would encompass the official statistics of the major leagues. The five-man committee, which consisted of officials from the AL and NL, the commissioner’s office, the Hall of Fame, and the BBWAA — all of them white men, of course — announced in 1969 that it had determined that the AL, NL and four defunct leagues met the criteria to be considered majors[.]
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The SBRC did not formally consider the Negro Leagues, with Joe Reichler, who represented the commissioner’s office, saying in 1987 that the leagues’ lack of exhaustive statistics and volume of games against local semipro teams factored into that decision. “They played against whoever they could for whatever they could get,” he told Gannett News Service. “You can’t blame them, but they never played more than 40 or 50 league games. It just wasn’t a cohesive league. There’s no way that you could say they were major league.”

The year 2020 served as a catalyst for a reconsideration of that exclusion. . . . In December of that year, MLB announced its “long overdue” decision to bestow official recognition of seven professional Negro Leagues from the 1920–1948 period as major leagues. … Read More

(via FanGraphs)