3 Years After Announcement, MLB Still Hasn't Incorporated Negro Leagues Data
Due to complex negotiations with Seamheads, Major League Baseball has made minimal progress toward adding Negro Leagues stats into its official record.
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Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . There are three players still alive who played in the Negro Leagues and seasons officially recognized as “Major Leagues” by MLB: Willie Mays, Bill Greason and Ron Teasley. Of those three, Teasley is the only one who never played Major League Baseball — he played in two games with the New York Cubans in 1948, the last year before the Negro National League disbanded. Mays suited up for the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League in 1948, and Greason was Mays’ teammate.
. . . On June 20, 2024, the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants will play a game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., the former home of Mays’ Birmingham Black Barons from 1924 through 1960. As part of that tribute to the Negro Leagues, Rickwood Field will also host a Minor League game between the Double-A Birmingham Barons and Montgomery Biscuits. Since 1996, the Double-A Barons have played a game at Rickwood Field every year to pay tribute to the field’s history.
Leading Off
MLB Dragging Their Feet On Negro Leagues Stats
By Paul White
It’s been nearly three years since Major League Baseball announced in December 2020 that they had finally decided to recognize seven Negro Leagues from the period between 1920 and 1948 as official Major Leagues. The announcement had long been in the works and was timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro National League by Andrew “Rube” Foster, but MLB ran into trouble right from the beginning.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted most of the 2020 season, including the various celebrations baseball and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (NLBM) in Kansas City had planned for the anniversary. As a result, the announcement that the leagues were finally being recognized didn’t take place until the offseason. While many baseball fans and baseball historians took note, it didn’t receive the same publicity it would have absent the unfortunate timing.
When the announcement was made, the official press release noted that MLB was “officially elevating the Negro Leagues to ‘Major League’ status.” That word, “elevating,” struck many people the wrong way.
“‘Elevate’ is not the word,” said former Major Leaguer Jerry Hairston, Jr., whose grandfather, Sam Hairston, played for the Indianapolis Clowns. “It’s to recognize the Negro Leagues. They were already elevated.”
Bob Kendrick, president of the NLBM, felt much the same at first.
“There was a part of me that kind of got radical,” Kendrick said. “It was, ‘Hell, we don’t need you to validate us.’”
Kendrick’s views shifted once he realized the historical significance of the recognition. No longer was Ted Williams the last Major League player to hit .400 in a season. Instead, it was Artie Wilson (.433) and Willard Brown (.408), who each exceeded the mark in 1948 while playing in the Negro American League. The single-season record for slugging percentage had been .863 by Barry Bonds in 2001, but four different seasons by Negro Leagues players now exceeded it, topped by Josh Gibson’s remarkable .974 slugging percentage in 1937. Dutch Leonard’s famous 0.96 ERA in 1914, or Tim Keefe’s 19th century mark of 0.86 in 1880, were no longer in the running for the best single-season ERA figures ever. Instead, it was the 0.64 mark Robert Keyes achieved in 1944 while pitching for the Memphis Red Sox.
We know this because of the tireless work of Negro Leagues researchers like Gary Ashwill, Scott Simkus, Mike Lynch, and Kevin Johnson, who built the invaluable Seamheads Negro Leagues Database and published it online. Decades of work in compiling statistics from old newspaper box scores allowed them to document the achievements of Black players from the period before Jackie Robinson re-integrated the White Major Leagues. Their work was so critical, in fact, that MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred commended them in the announcement about the Negro Leagues’ recognition.
Soon after the announcement, the operators of Baseball-Reference.com reached an agreement with Seamheads to incorporate their Negro Leagues data with the data already available on Baseball-Reference. Earlier this year, FanGraphs.com reached a similar agreement. If you use either site to look up official Major League records, the accomplishments of Negro Leagues players will be included.
That is not the case on the MLB.com website.
If you use Major League Baseball’s official statistics page to look up Major League records, it will still say that Bonds’ .863 slugging percentage is the best single-season mark ever, and that Williams’ .406 average in 1941 is the last time a Major Leaguer hit .400. That’s because Major League Baseball balked at using the Seamheads database.
The sticking point reportedly didn’t have anything to do with money. Instead, it appears that Seamheads had concerns that MLB wanted control of the data and how it would be used, rather than merely licensing it from Seamheads as other online sites had done. In a lengthy article in The Athletic in May of this year, descendants of Negro Leaguers expressed anger and disappointment that no resolution had been reached.
“I’m shocked,” said Sean Gibson, great-grandson of Hall of Famer Josh Gibson. “It’s sad. I feel like Major League Baseball jumped the gun. They should have had all that worked out before they made the announcement.”
Two weeks ago, MLB published an article on their site in which they again noted the invaluable work of the researchers who built Seamheads. They revealed that a licensing deal to use the data finally had been reached earlier this year, but that fans shouldn’t expect to see that data incorporated into official MLB records anytime soon. They’ve decided that Elias Sports Bureau, the official statisticians to Major League Baseball, must “audit” the data first, according to MLB historian John Thorn.
A 15-person Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee, led by Thorn, has been established. They met for the first time in September and are discussing which Negro Leagues data will or will not be included in MLB’s records. Gibson has been included on the committee, which is a positive step, but some still aren’t happy. Vanessa Ivy Rose, granddaughter of Hall of Famer Turkey Stearnes, wrote on Twitter that “this whole article can be summed up in one word: wait.”
That’s exactly right. MLB admitted as much in the article, noting that “no one knows the answer” to the question of when the committee’s work will be done. “History is process, not product,” said Thorn.
Three years removed from the Negro Leagues being recognized as they should, there’s still nothing in the official MLB record to prove it.
And no one with MLB will commit that there ever will be.
Paul White is an IBWAA Life Member who writes at Lost in Left Field. He is also a member of SABR and has written for their BioProject and Games Project. Paul is currently writing a book for McFarland Publishers about the history of the Hall of Fame’s recognition of the Negro Leagues. He lives with his wife in the suburbs of Kansas City.