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MLB Retrospectively Elevates Negro Leagues to Major League Status
MLB Retrospectively Elevates Negro Leagues to Major League Status
Major League Baseball announced Wednesday that it was “correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history” by officially elevating the Negro Leagues from 1920 through 1948 to major-league status, a move that both grants recognition to some of baseball’s pioneers and immediately rewrites the game’s record books.
Roughly 3,400 Black and Latino players who were barred from joining the segregated National and American Leagues will now be recognized as “major-leaguers,” alongside white stars of the era. Before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, the Negro Leagues were the highest level of professional baseball open to Black players, producing many players who are considered among the most talented in history.
“All of us who love baseball have long known that the Negro Leagues produced many of our game’s best players, innovations and triumphs against a backdrop of injustice,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said.
Beyond the symbolism of the move, this new designation will change MLB’s record books. All statistics and records for players who played in seven Negro Leagues that operated during that span will become part of MLB’s history.
MLB said it has begun a review process with the Elias Sports Bureau “to determine the full scope of this designation’s ramifications on statistics and records,” working with historians to evaluate the relevant issues.
The impact could be sweeping. For example, Ted Williams has for eight decades been recognized as the last man to hit .400 in Major League Baseball. His .406 batting average for the Boston Red Sox in 1941 is a statistic permanently etched in the fabric of the sport, standing for generations as one of the pinnacles of athletic achievement.
However, Josh Gibson, the Hall-of-Fame catcher known for his time with the Homestead Grays, hit .441 in 1943, according to the Seamheads Negro League Database, a key source MLB used in reaching its decision. That means that Gibson not only tops Williams, but surpasses Hugh Duffy’s .440 for the 1894 Boston Beaneaters for the best ever.
In the late 1960s, commissioner William Eckert convened the Special Baseball Records Committee to settle issues related to baseball’s statistics. That group identified six major leagues dating back to 1876. The Negro Leagues weren’t included. On Wednesday, MLB said that the “committee’s 1969 omission of the Negro Leagues from consideration was clearly an error that demands today’s designation.”
On Aug. 16, MLB staged a league-wide celebration in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues. All players, managers, coaches and umpires wore a Negro Leagues uniform patch that day.
“This serves as historical validation for those who had been shunned from the major leagues and had the foresight and courage to create their own league that helped change the game and our country, too,” said Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo.
are gonna react to this.
Wish for footage of other men, brehs.
