Baseball announced it was elevating the 1920-48 Negro Leagues to major league status, a move that not only seeks to right a cosmic wrong that has shadowed the game for a century, but also forces a wholesale recalibration of its record book.
For decades, baseball historians and fans have accepted it as gospel that Willie Mays collected 3,283 hits in his career, Bob Feller threw the only opening day no-hitter in baseball history and the top three batting averages of all-time belonged to Ty Cobb (.366), Rogers Hornsby (.359) and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson (.359). To suggest otherwise was to provoke a bar fight, or at the very least a peaceful consulting of Google. But on Wednesday, in a monumental change for the sport, Major League Baseball announced it was elevating the 1920-48 Negro Leagues to major league status, a move that not only seeks to right a cosmic wrong that has shadowed the game for a century — the segregation of baseball that famously ended when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947 — but also forces a wholesale recalibration of its record book. The “long overdue recognition,” as MLB called it in a news release, will add the names of some 3,400 Negro Leaguers from seven distinct leagues in the 1920s,1930s and 1940s, along with all their accumulated statistics, to its official records. That means Negro League stars such as Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and James “Cool Papa” Bell — all of whom were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. in the 1970s — will gain an additional designation denied to them during their lives: big leaguers. “The Negro Leagues was a major league,” Bell, who died in 1991, told Gannett News Service in 1987. “They wouldn’t let us play in the white leagues and we [were] great ballplayers in the Negro Leagues, so how can you say we [weren’t] major league?” “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,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said in the statement. “We are now grateful to count the players of the Negro Leagues where they belong: as Major Leaguers within the official historical record.” The move was the result of years of study by researchers from the Seamheads Negro League Database — who pored over newspaper clippings, scorebooks and other historical records to compile statistics — as well as research by the Baseball Hall of Fame, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City and other entities. “In the minds of baseball fans worldwide,” Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Museum, said in a statement, “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.
