By Davis Carlton
Major League Baseball (MLB) has decided to grant the Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1948 the status of official “major leagues.” This might not seem like a particularly noteworthy decision, but it means that MLB has decided to include statistics from the former Negro League in compiling official major league records. This decision is being touted as a long overdue correction of the historic injustice that was segregation. During the time period under consideration, black baseball players were only allowed to play in segregated Negro Leagues. Now statistics and records from the days of the Negro Leagues will be considered on a par with other MLB statistics. As a baseball fan and a stats geek I believe that this is a mistake and I’ll explain why.
Segregation has been utterly vilified in contemporary pop culture, but I sincerely doubt that the ardent segregationists of last century would change their minds if they witnessed America in the current year. Nevertheless, one could theoretically accept the mainstream narrative on the evils of segregation in sports and society in general and should still conclude that incorporating Negro League statistics into MLB records is the wrong decision. The issue is with the nature of competition in professional baseball during the period in question as well as the length of the baseball season. Negro League seasons were considerably shorter than MLB seasons, and this affects how we should understand statistics that measure efficiencies like batting average.
Batting average simply calculates how often a player earns a hit by dividing the total number of hits by the number of total at bats during the season. Earning a base hit is difficult relative to other accomplishments in other major sports. A good or even a great hitter will likely have a batting average in the .300s which translates into getting a hit about 30 percent of the time. This contrasts with a quarterback’s completion percentage, which looks at how many complete vs. incomplete passes a quarterback throws. A good quarterback will complete between 50 to 70 percent of his passes. The difficulty in hitting means that longer seasons and more at bats is likely to lower batting averages as the sample size grows to reflect the difficulty in hitting.
There are also era-specific qualifications that often have to be discussed when looking at the history of baseball records. Baseball historians understand that the game has changed significantly over the century and a half of baseball’s existence. The composition of baseballs changed into its more modern form circa 1920. The consequence was that balls generally traveled further than before. Power numbers like home runs increased, while efficiency statistics like batting average diminished as balls that were hit into play were more predictably handled by defenses. Consequently it’s common to speak of records from the pre-1920 “dead ball” era vs. the more modern post-1920 “live ball” era. Even since then baseball has undergone considerable changes. The season was lengthened in 1961 from 154 games to 162 games to facilitate new teams. This meant additional at bats and a further diminishing of batting averages.
Baseball has also incorporated an increased role for “relief pitchers” that come into the game late in order to protect a lead. Baseball through the 60s into the 70s generally applied the philosophy that pitchers should “finish what they started,” meaning pitch the entire game if they could. The introduction of relief pitchers and longer seasons has contributed to diminishing batting averages. The legendary Ted Williams was the last MLB player to bat above the .400 mark for an entire season in 1941. With this in mind, let’s look at some of the anomalies that will be introduced into the MLB record book by incorporating Negro League records into official record keeping (this hyperlinked article is the source of the statistical information that follows).
Josh Gibson of the Negro Leagues takes center stage as undeniably one of the greatest Negro League players of all time. Gibson’s 1943 batting average of .466 is expected to become the single season record besting Hugh Duffy’s mark of .440 set in 1894. Several points need to be made to demonstrate how this simply cannot meaningfully be compared to other seasons in order for this to be considered the bona fide record. The article’s author defends this as the record by comparing the number of plate appearances that Gibson had in 1943 (302) with the number of plate appearances with Ross Barnes in 1876 (340), who stands at 2nd place on the current list. This ignores the rest of the seasons on the list, including Hugh Duffy’s mark in 1894 in which he had 616 plate appearances.
Anyone who is a baseball fan understands just how important this difference is to a player’s overall batting average at the end of the season. Even good hitters typically go through at least modest slumps during the course of the season, and this is why it is virtually impossible to hit at the averages that stand near the tops of the record books. Usually Rogers Hornsby’s 1924 batting average (.424) is considered the “modern” single season batting record because the game had taken its more modern shape by this time. The fact that Gibson’s mark breaks a record dating back to the pre-1920 “dead ball era” by more than 20 points ought to raise red flags.
There are additional problems trying to compare the level of competition between the Negro Leagues and MLB. Negro League players have already been considered eligible for the Hall of Fame, and many players like Josh Gibson have already been enshrined. Gibson is probably the most prominent Hall of Famer to have spent his entire career in the Negro Leagues, and the article mentions that on his Hall of Fame plaque he is said to have hit “almost 800 home runs in league and independent baseball during his 17-year career.” Those “independent games” were against amateur and semi-pro competition. The actual number that will likely be credited to Gibson as his official tally is 194.
It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to see the vast difference between the two numbers which means that nearly three quarters of Gibson’s purported career production came against non-professional competition. This is why it would be ridiculous to consider Josh Gibson as having the second highest career batting average and OPS+ (behind legends Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth respectively) as the article suggests. While Josh Gibson’s career is probably the most striking example, this demonstrates just how apples to oranges the comparison is between the white MLB and the Negro Leagues during the period under consideration.
Some object to these arguments about the relative competitiveness of the Negro Leagues by claiming that the segregated MLB wasn’t as competitive as it would have been if it had been integrated. Many people often assume that blacks are intrinsically greater athletes than whites and that therefore Negro League stats ought to have at least as much credibility as stats from white players when the MLB was whites only. A complete discussion on the subject of the perceived athletic prowess of blacks is beyond what I intend here, but I would like to make a couple of comments.
First, it’s interesting that black participation in professional baseball has been on the decline since the 1980s to the point that MLB executives have noticed and are starting to panic. Steve Sailer surmises that blacks are more likely to play sports in which their superior speed gives them a greater competitive advantage, and those blacks who continue to pursue careers in baseball are disproportionately pitchers or outfielders. Ironically, integration has brought about a gradual decline in the number of blacks participating in professional baseball. Josh Gibson was probably the greatest hitter of the Negro Leagues and he played catcher; a position that very few blacks play in modern professional baseball. There have undoubtedly been great black ballplayers in the integrated MLB since the late 1940s, but many whites still continue to dominate. There is no reason to believe that an earlier integration would have drastically changed statistics of white players. The more likely result is that many Negro League players would not have had the opportunity to play professional baseball.
Second, black athletic prowess, at least in comparison to whites, is certainly overblown. J.B. Cash has long detailed the racial caste system in sports. Professional baseball has a well-documented problem with steroids, and a disproportionate number of those guilty of using performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) are Hispanics, many of whom are Afro-Caribbean players who have displaced American-born blacks. Blacks tend to be better represented in professional basketball (the NBA) and professional football (the NFL). These sports don’t have the same history with combating PEDs as the MLB, but it isn’t because their players aren’t using them. Both the NFL and NBA have PED problems that are possibly much worse than what has been allowed in the MLB. The idea that talent in the MLB was greatly diminished before integration is not well-founded.
There have been many black superstars to play professional baseball. These include Josh Gibson and “Cool Papa” Bell before integration, and stars like Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Ferguson Jenkins, Joe Morgan, and many others since integration. It’s fun to speculate about how Negro League stars would have fared had the MLB been integrated earlier, but simply considering their statistics on a par with the MLB doesn’t make sense. Most baseball fans understand that certain records are era-specific, and the same should apply to Negro League statistics. I applaud efforts to discover more box scores from old Negro League games in order to better understand that particular era, but their statistics belong in their own…ahem…segregated category.