By Davis Carlton

A few years ago Major League Baseball announced their plan to acknowledge the long-defunct Negro Leagues as full-fledged “major leagues” and planned on integrating Negro League statistics into official MLB records. I wrote a response when this was announced, and I believe my observations at the time are just as valid and relevant today. The MLB just announced that it has completed a three year study of the Negro Leagues and is now ready to officially integrate their records. The results are not without controversy, with many questioning the legitimacy of the comparisons between Negro League statistics with the traditional Major Leagues on several grounds.

Ken Rosenthal at The Athletic isn’t having it. To those who dare to question the wisdom of this change to official records, Rosenthal asks, “How legitimate were MLB’s statistics prior to 1947, when the league was essentially an all-white men’s club?” Perhaps there is value to having homogeneous institutions (white boys’ clubs) that outweigh concerns about maximizing competition? Rosenthal’s rhetorical questions are meant to address the objections to this new statistical “update.” Those opposing the change argue, as I did in my previous article, that the Negro League statistics cannot meaningfully be compared to the statistics of the Major Leagues during the relevant time period. This is based upon the brevity of Negro League seasons compared to the Major Leagues, the level of competition in the Negro Leagues, as well as the poor quality of Negro League records.

Rosenthal argues that concerns about quality of competition of the Negro Leagues don’t take into account the absence of the best black players in the pre-integration Major Leagues. To quote Rosenthal, “If you want to argue Josh Gibson didn’t face the best competition, well, neither did Babe Ruth.” This counter-argument from Rosenthal depends upon an over-inflated sense of black athletic prowess as I mentioned in my previous article. Rosenthal’s argument about Babe Ruth is also a poorly chosen example because Babe Ruth did play against Negro League baseball stars in barnstorming tours as is pointed out by baseball historian Bill Jenkinson. In limited action Ruth’s statistics were even better than the numbers he posted against white major league opponents.

There are also record keeping oddities that are hard to explain. Why aren’t there records for how many times particular batters struck out, but there are records for how many strikeouts that pitchers recorded? It’s also suspect that new discoveries have changed over the three years of the Negro Leagues research project. In my original article I stated, per MLB reporting, that Josh Gibson was going to be attributed a career batting average of .362, which would put him at second all-time behind Ty Cobb (.367). Now MLB has “discovered” that Gibson’s career batting average is somehow 10 points higher, giving him a batting average of .372 (I have also seen .373 reported), good enough for the all-time record. These sorts of “discoveries” don’t happen with regular MLB statistics except for very rare anomalies, certainly not enough to change career stats to that degree.

Rosenthal brushes aside concerns about sample sizes; “[I]f you want to argue Gibson’s newly anointed record-setting 1943 season is less meaningful because he appeared in only 69 games, well, people who follow the sport are forever engaging in such context-driven debates.” Rosenthal then cites the example of how many baseball fans don’t accept Barry Bonds as the all-time home run leader over Hank Aaron due to Bonds’ documented history of performance-enhancing drugs, even though Bonds remains the all-time leader in home runs on paper. I suppose that Rosenthal has a point, but I don’t see how it helps his case.

I agree with those who are skeptical about “steroid era” records and stats, and I think that there should at the very least be an asterisk attached to statistics that are likely due to cheating. The unfair advantage of cheating makes for an “apples to oranges” comparison when compared to those who didn’t cheat. The reason that I and so many others think that Negro League stats shouldn’t be included with official major league stats is because there are too many dissimilarities to make for a meaningful comparison. In the case of these new records for “rate stats” like batting average and on-base plus slugging, the Negro League seasons wouldn’t have qualified due to being below the threshold for plate appearances in both a single season and a career. In other words, the sample sizes are too small, so in order for them to count towards official records special exceptions are having to be made.

Rosenthal wants to argue that this is simply about acknowledging the greatness of pre-integration Negro League players the way we do for white players before integration in 1947. The issue is that it isn’t necessary or even helpful to integrate the record books in order to acknowledge, as MLB has in the past, that the Negro Leagues featured some truly remarkable talent. Those who reject the inclusion of Negro League statistics are not making a value judgment about the character or even the athletic ability of the Negro Leaguers themselves.

The differences in the level of competition, accuracy in record keeping, and in statistical sample sizes due to the different lengths of seasons all make meaningful comparisons impossible. How would Josh Gibson, Turkey Stearnes, Cool Papa Bell, or Oscar Charleston have fared if they had played their careers in MLB? We just don’t know. It all remains in the realm of the hypothetical. It’s fascinating to speculate. Sports fans constantly speculate about just how players from different eras would perform against each other. But that’s all it is…speculation.^*

The larger issue is that the re-writing of MLB history is meant to revolutionize the way that baseball fans understand the history of the game itself. Rosenthal quotes Reds pitcher Hunter Greene, “I’m going to have to do a little bit more research and understand some of the history to kind of rewire my brain on some of the best players.” This is exactly what George Orwell was talking about when he wrote, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped.” (George Orwell, 1984)

The goal is to make baseball fans follow the example of Hunter Greene and “rewire” their brains about the history of the sport. This is all part of a larger project of white erasure; the replacing of white heroes, history, and symbols with non-white alternatives in order to manipulate future generations’ perception of the past. This can be seen in how artificial intelligence is being trained to re-write history for more “inclusive representation,” and how white characters from white literature are being re-cast as non-white, as well as non-whites being retrojected into historical contexts in Europe and North America that are historically inaccurate. In these truly Orwellian times, we have always been at war with East Asia, and Josh Gibson has always been baseball’s all-time batting champion.

*Of course, the Baseball Hall of Fame has shown itself favorable to special cases of speculation as demonstrated in their choice of Satchel Paige as the first inductee in their Negro League category in 1971, despite his extensive years spent in the minors and various Latin American leagues during his prime. It was a selection obviously based upon his career longevity, his fortunate appearance on the pitching roster of the World Series winning 1948 Cleveland Indians, and his rather notorious lone-game appearance for the Kansas City Athletics at age 59 in 1965 in accordance with the civil rights narrative prevalent in that year.