Tag Archives: Negro Leagues

Stop wearing 42 ubiqitously on Jackie Robinson Day

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Jackie Robinson

Only one Show team really has the call to wear 42 on Jackie Robinson Day. But he can still be honoured by the rest of the Show on his day . . .

Before he was anything else once he broke baseball’s disgraceful colour line, Jackie Robinson was a Dodger. A Brooklyn Dodger. A Dodger as the first major league Rookie of the Year (the award became one for each league in 1949), a Dodger when the Boys of Summer finally made this year next year (the 1955 World Series), and a Dodger when he retired at 37.

My friend Howard Cole, a splendid baseball writer who created the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America (and very kindly lured me into life membership), tried to remind people of that point around Jackie Robinson Day 2013.

“Truth be told,” he wrote for L.A. Weekly then, “while I understand the reasoning behind it, I’m a little jealous of the teams that get to share in the holiday. They didn’t do anything in particular, and some made things as difficult for Jack as can possibly be.” Not to mention that not every team other than the Cleveland Indians (with Larry Doby) and a third Show team got the near-immediate hint.

“I’d kind of like to see just the Dodger players wearing the number 42 on their jerseys,” Cole continued, “with the rest of teams bowing in reverence.”

Retiring Robinson’s uniform number baseball-wide is one thing, but my friend Cole is right. On Jackie Robinson Day—whether everyone’s playing on the actual day or whether, as this week, it covers two days since several teams were off Thursday—only one team has the proper call to wear 42 on their backs.

That team is Robinson’s team.

It’s not that the entire Dodger team necessarily welcomed him with open arms and hugs when he first arrived in 1947. There were teammates who did so. There were others who didn’t. There were those among the latter who petitioned to push the Dodgers not to bring Robinson up from the Montreal Royals, where he’d won the International League batting title and helped lead them to the league championship.

Robinson had to change hearts and minds the hard way. In a Dodger uniform. He had to change hearts and minds on both his own team and the rest of the league. It was easier to convince a barracuda to think about a strictly vegetation diet. Maybe the toughest mind he had to change was the man said to have petitioned the Dodgers to block Robinson’s advent in the first place.

But there the Dodgers were clinching the 1947 pennant. And there in The Sporting News was a remarkable quote: No other ballplayer on this club, with the possible exception of Bruce Edwards, has done more to put the Dodgers up in the race as Robinson has. He is everything Branch Rickey said he was when he came up from Montreal.

That was Dixie Walker talking. The same Dixie Walker who’d once said he’d sooner stay home and paint his house than play with a black man on his team. The same Dixie Walker who eventually made a reputation as a coach for helping young black players adjust and improve their swings at the plate. Though he’d be one-upped by a southern white teammate named Bobby Bragan.

When Branch Rickey called his southern Dodgers to ask about the Walker petition and their real feelings, Bragan said right out he’d been raised to segregation. Rickey agreed to trade Bragan but never made the deal. Bragan’s heart and mind could be changed by only one man. Robinson.

Rickey asked Bragan if he’d play his best with Robinson on the team. The reluctant Bragan said yes, he would. Then, little by little, piece by piece, Bragan found himself drawn to Robinson. They’d talk baseball, on the team train and in the dugout, maybe sharing a joke or two. Before long, as a remarkable profile by Joe Posnanski said, Bragan found himself dissenting from his own family’s dismissal of Robinson. “Wait a minute,” he told his family, “you don’t know him.”

“Bragan and Robinson became friends, real friends, the sort who would go to each other’s houses for dinner occasionally, the sort who would happily embrace whenever they came across each other,” Posnanski wrote. “And Robinson was always proud that Bragan became known as a man who would treat people fairly, honestly, no matter the color of their skin.”

Bragan went further. He became a manager in the minors and the majors and developed a bigger reputation for helping young minority ballplayers—including turning a frustrated kid in the Dodger system into a switch hitter and shepherding his path to the Show, a kid named Maury Wills.

“I think it’s just a matter of becoming acclimated to the thing by association,” Bragan ended up writing in his memoir, Baseball Has Done It. “I was exposed to integration daily under the shower, in the next locker, on the bus, in the hotel and many conversations . . . All this adds up to a tolerant attitude, a little more understanding of the situation than if we’d never left Alabama.”

If only today’s Bragans in and out of baseball were that open. And not just when it comes to black players, black people. When the Indians’ Yu Chang—a middle infielder by trade placed at first base, and a Taiwan native—made an unfortunate ninth-inning throwing error (instead of stepping on the pad for the second out, his throw to second trying for a double play hit Yasmani Grandal in the helmet, allowing the White Sox to score the winning run), he was hit with particularly racist Twitter messages.

“Maybe fix those slanty eyes and you can throw the ball straight jerk off,” said the nastiest of the messages and probably the one above all that hit Chang between his eyes. “Exercise your freedom of speech in a right way,” he tweeted, “I accept all comments, positive or negative but DEFINITELY NOT RACIST ONES. Thank you all and love you all. #StopAsianHate.”

I hope I wasn’t the only one who noticed that that happened to a member of the team that followed the Dodgers’ lead almost immediately, when the Indians’ then-owner Bill Veeck bought Larry Doby from the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League and Doby broke the American League colour line in July 1947.

Hank Thompson

Hank Thompson—the St. Louis Browns became baseball’s third integrating team when picking Thompson and Willard Brown in 1947.

Would you like to know or be reminded how baseball’s re-breaking of the colour line (there’d been black and Latino players in the pre-20th Century game, however scattered or short lived before the colour line was imposed in earnest) actually progressed? Here you go:

After Robinson in Brooklyn and Doby in Cleveland, the next team to admit black players in 1947 was the St. Louis Browns, with infielder Hank Thompson and outfielder Willard Brown. Brown at 32 played one season with the Browns but became a Hall of Famer by way of the eventual Negro Leagues Committee in 2006; he’d been a solid slugging player for the legendary Kansas City Monarchs.

Also 1947—the Dodgers brought up pitcher Dan Bankhead, whose Show career didn’t amount to much. From there, here are the first black/minority players with each major league team of the time:

1949—Hall of Famer Monte Irvin, the outfielder who broke the New York Giants’ colour barrier.

1950—Sam Jethroe, outfielder, Boston Braves. Anyone who says Boston just wouldn’t have accepted black or minority players in those years should be called a liar. The Braves welcomed black players as liberally as the Tom Yawkey Red Sox wouldn’t.

1953—Ernie Banks (shortstop, Chicago Cubs), Bob Trice (pitcher, Philadelphia Athletics), Carlos Bernier (outfielder, Pittsburgh Pirates). Bernier was a black Puerto Rican; a year later, the Pirates welcomed African-American second baseman Curt Roberts. Inexplicably, Show historians tend to consider Roberts and not Bernier the first black Pirate.

1954—Tom Alston (first baseman, St. Louis Cardinals), Nino Escalera and Chuck Harmon (outfielder, infielder-outfielder, respectively, Cincinnati Reds—both players debuted in the same game), Carlos Paula (outfielder, Washington Senators).

1955—Elston Howard (catcher, Yankees).

1956—Ozzie Virgil (catcher/infielder, Tigers).

1957—John Kennedy (infielder, Phillies).

1959—Pumpsie Green (infielder, Red Sox.)

If you want to be absolutely technical about it, only three teams in today’s Show really have any business thinking about wearing 42 on Jackie Robinson day: the Dodgers, the Indians, and the Orioles, who’d moved from St. Louis in the first place after 1953 but who thought nothing of bringing two black players to the major league team in the same year as Robinson premiered.

What should the other teams do on Jackie Robinson Day if they have no call in certain ways to wear 42? I have an idea: Let the teams in both leagues who were there before expansion wear the numbers of their first black players.

Let the Braves wear Sam Jethroe’s number 5. Let the Red Sox wear Green’s number 12. Let the Cubs wear Ernie Banks’s 14 and the White Sox wear Minnie Minoso’s 9. Let the Tigers wear Ozzie Virgil’s 22. Let the Giants wear Monte Irvin’s 20. (He debuted with 7 but changed his number in 1950.) Let the Yankees wear Elston Howard’s 33. Let the Athletics wear Bob Trice’s 23, let the Phillies wear John Kennedy’s 8. Let the Cardinals wear Tom Alston’s 10, let the Twins (the original Senators) wear Carlos Paula’s 31. (Paula wore 31 for two of his three Washington seasons.)

Let the subsequent expansion teams wear the numbers of significant black players who played contiguous to their areas unless we know whom their first chosen black players might have been:

Los Angeles Angels—Julio Becquer, 19. The first black player the Angels picked in the 1960 expansion draft that created the team.

Texas Rangers—Since they were born as the second Washington Senators, maybe they could wear Homestead Grays legend Buck Leonard’s 32.

New York Mets—Martin Dihigo, Hall of Fame pitcher for the New York Cubans, 17.

Houston Astros—This is a stretch: the Newark Eagles moved to Houston in 1948, by which time the team’s most notable players were either going to the Show or gone. Maybe Ray Dandridge, the Hall of Famer who wore 38 as an Eagle.

Kansas City Royals—This one’s a no-brainer: Satchel Paige, who wore 25 as a Kansas City Monarch.

Milwaukee Brewers—The erstwhile Seattle Pilots have a kind of choice: they could wear Luke Easter’s 9, since Easter once played for the Seattle Steelheads; or, they could wear Henry Aaron’s 44, since Aaron was the first black player signed by the Braves after they moved to Milwaukee and played his final MLB season with the Brewers.

Julio Becquer

Julio Becquer, the first black player to be selected by the Angels in the expansion draft creating the team.

San Diego Padres—John Ritchey, the first black player in the Pacific Coast League, who played as it happened for the Padres of that old venerable PCL. Uniform number: 1, I think.

Washington Nationals—Born as the Montreal Expos, well, nobody could top Jackie Robinson who’d been a Montreal Royal. But since they’re ensconced in Washington and won their franchise-first World Series as the Nats, they could go for a Homestead Grays immortal since the Grays played most of their games in Washington: Hall of Famer Josh Gibson, 20.

Seattle Mariners—Artie Wilson, who integrated the ancient Seattle Rainers of the ancient PCL and was the last Negro Leagues player known to hit .400. I haven’t been able to unearth his Rainers uniform number, but when he made it briefly to the New York Giants he wore 15.

Toronto Blue Jays—Charlie White, relief pitcher, Hall of Famer as a Negro Leaguer, and one of the first two black players signed to the longtime minor league Toronto Maple Leafs after Jack Kent Cooke bought the team in 1951. I can’t find his Negro Leagues uniform numbers, but he did wear 24 as a brief mid-1950s Milwaukee Brave.

Colorado Rockies—Middle infielder Bubbles Anderson. The only Negro Leaguer known to have been born in Colorado. Played for the Negro minor league Denver White Elephants, whose schedule often included games against white Colorodan minor league teams. Later played for the Monarchs and the Birmingham Black Barons. Number: 22.

Florida Marlins—Herbert Barnhill, a catcher for the Jacksonville Red Caps, Florida’s only-ever entry in the Negro American League. The Red Caps lured Barnhill from the Atlanta Black Crackers. Number: Possibly 18.

Arizona Diamondbacks—Ford Smith, pitcher and the only native of Arizona ever to play in the Negro Leagues, with four seasons as a Monarch before the New York Giants signed him to play in their organisation. Smith never made the Giants. I can’t unearth his uniform number, either, so since he was the first from Arizona let the D’Backs wear 1 with his name on the back.

Tampa Bay Rays—Walter Lee Gibbons, pitcher, who played for the Tampa Rockets of the Florida State Negro League before joining the legendary Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League. Number: 19.

If the foregoing has been a bit of a sprawl, I apologise. But it just doesn’t seem right that every Show team should wear 42 on Jackie Robinson Day. Not when only one team in the Show has the true right to claim Robinson as their own pioneering Hall of Famer, not when only two other teams took the same-season hint.

That team is the Dodgers. Everyone else, please ponder the foregoing and do your best to make it so. But don’t stop there, either. It would make everything Robinson stood for and believed meaningless if baseball can’t convince more of today’s generations of young black and other American minority people to embrace and feel at home playing Robinson’s game as their game, too.

Let the Negro Leagues records Show

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Why should anyone fear to know exactly how many home runs Josh Gibson really hit in major league competition?

Have you ever heard of the Wilmington Quicksteps? They were a replacement team in the 1884 Union Association, after the Philadelphia Keystones folded down the stretch with a 21-46 record. The Quicksteps ruled the ancient Eastern League (forerunner of the AAA-level International League) to the point where fan interest collapsed.

Enter UA founder Henry Lucas. When the Keystones folded, Lucas invited the Quicksteps to replace them. That was the good news. The bad news: the Quicksteps played eighteen games, lost sixteen of them, and with several key players jumping the team to sign with other UA clubs for better pay, the Quicksteps stepped away and folded before the season ended.

Lucas owned the 1884 UA’s pennant winner—the St. Louis Maroons. He replaced the Quicksteps with the first club known to have been called the Milwaukee Brewers. After the season, both those Brewers and the entire UA folded. Now, the fun part: Because the Brewers played twelve games, won eight, and made for a .667 winning percentage, they were considered the league’s second-place finishers. (The Maroons won the pennant with a 94-19 record, if you’re scoring at home.)

What maroons! you say.

Folded but not forgotten. In 1968, after then-baseball commissioner William D. Eckert convened a panel to determine whom among the latter 19th Century’s professional leagues merited classification as major leagues, the UA was one of four leagues recognised thus. (The others: the 1882-91 American Association, the 1890 Players League, and the 1914-1915 Federal League.)

Thus do the Quicksteps’ 2-16 record, the Brewers’ 8-4 second-place finish, and all individual and team statistics therein, count as major league statistics. You can look them up, too, at either Baseball Reference or Retrosheet. (They list the Brewers as the Milwaukee Grays, by the way.) You’d be betting on a sure thing, too, if you suggest that no one otherwise gives a fig’s leaf about it.

But oh, doctor, did enough people give figs’ leaves about what to do about the records now that the seven known Negro Leagues have too-long-overdue major league status. (They weren’t even a topic before that 1968 panel.) Forget “you could look it up,” some of these people seemed to be afraid we were now going to blow it up.

Just a cursory tour through the social media swamps and lakes shows those who think Negro Leagues stats might distort the overall record, those who think they’ll screw up some Negro Leaguers who made what were then the majors, and even—so help me God I saw someone say this—maybe more than one fearing that Jackie Robinson’s and Branch Rickey’s accomplishment in 1947 would be diluted, diminished, deceased.

Need a reminder about a couple of things? Thomas Boswell—who made me aware of the Quicksteps in the first place—has a few. “MLB played just 60 games this past season, far fewer than many Negro League seasons,” he wrote Friday. “Yet the [Washington Nationals’] Juan Soto can claim his batting, slugging and on-base titles forever.”

Boswell says, plainly, let the records show. The keepers of baseball’s statistics and its flames have spent eons on expeditions to get the real records. So why shouldn’t the Negro Leagues get the same attention and respect now that they’re officially the group of major leagues that everyone with heart, soul, and brains knew they were in fact though not in official branding and badging?

What are the worriers worried about? That Willie Mays might lose three points on his lifetime hitting average (he would, down to .301) but gain a lifetime home run if his single season with the Birmingham Black Barons joins the major league books? That Josh Gibson might turn out not to have hit 800+ home runs? (At least not in official league competition.) That those and more changes might do what nobody with a brain would really suggest—dilute their actual greatness?

Try this one on. Jackie Robinson played the 1945 season with the Negro American League legend Kansas City Monarchs. (His teammates included Hall of Famer Satchel Paige and Double Duty Radcliffe.) His slash line was .414/.460/.569 in 63 games known on the record. Now that the Monarchs are an official major league team, guess what that does for Robinson so far? It bumps his hitting average to .314 but keeps his on-base percentage at .414 and his slugging percentage at .474.

Monte Irvin’s life as a New York Giant was compromised by a nasty ankle injury. Marry his known Newark Eagles (Negro National League II) stats to his Giants stats (and his one season as a Cub) and he’s got a .304 major league hitting average. He might even shake out higher when they finally exhume the complete statistics. (Surely you’ve read that, at the time Rickey made his move, his first target was Irvin, considered at the time the best in the Negro Leagues, but Irvin turned it down saying he wasn’t quite ready after missing time to World War II.)

Spare me the crap, too, about the Negro Leaguers not facing major league competition except in exhibition or barnstorm games. It wasn’t their fault. Nobody held the Show at gunpoint to force it to enforce a colour line. Nobody will ever know for dead last certain why team and league administrators in the seven Negro Leagues didn’t keep complete records that the mainstream newspapers wouldn’t.

In baseball’s first generation of desegregation, as slow on the uptake as it actually was, you saw just enough of what Negro Leagues players might do against their white competitors. Robinson has a .281/.333/.481 slash line with nine home runs against Hall of Famer Robin Roberts. Irvin went 2-for-4 against Hall of Famer Don Drysdale and posted a lovely .276/.383/.449 slash line with four homers against Hall of Famer Warren Spahn.

Paige kept Hall of Famer Ted Williams to a .222/.364/.222 slash line—with no home runs. And that was when Paige was in his 40s, far past his prime, but still an effective relief pitcher who inspired Yankee manager Casey Stengel to hector his hitters, “Get your runs now—Father Time is coming!”

Maybe the worriers are worried that a few sacred Show cows might turn out to have been steak? Boswell isolates a case: “Artie Wilson hit .428 in 1948 in the Negro Leagues. Does that make Wilson, not Ted Williams, the last .400 hitter? Teddy Ballgame would get a kick out of that; few men ever boosted and boasted about the quality of Negro League play more than Ted.”

Oho, some cynics might ask (and have asked), but how many of Josh Gibson’s home runs came off guys that would never have made the major leagues even if there was no segregation?

Elston Howard—from teenage Kansas City Monarch (1949) to Hall of Famer Yogi Berra’s eventual successor behind the Yankee plate.

OK, you asked for it. How many of Henry Aaron’s, Babe Ruth’s, Albert Pujols’s, Willie Mays’s, Ken Griffey, Jr.’s, Jim Thome’s, Frank Robinson’s, or Harmon Killebrew’s home runs came off guys who probably had no business being in the majors, too? No hitter faces only the Walter Johnsons, Lefty Groves, Satchel Paiges, Double Duty Radcliffes, Whitey Fords, Sandy Koufaxes, Bob Gibsons, Juan Marichals, Tom Seavers, or Randy Johnsons.

The only thing anyone should worry about is that it may take a good long while before finalising the complete stats is done for Gibson, Irvin, Paige, Radcliffe, Robinson, Wilson, Cool Papa Bell, Roy Campanella, Larry Doby, Sam Jethroe, Elston Howard, Buck Leonard, Don Newcombe, Buck O’Neil, and every Negro Leagues player who did or didn’t eventually make it to the Show after Robinson. If they can be done at last.

“The new Negro League numbers will have many such gaps, a byproduct of the discrimination that limited every aspect of those players’ lives, right down to the tiny detail that many of their games got no box scores in papers,” Boswell observes.

As more information is gathered, all those Negro League stats will change, just as, over my life, I have watched the win, strikeout and hit totals change for Walter Johnson and many other white Hall of Famers.

What the true baseball fan wants to know is: everything. All the data that is available. We will figure out, each in our own way, what to make of it, how to rank it and, in some cases, how to get our jaws off the floor.

We’ll also figure out that there was so much more to regret than we ever knew, when we first learned of the shameful decades of baseball’s segregation. But we’ll also figure out just how much richer the game we love is, now that those men are given officially what we always knew they were, from the stories, the legends, and the eventual actualities when they were finally allowed to join their white baseball brethren on the field:

They’re major leaguers, dammit!

Formalising what people of heart, soul, and mind always knew

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Monte Irvin and Willie Mays—major leaguers as Giants and as a Newark Eagle (Irvin) and Birmingham Black Baron (Mays).

When Ted Williams was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966, he kept it short, sweet, and shameless. One moment, Williams gave props to Willie Mays, who’d passed him on the all-time home run list days earlier: “[H]e’s pushing, and I say to him, ‘Go get ’em, Willie’.” Then, the Splinter hit a grand slam:

Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. I hope that one day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.

Gibson didn’t quite live long enough to receive his chance to play major league baseball; he died before Branch Rickey finally began the undoing of what should never have been done in the first place. But he was inducted into the Hall of Fame as a baseball immortal in 1972.

Paige did get his chance. Among other things, he kept Williams to a .222 hitting average and slugging percentage but a .364 on-base percentage, after joining the American League with the Cleveland Indians and in due course the St. Louis Browns—in his forties.

Unlike Gibson, Paige did live long enough to see himself inducted into the Hall of Fame, the first Negro Leagues player so inducted (in 1971) after a special committee was formed to determine, as best they could with what they had, whom among the Negro Leagues’ best belonged in Cooperstown.

Not long before then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn formed the committee, his predecessor William Eckert convened another committee to isolate which among the earliest professional leagues merited official major league status. Four leagues were given such formal recognition by that group: the American Association of 1882-91, the Union Association of 1884, the Players League of 1890, and the Federal League of 1914-1915.

The Negro Leagues weren’t even a topic then. Boy, are they a topic now, with commissioner Rob Manfred having pronounced that the seven professional Negro Leagues which played from 1920 to 1948 shall henceforth be known as major leagues. Did I say seven?

Manfred conferred formal major league status on the first Negro National League of 1920-31, the Eastern Coloured League of 1923-28, the American Negro League of 1929, the East-West League of 1932, the Negro Southern League of 1932, the second Negro National League of 1933-1948, and the Negro American League of 1937-1948.

That’s the formality. Any baseball fan with heart, soul, and mind coordinating properly didn’t need a formal proclamation to know the Negro Leagues were as good and sometimes better than the “official” major leagues. They knew down to their bone marrow that Ted Williams was dead right in his implication that the “official” Show’s pre-1947 segregation denied those leagues and a good number of their players their propers.

Why the 1948 cutoff? That was the year of the final Negro World Series, between the Homestead Grays of the NNL and the Birmingham Black Barons of the NAL. (The Grays flattened the Barons in five, despite the Barons’ sharp center fielder—a child prodigy named Willie Mays.) With Jackie Robinson having cracked the old, disgraceful major league segregation line a year earlier, and National and American League teams beginning to scout and sign Negro Leagues talent, however incrementally, the Negro Leagues’ days were numbered.

After that Series (the Grays won the last such major league-level championship in Washington until last year’s Nationals), the Negro National League folded, followed by the Grays themselves in 1951 after barnstorming proved financially untenable. With the two then-solely recognised major leagues continuing to bring black talent aboard, the Negro American League fell back to the equivalence of the highest minor league before folding in 1958.

Bob Kendrick, a man of impeccable intelligence and sensitivity who presides over the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, knows the difference between conferring historical merit and validating the Negro Leagues and its players as major leaguers. “[T]hey never looked to Major League Baseball to validate them,” Kendrick tells MLB.com writer (and author of the splendid A Fan’s Guide to Baseball Analytics) Anthony Castrovince.

But for fans and for historical sake, this is significant, it really is. So we are extremely pleased with this announcement. And for us, it does give additional credence to how significant the Negro Leagues were, both on and off the field.

A writer for The Athletic, Marcus Thompson II, sees and raises. “‘Oh, so now they’re good?’ was my initial reaction,” he writes in a forum convened by the journal to discuss the Manfred pronouncement.

Josh Gibson doesn’t need validation from Major League Baseball. Oscar Charleston doesn’t need validation. Pop Lloyd ain’t suddenly legit now because MLB basically decided to include him in the fold. It reeked of baseball’s arrogance. It wasn’t so much the inclusion of Negro League players, but the idea that somehow they are being officialized by this inclusion. This, obviously, should have been done a long time ago. But the pretentiousness of believing this to somehow be an elevation of those players, as if they’re being knighted posthumously, is insane and offensive . . . Satchel Paige was already a Major Leaguer by every other possible definition. Cool Papa Bell’s been official. His name is Cool Papa Bell.

Did we really need Rob Manfred to tell us Satchel Paige (left) and Jackie Robinson were major league level in the Negro Leagues?

Indeed. And, what do you know, just one prowl of social media delivered enough of the half-witticisms of those who think any thought of the Negro Leagues as “official” major leagues carries the whiff of political correctness. One such miscreant sticks uncomfortably in my mind: “[T]hey didn’t play against ball players like Bob Feller and Ted Williams sooooo… they didn’t play against major league talent.”

Well, now. I’d have loved the miscreant to explain what he thinks of the Show’s willful exclusion of non-white talent prior to 1947. (Fair disclosure: I zapped him by answering his foolish remark with the aforequoted Williams valedictory. As I write, he hasn’t offered an answer.) Do he and others of (I hate to use a four-letter word when ladies might be reading) like mind think such “major leaguers” as Robinson, Mays, Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Henry Aaron, and Ernie Banks were just another bunch of minor leaguers before “organised baseball” deigned to invite them aboard?

Those of us who love the game and share the concurrent strain that its statistics are its life blood face a pretty pickle, too: How to finalise the true statistics of Negro Leagues competition. For one thing, it was known long enough that the Negro Leagues didn’t keep complete statistics for assorted and largely unpleasant reasons tied in large part to the unconscionable segregation of the so-called National Pastime.

The legends yielded by the Negro Leagues have been fun as legends but problematic as statistical analysis. Josh Gibson hitting eight hundred home runs plus in his baseball life is great fun as a legend, but how many did Gibson actually hit in Negro Leagues competition against how many did he actually hit on the barnstorms?

Castrovince observes that Negro Leagues statistics from leagues competition in 1920-1948 will be the ones brought to account, for a couple of very good reasons: Trying to develop the leagues before 1920 weren’t successful “and lacked a league structure.” Fans black, white, brown, and paisley alike may be disappointed with the net result because the barnstorm and exhibition stats won’t be included.

It won’t be simple, says another Athletic forum participant, Marc Carig. “[T]here are still games missing from the historical record,” he begins.

As of now, researchers have documented 73 percent of Negro League games contested in the 1920-1948 window of inclusion. That figure will keep climbing. More and more newspapers are getting digitized, making it easier to search for documentation. But it is still unlikely it will ever get to 100 percent. That can be a challenge. Now begins the work of figuring out how to incorporate that existing data into the official records. That’s the next step in the process. It’s not an easy one. But it’s worthwhile.

Forget about whether Gibson knocks Aaron and Barry Bonds out of the home run record books. He’ll probably still look like the great bombardier of his legend. And, since Aaron’s Negro Leagues play came after 1948, any home runs he hit before joining the Braves’ organisation won’t change his career home run total. Or the magnitude of his career and of a certain night in April 1974.

But Mays will see some changes. Let’s look. He had 73 plate appearances for the 1948 Black Barons, with sixteen hits including two doubles, twelve runs batted in, and twelve walks.He hit .262 with a .384 on-base percentage but a .295 slugging percentage with the ’48 Black Barons. His OBP won’t change, but his hitting average (sorry, the traditional batting average is incomplete and mistreats hits) will fall . . . one point, to .301. His slugging percentage will also fall . . . one point, to .556.

Another Athletic forum participant, Jason Jones, understands the concurrent late symbolism and undercurrent shame in Manfred’s pronouncement. “[I]f it took this announcement for you to believe Josh Gibson was one of the best to ever swing a bat, shame on you,” Jones says. “This is clearly long overdue. I wish those players were here to see baseball finally do the right thing.”

It shouldn’t have taken us that pronouncement, either, to believe Satchel Paige was one of the best ever to take the mound. (Casey Stengel would hector his Yankees when he saw Paige throwing in the bullpen, “Get your runs now—Father Time is coming!” That was when Paige was in his 40s and not exactly in his prime.)

Or, that Buck Leonard was one of the best ever to play first base.

Or, that Monte Irvin may have been the actual best of the Negro League talents to cross into the Show when he finally did, and that he might have given the Show another decade of his best before an ankle injury compromised him while with the Giants. Among others. (Irvin’s lifetime major league hitting average might jump to .304 when the records are adjusted.)

Said Manfred in a formal statement, “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. We are now grateful to count the players of the Negro Leagues where they belong: as Major Leaguers within the official historical record.”

Where they always belonged.

Now, if only Manfred and his minions would take things from there to send the Show on a real, substantial mission to rekindle deeper interest in baseball among black youth around the country, whether inner city, suburbia, or the country life. Black people have elevated the game as men and as players, coaches, managers, and executives, even if the number  among the last three of those remains terribly low.

Today’s young black aspirants deserve to know the game belongs to them, too. Numerous localised organisations carry that mission splendidly. It would give them a badly needed lift, and further honour the Negro Leagues legacy, if Manfred and his get off the schneid and onto the hunt. It’d mean as much and maybe more than how Jackie Robinson’s Hall of Fame plaque would look with the addition of his seasons with the Kansas City Monarchs.