OT: MLB Will Finally Reclassify the Negro Leagues as Baseball Major Leagues.
In a move that should have been done years ago, Major League Baseball is finally recognizing the proper place in history of Negro Leagues Baseball, something I think most dedicated baseball fans will agree with.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/30531397/mlb-reclassifies-negro-leagues-major-league
December 16th, 2020 at 1:30 PM ^
Yeah, this should have happened long ago, but glad they finally made it official. It always felt weird that we'd make a distinction about those players and stats because they were in a segregated league but not about the white-only MLB that was going on concurrently. It'll be good to treat them all equally now.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:32 PM ^
Belated progress is still progress. Now what I need is some of those teams hats, the typography they had was wild
December 16th, 2020 at 1:33 PM ^
This is excellent.
The cynic in me expects someone to object. They can promptly pound sand.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:41 PM ^
They sure can!
Like the article says, MLB is finally rectifying a bad decision they made in 1969 when they declined to elevate Negro Leagues history to this level.
The more I think about today's announcement, the more excited I get! Not only do the statistical numbers get added in to official MLB statistics for such greats as Satchel Paige and numerous others who got their starts pre-segregation, but previously obscured stats and accomplishments of earlier underappreciated pioneers will finally see the light of day, going back to the earliest history of segregated baseball.
The complete story of those brave men will finally be told!
December 16th, 2020 at 1:45 PM ^
Totally agreed.
While I know that we are in a really strange place as a society right now, and we have a very long way to go when it comes to fully understanding what it will mean to have true racial reconciliation, announcements like this are a positive step.
Forward progress is good.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:49 PM ^
This is great news and long overdue.
I wouldn't want the job of the Elias Sports Bureau sorting out the numbers.
Satchel's own account of some of his stats:
2,500 games pitched, 2,000 victories, 250 shutouts, a personal-best of 22 strikeouts in a game, 50 no-hitters, a 21-game winning streak, a 62-inning scoreless streak, a day in which he notched three separate victories and a year in which he appeared in more than 150 games.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:52 PM ^
TO BILL BRASKY
December 16th, 2020 at 1:53 PM ^
He's even greater than I thought!
LOL
December 16th, 2020 at 3:30 PM ^
Yep,
Stats aside, by most accounts, Satchel was among the best of the best pitchers in the history of organized baseball.
December 16th, 2020 at 6:36 PM ^
Satchel was gangsta.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:42 PM ^
The bummer about this, and I think where the objection will come, is that these guys that played in the same era never had a chance to play one another. So you will always have people on both sides of the argument saying that one was a better league than the other but we will never really know. It will be like people comparing Lebron and Jordan about who was better, or in this case which record holder was actually playing better competition. No one will ever know the answer.
December 16th, 2020 at 3:08 PM ^
They did play each other..and everyone who played knew.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:34 PM ^
Wow! This is great.
I hadn't realized MLB had recognized other "major" leagues, or I'd have been annoyed at the omission.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:58 PM ^
Prior to today, these were the six official major leagues:
National League (1876-present)
American Association (1882-1891)
Union Association (1884)
Player's League (1890)
American League (1901-present)
Federal League (1914-1915)
An argument for the National Association (1871-1875) could be made as another Major League, but so far MLB has not agreed.
I will be interested to see how the records from the Negro Leagues are incorporated. For the most part, the teams only played 30-50 league games in a full season, and 100+ exhibition games, all-star games, charity games, etc., and I'm not sure how good the record-keeping is for some of those games. Hopefully they can find stats for all of the games that need to be counted.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:51 PM ^
Long overdue.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:52 PM ^
This is good news. Unfortunately, though, a huge amount of Negro League stats have been lost to time (at least as I understand it).
December 16th, 2020 at 1:56 PM ^
Yeah, I've not followed it particularly deeply but I noticed at baseball-reference.com that the stats for the Negro League players were largely based on secondary sources (newspaper articles, concurrent tabulations by teams, etc.) and oftentimes incomplete. So it does feel like a lot of them will be limited but it's still good to see.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:57 PM ^
There's a bunch of historians/statisticians who are working to restore them by searching through old newspapers and what not for box scores.
December 16th, 2020 at 2:29 PM ^
One of the big admissions of this announcement is that the stats will not be level, by any means, but that shouldn't be the reason to exclude the negro leagues any longer.
It's just like how bowl game didn't used to count towards a college season's stats, but now they do, and the game isn't broken because of it.
Just finished reading the biography of Satchel Paige last month, and it was fascinating in 2020 for several reasons, but one of which was so many of legendary stories (no-hitters on consecutive days, 100+ innings without a run score against, etc) cannot be debunked because there was almost no reporting, as white run newspapers did not cover the negro leagues, and black newspapers were barely funded.
December 16th, 2020 at 1:59 PM ^
can they document that Josh Gibson hit more home runs than that asshole Barry Bonds?
That would be awesome.
December 16th, 2020 at 3:06 PM ^
In the late 1980s, I wrote a kids' alphabet book of baseball nicknames (there were no nicknames starting with X). I created a short story for each player describing how he obtained/earned his nickname. I used the official encyclopedia of baseball and several players' names chosen were from the leagues mentioned above, but, of course, the players of the MNBL were not listed. I did not use any of them even though the players were well known to me. Later on, I realized how ignorant that was for so many reasons. My work still sits in a drawer...
I am elated and sad that The League has been recognized officially.
December 16th, 2020 at 3:21 PM ^
What did you do for X?
December 16th, 2020 at 3:11 PM ^
It's about damn time.
December 16th, 2020 at 5:06 PM ^
Hip hip hooray! So many of the best players, the biggest characters, and the wildest stories come from the Negro Leagues. Great stuff.
December 17th, 2020 at 7:19 PM ^
Awesome. I saw this on MLB last night totally agree. Many of those player were as good - or better - than the players in the MLB at that time. Would have been interesting to see a All Star team from each league play a three game series.