(ThyBlackMan.com) Negro Leagues Baseball did not completely get the celebration its rich history deserves in 2020. The year 2020 marked the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues and the coronavirus pandemic understandably derailed major celebrations and gatherings for most of the year for many attractions and museums including the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. Major League Baseball did honor during the 2020 MLB season including having its teams like the Miami Marlins wear throwback Miami Giants uniforms to pay tribute to the semipro team that played in South Florida in the 1930s.
However, the MLB’s celebration of Negro Leagues Baseball history could not have all the festivities originally planned due to the pandemic. Bob Kendrick, who is the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, said, “Even though it’s not the way that we had envisioned it, with fans being in the ballpark and creating that groundswell of energy in and around this celebration, we have one of the most significant platforms ever to count the richness of the history of the Negro Leagues”. Near the end of 2020, Major League Baseball made a bold decision to announce that it is reclassifying the Negro Leagues as a major league.
In professional baseball, numbers and statistics carry more weight than in other professional sports. Baseball players being in the 3,000 hit “club”, getting to 3,000 career strikeouts as a pitcher, or winning the “Triple Crown” of hitting regarding batting average, home runs, and RBI are numbers that generate discussion of overall baseball history. Today’s sports are as analytical as ever before with advanced statistics in most team sports and Major League Baseball was the standard bearer for the analytics generation with sabermetrics. Numbers in Major League Baseball seem to carry more weight than in any other professional sport. According the Major League Baseball, “It is MLB’s view that the Committee’s 1969 omission of the Negro Leagues from consideration was clearly an error that demands today’s designation.” Major League Baseball will attempt to marry the production of the Negro Leagues baseball players, who were not permitted to join the MLB due to racism, into their records and record books.
This seems to be a very nice gesture and nod to the importance of Negro Leagues, their players, and the history of independent Black baseball clubs and leagues. However, this will be very difficult to do as the MLB will enlist the services of the incredible Elias Sports Bureau to review Negro Leagues statistics and records and figure out how to incorporate them into major league history. There was no standard method of record-keeping for the Negro Leagues during the time those games were being played so grabbing very accurate numbers will be challenging.
A Negro Leagues Baseball legend like Josh Gibson, who hit by many estimates over 800 career home runs in his Negro Leagues career and never got an opportunity to play Major League Baseball despite having the nickname “the Black Babe Ruth”. Ironically, the career record holder for home runs in MLB history, Barry Bonds, has his own numbers questioned by performance-enhancing drug suspicions in his career. Bonds’ home run total overtook the career total of the recently departed, Hank Aaron, who also spent a short period of his baseball career in Negro Leagues Baseball. The combining of Negro Leagues Baseball statistics and Major League Baseball statistics make who owns the accomplishment of having the most home runs ever even more muddied than it already is with Bonds’ possible PED use. It is a nice notion to integrate the numbers of the Negro League players but those players, teams, and its history stand well alone in its own category as having the talent to play and manage in Major League Baseball but decided to make a separate, but special legacy due to the overt bigotry of its day.
Staff Writer; Mark Hines
