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The North American professional baseball league, MLB, will count from now on all the games that for 29 years were played in the so-called Negro Leagues as if they were played within the MLB umbrella.
This means that all players who played in the leagues are counted as official professional athletes and that all games are now counted in official MLB statistics.
“We are grateful to now be able to count the Negro Leagues players to which they belong as MLB players who are part of our official historical roles,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told the league website.
– All of us who love baseball have long known that the Negro Leagues produced many of the best players in our sport, were innovative, and celebrated great triumphs against social injustice.
“A recognition”
The “injustices” Manford speaks of were clearly racism in the United States that prevented black players from participating in the main stages of national sport, through rules, segregation laws, or due to discrimination from coaches and the public. Thus, the best black players of the 1920s gathered into seven different Negro Leagues.
It wasn’t until Jackie Robinson made his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947 that a black player played in the MLB.
“This is really good,” legendary Willie Mays told the San Francisco Chronicle.
– Give credit to the guys who played then, and I’m talking about a lot of good baseball players. They were never allowed to be part of the league, says Mays, who played in the Birmingham Black Barons before joining the MLB and the then New York Giants in 1951. He later became MVP twice and in 1999 was selected “The Law of the Century”.
Statistics need to be corrected
Players and statistics from other baseball leagues that existed during the sport’s early years, before MLB or in parallel with the league, became part of the MLB family as early as 1968, but then there was no room for the Negro Leagues.
– Then there were no big protests. It was like in Ralph Ellison’s novel “The Invisible Man”, it wasn’t even a problem that no one saw. No one protested because no one even raised the issue, says John Thorn, who is MLB’s chief statistician.
But when the leagues now celebrate 100 years, they are welcome. In August, every team in the league played with a special emblem to pay tribute to the leagues, and now the players are officially part of MLB history.
– More than 3,400 players, few of whom are still alive, and their families, can now say they have been MLB players. No difference, they were all in the big leagues, says Thorn, who will now make sure all the stats are correct. According to mlb.com, this could mean, among other things, the legendary Babe Ruth being left off the list of the best shooting percentages of all time.
Martin Yngve / TT
The legendary Willie Mays, here in the Giants jersey after the club traded New York for San Francisco. Image: AP / TT
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