In a landmark decision decades in the making, Major League Baseball announced Tuesday that it will enter the statistics of the Negro Leagues that operated in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s into its record books.
“This initiative is aimed at ensuring that future generations of fans have access to the statistics and milestones of all those who made the Negro Leagues possible,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement to the Associated Press.
Black players were excluded from the MLB until Jackie Robinson broke the league’s color barrier in 1947 when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. That breakthrough ultimately led to the Negro Leagues ending play in 1960.
“Their achievements on the field will be a gateway to broader knowledge about this triumph in American history and the path that led to Jackie Robinson’s Dodger debut in 1947,” Manfred said in his statement.
In 2020, in the wake of America’s reckoning with racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd, MLB announced that it “elevated” seven Negro Leagues that operated between 1920 and 1948 to “major league” status, a move that at the time meant that approximately 3,400 players in those Negro Leagues could be recognized by the MLB for their on-field achievements. However, Wednesday’s announcement goes one step further.
The immediate impact of its creation will see Josh Gibson, one of baseball’s greatest players, take over several records held by the likes of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, according to CBS Sports.
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Gibson becomes the all-time leader in career batting average at .372, surpassing Cobb’s mark of .366, according to CBS Sports. His career .718 slugging percentage will now also be an all-time high, surpassing Ruth’s previous record of .690, and he will be the leader in career OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) with 1.177, surpassing Ruth’s score of .690. 1,164.
“When you hear Josh Gibson’s name now, it’s not just that he was the best player in the Negro Leagues, but one of the greatest of all time,” Sean Gibson, Gibson’s great-grandson, said in a statement on Tuesday USAToday. “These aren’t just Negro League statistics. They are major league baseball statistics.”
In 2020, MLB acknowledged that it wanted to rectify a 1969 decision by the Special Committee on Baseball Records — a group created to determine which leagues would be recognized as “major leagues.” That 1969 commission recognized six such “major leagues” dating back to 1876, but left out all the Negro Leagues.
“MLB believes that the commission’s 1969 disregard for the Negro League was clearly an error that calls for today’s designation,” the league said in 2020.
Late Henk Aaron played in the Negro Leagues before moving to the MLB and eventually breaking Ruth’s home run record. In the 2023 documentary “The League,” he described the challenges Negro League players faced.
“We got one dollar a day in meal money, and we bought one loaf of bread and we bought a big jar of peanut butter,” Aaron said. “We lived on that for three or four days.”
— Zoe Christen Jones and Jericka Duncan contributed to this report.
