About Declaring That the Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues

According to The New York Times (“The MLB-Negro Leagues Stat Change: What Happened, and Why?“, May 29, 2024):

Some will be shocked waking up to the news Wednesday that Hall of Famer and Negro League star Josh Gibson is now the major leagues’ all-time batting leader — 77 years after his death in 1947. Gibson has long been called one of the best hitters in baseball history, but he died three months before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier and his numbers never appeared in MLB’s official record.

Until now.

As more than 2,300 Negro Leaguers’ numbers are added to the league’s official ledger, Gibson is MLB’s new career leader in batting average (.372), slugging percentage (.718) and OPS (1.177), and holds the single-season record in each slash-line category (.466/.564/.974).

Single-season OPS

NAME	OPS (SEASON)
Josh Gibson	1.474 (1937)
Josh Gibson	1.435 (1943)
Barry Bonds	1.421 (2004)
Chino Smith	1.421 (1929)
Barry Bonds	1.381 (2002)
Babe Ruth	1.379 (1920)
Barry Bonds	1.378 (2001)
Babe Ruth	1.358 (1921)
Mule Suttles	1.349 (1926)
Babe Ruth	1.309 (1923)

[Note: OPS is a statistic that comes close to the sum of batting average and slugging percentage. I prefer the latter two, which I use below.]

“When you hear Josh Gibson’s name now, it’s not just that he was the greatest player in the Negro Leagues,’’ Gibson’s great-grandson, Sean, told USA TODAY, “but one of the greatest of all-time. These aren’t just Negro League stats. They’re major-league baseball stats.’’

This is of a piece with, though less harmful than, the beatification of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and others of their ilk. It’s yet another example of “equity” at work — make blacks equal (or more than equal) to whites and others by fiat.

I sampled the records of 25 black baseball players who went from the Negro leagues to Major League Baseball. The sample isn’t representative because it includes such greats, near-greats, long-tenured MLB players as Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Hank Thompson, Roy Campanella, Minnie Minoso, Luke Easter, Sam Jethroe, Jim Gilliam, Elston Howard, Monte Irvin, Harry Simpson, and Willie Mays. Of those players, Robinson, Doby, Campanella, Minoso, Irvin, and Mays were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

I compared the records compiled by the 25 players (as a group) in the Negro leagues with their performance in MLB. Here’s what I found:

The big leagues (the real ones) are tough, aren’t they? Let’s just say that the Negro leagues were on a par with minor-league baseball — perhaps class A in the scheme that prevailed back in the day (AAA, AA, A, B, C, and D).

Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and other real MLB record-holders can sleep soundly in their graves.