In a landmark decision spanning decades, Major League Baseball announced Tuesday that it will incorporate the statistics of black leagues that operated in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s into its record books.
“This initiative is focused on 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. Press.
Black players were banned from MLB until Jackie Robinson broke the league's color barrier in 1947 when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. This advance eventually led to the Black Leagues ending the game in 1960.
“His accomplishments on the field will be a gateway to greater learning about this triumph in American history and the path that led to Jackie Robinson's Dodger debut in 1947,” Manfred said in his communicated
In 2020, in the wake of America's reckoning with racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd, MLB announced that he was “elevating” seven Negro Leagues that operated from 1920 to 1948 to “major league” status, a move that, at the time, meant that approximately 3,400 players from those Negro Leagues could be recognized by MLB by his achievements on the field. Wednesday's announcement, however, will go one step further.
The immediate impact of the addition will put Josh Gibson, one of baseball's greatest players, on pace for multiple Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth-like records, according to CBS Sports.
Bettmann
Gibson will become the all-time leader in career batting average at .372, surpassing Cobb's mark of .366, according to CBS Sports. His career slugging percentage of .718 will also be the all-time high, surpassing Ruth's previous record of .690, and he will be the career OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) leader with 1,177, surpassing Ruth's mark of . 1,164.
“When you hear Josh Gibson's name now, it's not just that he was the greatest player in the Negro Leagues, but one of the greatest of all time,” Sean Gibson, Gibson's great-grandson, told USA Today in a announced on Tuesday. “These are not just Negro League statistics. These are major league baseball statistics.”
In 2020, MLB acknowledged that it was seeking to rectify a 1969 decision by the Special Committee on Baseball Records, a group that was formed to determine which leagues would be recognized as “major leagues.” That 1969 committee recognized six of these “major leagues” dating back to 1876, but omitted all Negro leagues from consideration.
“It is MLB's view that the committee's omission in 1969 of consideration of the Negro Leagues was clearly an error that warrants today's designation,” the league said in 2020.
the late Hank Aaron He played in the Negro Leagues before entering the MLB and eventually broke Ruth's career home run record. In the 2023 documentary “The League,” he described the challenges faced by Black League players.
“We had a dollar a day for food, we'd buy a loaf of bread and 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.
