Last Wednesday, Major League Baseball (MLB) announced that seven Negro Baseball Leagues which functioned between 1920 and 1948 will be officially accorded with Major League status and the records of those seasons incorporated into the statistical data of MLB.
The declaration, in the centenary year of the Negro Leagues, comes at a critical time in the history of the United States of America. The country finds itself in a divisive crosscurrent in terms of racial matters, at the bitter end of President Donald Trump’s term in office, following the largest turnout of voters in a presidential election in over a century, and the evolution of the Black Lives Matter movement. In the present circumstances, it is unlikely that a pronouncement of this nature will draw wholehearted support, but instead it would be greeted with skeptical review from both sides of the fence.
The source of the problem has its origins in 1876 when Organized Baseball – as it was known before it was called MLB – commenced and was reserved for Caucasians under the Segregation Laws of the day. As such, African Americans were excluded from participating. This set of circumstances led to the formation of the Negro Leagues which operated from 1920 until 1960.
In 1969, MLB Special Baseball Records Committee was commissioned to codify the historical standards that define the major leagues. The five-member, all-white male committee, which comprised representatives from the Baseball Commissioner’s Office, the National League, the American League (the latter two being the current major leagues), the Baseball Hall of Fame, and the Baseball Writers’ Association, granted status to four defunct organisations: the American Association (1882-91), the Union Association (1884), the Players League (1890) and the Federal League (1914-15). The Negro Leagues were excluded from the discussions, even though it was quite glaring that some of the selected leagues were only in existence for short periods of time.
“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,” MLB’s release stated. It added, “MLB is correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history by officially elevating the Negro Leagues to ‘Major League’ status.”
There was no standard of record keeping in the Negro Leagues and the statistics to be merged with the current MLB data is the result of years of study by researchers of the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database who scoured newspaper clippings, old scorebooks and other historical sources. Other contributors to the compilation included the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, in Kansas City, Missouri. These researchers will now work with MLB’s official statistician, the Elias Sports Bureau on the painstaking project of combining the statistics of 3,400 Negro players to the MLB database.
Is MLB hoping that by “elevating the Negro Leagues to Major League status” and merging the stats it will atone for the exclusionary practices it upheld for years, which resulted in several worthy players being denied participation in the Major Leagues? Is it hoping that by blending the stats into one entity, over the course of time MLB’s role of ‘Jim Crowing’ the players of colour their right to play will be forgotten?
If MLB is sincere about its role in the acknowledgement of the Negro Leagues, this is just the first of several steps it will have to take. As Mike Freeman, writing in the USA Today newspaper advocates, “Baseball [MLB] needs to retroactively pay the newly recognized Negro League players and their surviving families. Pay them reparations.” Freeman illustrates the width of the disparity in payment by revealing that winners of the 1924 MLB World Series received nineteen times more in compensation that their counterparts from the 1924 Colored World Series. Of the approximately 130 surviving members of the Negro Leagues, there are only four players still alive who played in the 1920 to 1948 window, the period recognized by MLB as qualifying for Major League status. Freeman proposes the four, Bill Greason, Clyde Golden, Ron Teasley and Willie Mays, be “the faces of a compensation plan, like plaintiffs in a lawsuit, and account for what was a wide disparity in pay between black and white players during those 28 years.”
As a second step, MLB must make significant input, not only financial, but also to the promotion, development and preservation of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. This institution, a privately-funded, not-for-profit organization founded in 1990, which has grown from a one-room entity into a 10,000 square foot cultural complex, must be maintained to provide future generations with a practical reminder of the way baseball was divided during the earlier half of the twentieth century.
Seventy-three years have passed since Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s colour barrier in 1947, thus paving the way for other Black players to play in the major leagues, which in turn led to the dissolution of the Negro Leagues. Now MLB purports that it is “correcting an oversight” by re-writing the MLB record books. Or is it just swallowing up the records of the Negro Leagues?
This was not an oversight. MLB was part and parcel of the system that denied Black players an opportunity to play at the highest level, a fact that it can no longer deny. MLB needs to acknowledge its culpability and issue a proper apology to the Negro League players.
