The past can’t be changed, right? Wrong. Major League Baseball made significant changes to the official history of baseball’s “major leagues” Wednesday, adding stats from seven Negro Leagues between 1920 and 1948 to the collection of “major leagues” previously defined by an all-white committee in 1969. (Those included the current National League and American League, but also the American Association (1882-1891), the Union Association (1884), the Players League (1890) and the Federal League (1914-15)). But that stat addition isn’t finished yet.
The long-anticipated inclusion of the Negro Leagues stats has already sparked a lot of comment, much of it positive. Many players and managers have chimed in on how this (and particularly, changes to leaderboards, such as those involving Josh Gibson) has motivated them to learn more about the Negro Leagues’ history, and media figures like Nick Wright have weighed in as well. And this even got “statistics” as a Merriam-Webster word of the week:
These are your words of the week
felony
Mickey Mouse
recuse
statistics
esprit de l’escalierhttps://t.co/HmQ3tG7Chi— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) May 31, 2024
But there’s still a lot to come with these stats. The ones included so far only cover about 75 percent of the games from these leagues, and went through an extensive audit process from MLB (which is why they slightly differ from the Seamheads ones licensed to Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus; those databases are expected to align more closely after the next yearly Seamheads update). And further games are expected to be added over time as more information is found.
Finding that information is a whole process. Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel illustrated that in a 2020 profile of Larry Lester, the chairman of the Society For American Baseball Research (SABR)’s Negro League Committee and the co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and a key figure in this effort. There, Lester explained the extensive digging he and others have done through Black newspaper archives and other sources. And that’s a key part of how we have these game stats. But, as the Elias Sports Bureau’s John Labombarda (also involved in this process) told Jayson Stark of The Athletic, game-by-game stats are not yet incorporated into the official MLB database, and won’t be for a while:
“Version 1.0 of this project was: Let’s get the single-season and career numbers in first,” said Labombarda, a member of the Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee that evaluated these numbers for MLB. “So that’s what we did for now, for today. But we don’t have any game-by-game box scores loaded yet. So we can’t do no-hitters, three-homer games, 15-strikeout games, etc.”
That, he said, is coming in Version 2.0, or possibly 3.0. But work on those versions hasn’t even begun, he said. Once it does, though, whew. It will be quite the hefty research project, kind of like baseball’s version of uncovering the Dead Sea Scrolls.
…“This was a very challenging project,” Labombarda said, “one that isn’t even close to being done.”
…How could the league add all of the career and season records to the hallowed official numbers of baseball despite the slight technicality that it literally can’t total up the numbers of all the games that produced those records?
Well, it wasn’t easy to sign off on that, Labombarda said. But in the end, the committee made a fundamental decision that made that possible:
“Really,” he said, “we’re just trying to concentrate on the information we have more than the information that we don’t have.”
That’s an understandable approach, especially as it took almost three and a half years from the time of the “major league” designation announcement in December 2020 to the actual integration of the stats in question this week. But, as Stark notes, it does mean there’s still uncertainty on some individual accomplishments, such as Satchel Paige’s no-hitters. And there are still differences to resolve there, such as if non-league games involving teams that were usually in one of these leagues should be counted or not (two of Paige’s most famous games, including a 17-strikeout no-hitter against the Homestead Grays in 1934, fall into that divide).
Thus, the Negro Leagues stat incorporation is far from a done or solved project. The data here is going to get further additions and refinements over time. But that doesn’t invalidate it, and it also doesn’t mean that it can’t be considered due to radically-different contexts. As Fangraphs’ Jay Jaffe noted, the difficult conditions for the Negro Leagues (including varying-length schedules and oft-changing league memberships) came as a result of the color barrier imposed by MLB. And MLB has had its own weirdness over the years, as the committee on this statistical incorporation cited in their report:
Negro Leagues statistics have not been thrown into an MLB “melting pot,” from which the identity of an individual, or team, or league may not be viewed distinctly. It is useful and necessary to comprehend these newly added records in the context of rival leagues struggling to survive and, because of their players’ skin color, being unwelcome in MLB. Resort to an underlying story is the best way to comprehend Negro Leagues statistics, but that has also been true for many seasons in what we previously understood as MLB. Consider the explanations necessary for understanding records in, for example, the statistically anomalous seasons of 2020, 1968, 1945, 1930, 1906, 1894, or 1877.
But all of this does mean that there will be more changes to these stats over the coming years. And while there’s a lot more work to do, there’s also a lot of excitement for it. The eventually-hoped-for incorporation of game-by-game data will take a lot of work, but it will make a massive difference, including in the stats that get looked up and referenced on MLB broadcasts and in game notes. And it will mean a lot for milestones like no-hitters as well.
