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"dalek" writes:

In sports, it's been said that winning is everything, and if you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'. But for several decades, until 1947, winning wasn't important enough in baseball to justify signing the best players regardless of race. Although there was never a formal rule prohibiting American League (AL) and National League (NL) teams from signing Black players, no general manager was willing to do so. Many of the best Black players instead participated in the Negro leagues [wikipedia.org], which were professional baseball teams comprised of players who were unwelcome in the AL and NL due to segregation. Although Negro league players have long been included in the Baseball Hall of Fame, it was only in 2020 that Major League Baseball (MLB) formally recognized that the Negro leagues were major leagues [mlb.com], and were of the same quality as the NL and AL. Because of this, MLB decided that the statistical records from the Negro leagues should be merged into their own statistical records.

The achievements of players and teams are often measured through their statistics. These include Henry Aaron hitting 755 career home runs, the 60 home runs Babe Ruth hit in the 1927 season, or Ted Williams being the last player to hit .400, with a batting average of .406 in the 1941 season. MLB's goal is to have a similarly accurate statistical record for the Negro leagues, things like how many home runs Josh Gibson [mlb.com] hit, how many bases Cool Papa Bell [mlb.com] stole, and Satchel Paige [mlb.com]'s earned run average during the prime of his career. Although a vast array of data is collected in modern professional baseball, statistics for a few games are missing as recently as the early 1970s. Incorporating Negro league statistics into the MLB historical record has been particularly challenging because the accounts of many of their games have been lost. The process of reconstructing the statistical records of Negro league teams has been somewhat like the search for lost Doctor Who episodes.

AL and NL teams of the era played 154 game seasons, but Negro league seasons were much shorter, instead spending the rest of their time barnstorming [baseballhall.org]. The practice of barnstorming originated because racism and Jim Crow laws forced Black baseball teams to play any willing opponent [nlbm.com], and continued even after the more formalized structure of the Negro leagues in 1920. Unfortunately, records of barnstorming games are particularly difficult to find. Many newspapers only reported on home games [sabr.org], so records are incomplete. To the best extent possible, these games are reconstructed, often from reporting in newspapers with a primarily Black readership [baseballhall.org]. In some cases, a box score might be available, providing somewhat detailed statistics from a game. In many other cases there is little more than a sentence or two in an old newspaper describing the outcome of a game, and many editions of these newspapers have not been preserved well. Sometimes descriptions of games and box scores [wikipedia.org] can be found by searching online, but in many cases they can only be obtained from microfilm or actual old newspapers.

An article in The Athletic [nytimes.com] tells the story a baseball historian giving a speech at a town in western Missouri, where an audience member told him that that many old newspapers had been preserved in the local bank vault. As a result, he was able to obtain a lost box score from the 1920s for the Kansas City Monarchs that he had been unable to find anywhere else. Another baseball historian told the story of trying to find a box score for a 1943 game between the Chicago American Giants and the Birmingham Black Barons, a game that was referenced in the Chicago Defender newspaper. After much searching, he found a box score of the game from a newspaper article on the local library's website in Kewanee, Illinois, where the game had actually been played. In some cases, there is conflicting reporting about what happened during a particular game, so researchers have to make educated guesses about what actually happened. The records are still incomplete, but historians have slowly been able to fill in the blanks and build more complete databases of Negro league games.

The statistics that can be recovered are entered into databases that are displayed online on sites like Seamheads [seamheads.com], Retrosheet [retrosheet.org], and Baseball Reference [baseball-reference.com]. In the case of Retrosheet, the entire database can easy be downloaded as text files with a format that is well-documented and can be parsed by software tools.

Sadly, we will probably never have complete statistics and records for Negro league teams. It doesn't correct the injustices of segregation, but because of the diligent work by baseball historians, we will at least have a much more complete record of the legacy and accomplishments of Black players who were unwelcome in the NL and AL because of their race.

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