How sad. How transparent. How self-destructive.
Major League Baseball announced yesterday that it is now incorporating statistics of the Negro Leagues and the records of more than 2,300 black players who played during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s into its own record books. This, of course, makes no sense at all: it is The Great Stupid at its dumbest. It is the epitome of DEI fiction and manipulating history. And, naturally, when everyone wakes up and realizes how brain-meltingly stupid this was, it cannot be reversed.
Because doing that would be “racist.”
Thus, lo and behold, legendary catcher Josh Gibson (above) becomes Major League Baseball’s career leader with a .372 batting average, surpassing Ty Cobb’s .367. Gibson’s .466 average for the 1943 Homestead Grays became the season standard, followed by the immortal (I’m kidding) Charlie “Chino” Smith’s .451 for the 1929 New York Lincoln Giants. These averages surpasse the .440 by hit Hugh Duffy for the National League’s Boston team in 1894.
Gibson also becomes the career leader in slugging percentage (.718) and OPS (1.177), moving ahead of Babe Ruth (.690 and 1.164). Gibson’s .974 slugging percentage in 1937 is now the MLB season record, with Barry Bonds’ .863 in 2001 dropping to fifth (that stat is also corrupted, but for a different reason). Bonds now trails legendary (kidding again) Mules Suttles’ .877 in 1926, Gibson’s .871 in 1943 and Smith’s .870 in 1929. Bonds’ prior OPS record of 1.421 in 2004 dropped to third behind Gibson’s 1.474 in 1937 and 1.435 in 1943.
MLB announced in December 2020 that it would be “correcting a longtime oversight” by adding the Negro Leagues to its statistics as if they were what they were not: true equivalents of the major league baseball. John Thorn, MLB’s official historian, is one of the ethics villains in this fiasco, chairing a 17-person committee that included Negro Leagues experts and statisticians. You see that date, don’t you? 2020? Yes, baseball decided to destroy the integrity of its statistics and history because a lifetime hood overdosing on fentanyl resisted arrest in Minneapolis and found himself under the knee of a brutal white cop. Naturally, this meant that the right thing to do was to trash the records of Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.
I still can’t believe I’m writing this. Josh Gibson never played more than 70 games in a season in his life, because the fluctuating Negro Leagues’ seasons were never more than 91 games at most. One season (in 1942) was just 26 games. Claiming it’s unfair to let Roger Maris pass Babe Ruth for the single season homer record (since shattered by Aaron Judge) when Babe played in a 154 game season and Maris had eight more games to hit one more homer in is one thing; equating Cobb’s 154 game season with a season half as long is something else, that something else being “idiotic.”
Last season, everyone was talking about how Marlins second baseman Luiz Arraez might become the first player since Ted Williams in 1941 to hit .400 because he was over that magic number half-way through the season. Five other players since Williams were hitting over .400 that far into the season or farther, and all had played more than 60 games. None of them hit .400. I wrote at the time that the odds of Arreaz not falling off as the season wore on were nil. He ended the season at .354.
The rationalization used to justify the false equivalence employed to make all the Negro League stars to look like supermen is pathetic. Those shorter official seasons, MLB noted in its release announcing the change, naturally lead to some “leaderboard extremes.” But the league verified a 60-game season during the pandemic, see, so that’s a precedent! “The irregularity of their league schedules, established in the spring but improvised by the summer, were not of their making but instead were born of MLB’s exclusionary practices,” MLB said in the release.
Oh! Well, hell, why not just declare Negro League teams World Series winners while you’re at it? After all, those teams’ not becoming world champions was “not of their making but instead were born of MLB’s exclusionary practices.” The committee deceietfully used the same statistical minimums for Negro League leaders as it does for the American and National Leagues: 3.1 plate appearances or 1 inning pitched per scheduled team game. But that standard was developed as appropriate for a 162 game season.
The rationalizations are running amuck in this mass-groveling effort. Larry Lester, a longtime Negro Leagues researcher who served on the committee (he’s black, but has no bias in this matter) told the Athletic, “Critics will say, ‘Well, (Gibson) only played against other Black teams. Well, Babe Ruth never hit a home run off a Black pitcher, and Josh Gibson never hit a home run off a white pitcher. So I guess my point is, the amount of melanin or the lack thereof does not indicate the greatness of a ballplayer.”
I guess his point also obfuscates the issue. Blacks were and are a small minority in the US, and a league made up of the best white players was still almost certainly more competitive than a league of just black players. Nobody’s saying Josh Gibson wasn’t a great player, but how great, and how he compared to contemporaries in Major League Baseball, is simply impossible to determine given the vastly different playing conditions. Never mind, says MLB. “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 provided to The Associated Press. “Their accomplishments on the field will be a gateway to broader learning about this triumph in American history and the path that led to Jackie Robinson’s 1947 Dodger debut.”
Got it. Make the statistics misleading as a mea culpa for systemic racism. Integrated the statistics even though the game wasn’t integrated. Make amens by pretending that Josh Gibson was a better hitter than Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb. Kiss the boo-boo and make it better. With any luck, future generations won’t be able to tell that there was any color line in baseball at all!
I still can’t believe I’m writing this…
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Sources: ESPN, New York Times, CBS
Ethics Alarms 
This is absolutely mind boggling/mind blowing. It makes zero sense, for reasons you already clearly pointed out.
Put the stats up aside of MLB’s, not in MLB’s.
ASSHOLES
Who’s next, Cuban Major Leagues? Japan? Gotta add them in, right? No bias’ now!
Of all the sports to go full blown bonkers, why baseball and of all things, baseball stats?
Bill James, save me.
Yeah, this one is a terrible head-scratcher until you mentioned the monument to George Floyd. Then it makes perfect, though still awful, sense.
In happier news, Angel Hernandez – the worst umpire in the history of baseball, and in the world of officiating regardless of sport – is retiring effective immediately.
But Joe West says Hernandez was really good at his job. Who ya gonna believe–another of the Top 10 worst umpires of all time, or your own eyes?
I thought exactly the same thing. West was an awful umpire himself. Hey, did Laz Diaz also say he thought Angel was terrific? It is touching that rotten umpires stick together.
I’m really surprised that at least one stadium organist – they still have those somewhere, don’t they? – didn’t start up a rousing chorus of “Three Blind Mice” when Hernandez was calling balls and strikes.
This decision is indeed beyond stupid. Comparing players from different eras is problematic enough, but this isn’t comparing apples to oranges, it’s comparing apples to trombones. Sure, recognize that there were some great players, all-time great players, in the Negro Leagues (can we still call them that?), but virtually everything about the seasons, the competition, etc., was different.
Was Josh Gibson a great hitter? Of course! Was he better than Babe Ruth (or Sadaharu Oh)? This is why someone invented bars and beers, to argue with your friends about stuff like this. I grew up an hour and a half north of New York City. I was a little too young to have witnessed Willie Mays, Duke Snider, and Mickey Mantle all playing centerfield for New York teams in the prime of their careers; the Dodgers and Giants had moved to the west coast by the time I was old enough to follow the game, and Duke was towards the end of his career. My dad wasn’t a fan of any of the three teams, but there were a lot of family friends who definitely has a favorite. Statistics, of course, meant nothing to those disputants. They’re even more irrelevant now.
If you want to honor the players of the Negro Leagues, do so by telling the truth about them. List their stats on the MLB website, but in a separate category, recognizing that comparisons between the leagues is fundamentally impossible.
But this episode also got me thinking about a different decision by a different collection of idiots regarding a different sport at a different level. If you paid attention to the hype in early February, you’d have thought that Iowa’s Caitlin Clark was about to become the all-time scoring leader in the history of women’s college basketball as she closed in on the numbers compiled by Washington’s Kelsey Plum. Thing was, that record belonged (and still does) to Pearl Moore, who scored over 4000 points between stints at Anderson Junior College and Francis Marion College. (Clark ultimately finished with 3951 points, more than Moore scored at the senior college level.)
Oh, you meant at a major university? Sure, I get it. In that case, the leader at the time was Lynette Woodard, who totaled 3649 points to Plum’s 3527. Woodard played at Kansas a little over a decade before I started grad school there. Needless to say, there were a lot of Jayhawk fans incensed about the NCAA’s snub of Woodard. You see, she played when the governing body of women’s intercollegiate sports was the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the NCAA having no interest in women’s sports.
Woodard played for a major university, played the same kind of schedule against the same level of competition, played according to the same rules (well, except that the 3-point line was introduced roughly concurrently with the NCAA’s takeover). But the NCAA seems to believe that they invented women’s college basketball, and most of the major media outlets cheerfully let them get away with it. Woodard’s name doesn’t appear, even as a footnote, on a numbers of lists of “Top 25 Women’s Division 1 scoring leaders.”
In this case, the competition didn’t change at all, but NCAA arrogance denied Woodard her deserved recognition. This isn’t Caitlin Clark’s fault, or Kelsey Plum’s, but the significant event should have been when Clark passed Woodard in late February, not Plum a couple weeks earlier. Clark has done wonders for fan interest in the game, and she seems to be a genuinely good person, something of a rarity among elite athletes. Nothing in my remarks is intended to take anything away from her accomplishments.
Oh, yeah, the racial element. Something of the reverse of MLB. Moore and Woodard are black, Clark and Plum are white. So all the headlines were about one white athlete passing another, when, depending on your perspective, at least one and possibly two black athletes had put up better numbers. Racism? Woodard thinks so, and frankly I’m disinclined to argue with her, although I return to one of my mantras: all racism is stupid, but not all stupidity is racist.
Given the opportunity, the NCAA will choose Woke and stupid every time. But if they have to choose between the two, stupid wins 10 times out of 10.
Nice piece, Curmie. Thank you.
I’ve been mystified by all the hoopla over the three-point shooter from Iowa. Women’s sports are so grossly inferior, I no longer watch them. This was brought home to me watching the women golfers play their U.S. Open at Pebble Beach. They were completely over matched … by the course. It’s my understanding women’s college teams regularly scrimmage against volunteer undergrad guys who played basketball in high school. What a joke. And don’t get me started on awfulness of women color announcers in pro sports. Okay, two words: Doris Burke. And who on earth watches the WNBA? Seriously. What kind of TV ratings and live crowds do they draw?
I would disagree. No, you cannot compare men’s and women’s sports in terms of higher, faster, stronger, it’s simply a matter of physiology and genetics than men will have the advantage there.
But I find women’s basketball to be more entertaining than the men’s version, at least at the NCAA level. It’s not nearly as dominated by single stars, although they do have them, but there is a greater emphasis on team play.
Yes, women’s college teams scrimmage against guys. I think that arose, years ago, in part because the talent pool for women’s basketball was thinner than for the men (fewer women involved in the sport). The men’s teams don’t have equally talented guys to scrimmage against or they’d be on the team, but I daresay there are more guys almost good enough that they can scrimmage against.
If you don’t like women’s sports — don’t watch them. Watch something you enjoy. That is why I don’t watch professional basketball of either sex, but do watch college. I watch MLB but typically not college baseball.
I don’t and I won’t, D.G! I don’t watch college sports, particularly football. It’s too many white people sitting in the stands yelling our black guys are better than your black guys. Na Na Na. And college basketball with the one and done is just ridiculous. It’s, rent a team for a year from the NBA. The current brand of NBA basketball as played by the four or five elite teams is fascinating. Like nothing basketball has been until now.
From the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:
https://www.post-gazette.com/sports/paul-zeise/2024/05/29/mlb-record-books-negro-leagues-rob-manfred-josh-gibson/stories/202405290110
Bingo.
Any likelihood of this being undone?
Never. How would you take away a black player’s “record” and give it back to a white player? MLB wouldn’t dare.
For example, CNN’s A-A hostess tonight said that “black stars of the past were finally taking their rightful place” in baseball’s record books. Their rightful place—in the records of a league they never played in, because they should have played.
They don’t even get asterisks? Or “NL” next to their names?