Visiting Column #59 -- Careful, Baseball, Be Very Careful

Major League Baseball is a truly screwy institution.

So ... ice cream.  Ice cream is a really tasty treat, and most everyone likes ice cream.  And a good ribeye steak, well-grilled, gee, that's a wonderful flavor.  I like steaks, and work hard to get mine grilled perfectly when we have them.  Yum-mers.

But you don't put ice cream on a steak.  Individually they are wonderful; putting them together simply ruins the integrity of both.

Yet baseball is about to do just that; to put ice cream on top of a well-grilled ribeye, at least metaphorically.

You may have read recently about MLB's decision to recognize the Negro leagues that operated in the 1920-1948 period (i.e., until integration of the majors killed the Negro leagues) as "major leagues."  This recognition, of course, would put them on a par with not only the American and National League but also the brief outlaw Federal League of the 1910s and the major leagues pre-1900.

It is, of course, an effort on the part of MLB to be "woke" and apologize for excluding black players prior to 1947.  I get that; it wasn't exactly to baseball's credit that it was not an integrated institution all those years.  And a ceremonial recognition of those Negro leagues that filled the gap is not a terrible thing at all -- it was not unusual for their teams to outdraw the majors in the same cities in years where the AL or NL team was poor.

The problem is not with the recognition itself, but for the misguided attempt to try to integrate the statistics of those leagues with those of the majors.  And that's where we need to draw the line.

First there is the problem of the record-keeping.  MLB games since before the turn of the century have been recorded carefully, box scores recorded for posterity including in the newspapers of the day, and scoring decisions, though frequently challenged, done by official scorers -- the choice of a hit or error had universal guidelines (though not always followed as well as we'd like).

As for the Negro leagues, well, let's say that for a long time the box scores were nonexistent, and diligent efforts to recover or recreate them have been made, but the veracity is, let's say, far less than what exists for the majors.

When we say that this or that MLB player had a lifetime average of .296, we don't challenge it because the underlying data is there to support it.  Ty Cobb's hit total literally was validated by someone reading thousands of box scores, that sort of thing.  And someone did that for Bevo LeBourveau, I'm equally sure.

The difference is that those box scores were there to be plumbed; they could be validated by contemporaneous accounts, not recreated by them.

Now MLB has to deal with Negro leagues players with batting averages of, say, .385.  How do you say that a .385 from a player in the Negro leagues compares in any way to the average of a player on MLB, when the provenance of the data on which the .385 is based is far sketchier?

Perhaps you are prepared to put that player in the Hall of Fame (I am fine with that); but are you going to then try to compare his career average with Cobb's and say that his average for all time will be shown above Cobb's?

I am not, and it is not just that the data is impossible to validate as tightly.  Given the quality of some of the research into the Negro leagues, there is certainly a high percentage of validation, although it is far from perfect.

The problem is more the second issue, the level of the competition.

There are countless recorded match-ups in exhibitions between the stars of the Negro leagues playing against MLB stars -- Satchel Paige pitched on a number of occasions (successfully) against white MLB stars; Babe Ruth batted against black pitching stars as well, many of whom held their own quite well.  The black star players most assuredly could have played and starred in MLB had they been allowed.

The point I have not read anywhere is that it is not the caliber of the black stars of the era, but of the non-stars who pitched to them and hit against them.

Having read extensively on the subject, I can assure you that the detailed, well-organized roster management in MLB bears little relationship to the contract management of the Negro leagues.  Players came and went regularly, and it was not unusual to find teenage players and local pickups filling out rosters, for players to come and go or be barely identified -- the same Jim Jones who played for Team A in 1927 might have played for Team B in 1932.  Same guy?  Who knows.

Why do I mention that?  Because that is the uneven level of competition against whom the black stars compiled their career totals.  It wasn't always Satchel Paige pitching to Josh Gibson (and to be fair, not always Gibson batting against Paige).  We can readily make educated guesses about how Paige would have fared had he made it to the majors ten years earlier, based on his performances in exhibitions against white star teams.

What we can't do is to try to imagine what, say, Ted Williams would have hit had he faced the full range of Negro leagues pitchers for his career, many of whom would have never emerged from the minors had the leagues been integrated then.  We can, of course, be pretty sure that he would have hit a good bit better than the lifetime .344 average he compiled over his long career.

So how do you include the career average of players who faced substantial doses of minor-league pitching, and match them against Williams?  Ted hit .366 as a Minneapolis Miller in 1938 before coming to the majors.  Does that now count?  Wasn't the pitching in the American Association, the AA league of the Millers, on average about the same as the Negro leagues of 1938?

The answer, of course, is that we don't know.  We do know the level of pitching in the majors at that time, because the records are all there.  Any pitcher who pitched in the majors in the 20th Century, well, we know how good they were because the records are there for them, as well as those of those who hit against them.

But there really was no organized Negro minor league for player development, nothing remotely like the actual minor leagues.  As such, there were plenty of black prospects who were immediately in the "majors", doing their development there, and providing fodder for the stars among their opponents.

I have no problem with the Negro leagues being called "major", even though the designation has no real meaning.  I have no problem with their most deserving stars being inducted into the Hall of Fame; they were famous and they were good.

I do, however, have a huge problem with an attempt to commingle the statistics of the Negro Leagues with the far-better-researched data from MLB.  It is unfortunate that the leagues were segregated; in fact, a lot of that era was simply unfortunate.  But just as you cannot escape history, as Abe Lincoln said, you cannot rewrite history for your own narrative.

The Negro leagues' stats simply need to be out there as a separate database, with the caveats as to its provenance and the very erratic level of competition against whom the stars played.  It seems a little "separate but equal", with their data over there, you know, by the kitchen, but much as the steroid stars belong in the Hall of Fame, the Negro leagues' data needs to be somewhere.  Just not incorporated into the MLB stats.

Otherwise, well, to treat it on a par with the MLB data is to put ice cream on that grilled ribeye.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton