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Statistics from the Negro Leagues are officially being incorporated into Major League Baseball's record books on Wednesday (May 29), per NBC News.
The move means roughly 2,300 Negro League players can have their stats recognized by MLB's official database. It will especially affect players like Josh Gibson, who was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972 but never had his name etched in MLB records.
Gibson's career batting average, slugging percentage, and OPS stats from the Negro League beat out records set by MLB legends Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth.
Wednesday's move comes three years after commissioner Robert Manfred announced that “Major League Baseball is correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history by officially elevating the Negro Leagues to ‘Major League’ status.”
The Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee was created to integrate statistics from the Negro Leagues into the MLB database. Researchers reviewed decades of newspaper clippings, microfilm, and anecdotal accounts to retrieve box scores and other data to include in the historical record.
MLB historian John Thorn, chair of the committee, said the decision to incorporate Negro League stats in the MLB was “not only righting a social, cultural and historical wrong, it’s defining baseball as a game for Americans without exclusion.”
“Baseball is a game of consistency, and it’s also a game of change. We may be slow to change, but when we do, it can be profound,” Thorn said.
Thorn noted that the updated MLB database will include “no asterisks, no footnotes” for stats from the Negro Leagues.
“The numbers will be no different for Willie Mays of the 1948 Birmingham Barons than that of Willie Mays of the [New York] Giants in 1951.”
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