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Look- if nobody has any opinions on this subject, perhaps the OP should just ask Leon to close the thread.
LOL - why so serious? . |
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According to the "official" stats Josh Gibson hit 113 HR. I wonder how many he really hit.
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Gibson's Hall of Fame plaque states he hit "almost 800 home runs in league and independent baseball during his 17-year career."
Other stats indicate he homered at a similar rate to the Babe. The guy had some mad hitting skills. |
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Did any Negro League players get 3,000 hits or 500 home runs?
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I wouldn't be mad if MLB stopped recognizing Cap Anson's stats.
That guy was a terrible person and a big reason segregation happened in MLB. |
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History is ugly, but if we are going to institute moral standard for Hall of Famers based on how we feel they should have lived their lives, I hate to break it to you, but some of the early Negro Leaguers would fall short as well. As society changes, we will be kicking out new guys every decade or so until eventually the only ones left are the boring ones nobody cares about anyways. |
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Grant, Gibson, Earl Wilson, Jenkins, Downing, Blue, Richard, Norris, Gooden, Stewart, and in 2005, Dontrelle Willis. In the 57 years since 1947, there were only 11 black 20 game winners. Of these 11, only 4 did it more than once (Gibson, Jenkins, Blue, Stewart.) So for all the talk about the great black hitters back in the day, the pitching, by Major League standards, was much less impressive. And that had to help the hitters. |
Don Newcombe won 20 games in 1951, 20 games in 1955, and 27 games in 1956.
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I think my point stands - the black hitters seem to have been well ahead of the pitchers. |
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There are many things that have impacted stats through the years that they all require an asterisks next to them when comparing. You can't compare steroid era, war years, dead-ball era, pre-integration, and Negro League to name a few. The stats deserve merit on their own. |
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History is what it is - why try changing it. Understand it, know the injustice occurred and try to find something positive. Why not look at people that tried to turn that injustice around. Guys like Branch Rickey or even Walter "Judge" McCredie. Erasing history by erasing Anson's stats because of his views serves no good purpose. For that matter, I'm sure there were plenty of players with bigoted views, even some that are in the HOF. It would be pretty strange to erase the stats of bigoted players because you can't erase what happened. |
Negro League to take World Series?
I wonder if the Negro League players had not been sold to MLB teams if they would have fielded a team(s) that would have won the World Series or multiple?
I think mlb remembered what happed when Jack Johnson was allowed to compete. When does the MLB allow the Japanese League to compete for the “World Series”? |
Jay Jaffe has a good article on FanGraphs about this. I haven't read this thread much so I don't know if someone else posted this.
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/wrestlin...ues-as-majors/ |
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It could be argued that there were some Major League players who lacked the talent to compete on a Negro League team. And, that Major League statics, pre-integration, were |
Makes me wonder about oriental players in the U.S., were they banned, too? Who was the first?
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I’m not expressing an opinion. This is how MLB would have handled a .450 average in 2020. From there it would be up to fans to decide whether to regard in same way as Hugh Duffy’s hard fought .440 average from 1894. We already have similar examples today with Bonds HR records and Astros 2017 WS. They are part of the MLB record book, though many fans don’t take them seriously. |
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None if we confine the stats to official league games, which is what MLB will recognize. |
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Not a strong take. Research the unwritten rules governing black pitchers in the early days of MLB integration. |
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So it hasn't happened yet. I don't think he had enough at bats to qualify for the batting title in any season, but the stats I can find vary a lot. Even the highest number isn't enough. |
Ted Williams was also Hispanic, so either way the last player to hit 400 was still a person of color.
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With fewer teams and far less scouting, the odds of a team being interested were lower. If you look at the lineups of many teams it's fairly obvious there just wasn't room on what we now call the depth chart. The teams at the bottom of the league most years had space, but where could someone break into the 1920's Yankees lineup? Or if you were say a second baseman, but the only scout that saw you was from the Red Sox between say 1938 and 1950 you were pretty much out of luck. |
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Poor Roger Maris will always have the asterick by his name. Probably should be a lot more astericks in the stats books. This will just add some more - with a whole lot of less reliable data. ��
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https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/i1QAA...pn/s-l1600.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/zMEAA...qC/s-l1600.jpg |
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Works both ways, which is why the Negro Leagues should be considered a Major League. But comparing stats and performance between leagues is problematic at best. |
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Maybe you misunderstood my post or are reading something into my post that isn't there? |
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Negro Leaguers were facing major league quality and minor league quality talent. Same with Major Leaguers. These players were not excluded from the ML because they lacked talent, it's because they were black. And as Triwak put it, just because someone says they weren't good enough to be in the Majors, doesn't make it true. There is no metric out there right now that can tell us the 11th best player on a NL team was equal to the 15th best player on a ML team. A lot of people out there have opinions, but the only way to prove it is to let them play... oops, too late for that. |
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No. That is totally at odds with history. The MLB had every opportunity to play against everybody. If you will recall, they chose to ban players of color from the league. When you say "neither COULD play against the best of both" that is a stretch considering the reason MLB didn't play against the best competition of the era was due to their choice to exclude them. |
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The NA was really just a loose confederation of individual teams that agreed (in principle) to play each other on a semi-regular basis. It was closer to an organized league to what had existed before, but I think it's reasonable to conclude that it wasn't a major "league", with the emphasis on "league". Now, one can can certainly argue this point, and there are other questionable cases as well, especially the Union Association of 1884, which I think was less of a major league than the NA was, despite MLB's decision to the contrary in 1968. Lack of organizational structure is also why MLB is not recognizing pre-1920 black baseball organizations as "major leagues", though I've already seen some argument about that. |
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I think it's great that the HOF is accepting the NL as another "Major League", just a lot of thought and effort will need to be put into the stats for any meaningful comparison. And even then it will obviously be an estimate of 'greatness'. Jeez, we can't even agree on who the best picture was in a single league within a given year, for one example. As far as anecdotal/opinions. I've read enough books were 'Joe Dirt said Milt Pappas was the toughest pitcher he ever faced, even tougher than Koufax', that individual opinions mean little. But taken in aggregate they could be meaningful. |
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That is the point. There was no shared experience when it came to excluding players of color from the major leagues. |
Here's another point of view from a prominent Black sportswriter, Howard Bryant, who penned Henry Aaron's autobiography:
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/...-black-players |
I don't have an issue with stats from the Negro League's being counted. I don't think there's much winning with the MLB's declaration of this though. Either way they are angering someone or some group of people. I did appreciate Bryant's take on the situation, and I do think he's right to a degree, this recognizes Black Ball Players but at the same time does not paint the full picture.
Baseball, to my knowledge at least, practiced De Facto segregation. There was never anything prohibiting owners signing people of color, other than the unwritten code all of them were willing to uphold, along with the opinions Kennesaw Mountain Landis who ruled the game with an iron first. More or less, it didn't have to be written, what he said usually applied. I think Baseball is trying to right a wrong. It's a wrong that is very complex, and there's really no proper way to do it. Because regardless of how it is handled someone, somewhere will detract from it. I think the MLB is trying to provide a spotlight to the Negro Leagues, to recognize it's history by including all of these players into the official MLB record books. I think baseball does need to recognize the fact that these players didn't choose not to play in the MLB, but that they simply weren't allowed. However I do think what baseball is doing is more than a lot of the other sports out there does. I do not want to overstep my bounds on this forum by talking politics but lets just say the NBA and the NFL aren't exactly the poster-children for justice with many of their practices. And again any decision of this magnitude will anger some group of people in some way. |
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One example relates to belief that Black men weren’t cerebral enough to pitch, catch, or manage. Here is Bob Kendrick on the topic— ——- “Historically, pitchers and catchers did not transition from the Negro Leagues,’’ Kendrick said. “There were great arms in the Negro Leagues, and we had great catchers from Josh Gibson to Roy Campanella, but that was considered a cerebral position. And the general consensus back then was that these men weren’t smart enough to play in the major leagues. ——— Same line of racist thinking limited Black Quarterbacks in football and managers/GMs in several sports. Additionally, Black pitchers were hesitant to throw inside vs white batters out of fear their lives or careers would be at risk if they injured a white player. |
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Too little too late
When I read the headline of this happening, I really hoped it had more to it than just stats. I know people live and die by the stats, I am certainly not one of those folks. I guess there was a naive part of me that had hoped if MLB was going to make the gesture of inclusion, there would have been an extension of some percentage of pension or benefit extended to living players, or something comparable to what players of that time period collected (or what their families would collect). At the end of the day, if you are going to recognize the league as professional, you should commit to the financial commitments of "squaring the house." If not, it feels like an empty gesture trying to make up for a shameful part of the sport's history done solely for optics.
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Adam W:
Luque was good in the majors but not great. Marsans doesn't even enter the equation. Lopez was of Spanish, thus European, ancestry. My comment was that there were no Latin American superstars pre-integration. I was quickly shot down about Ted Williams, to which I certainly conceded, despite Teddy clearly not showing the world his Latino pride. "Now, Mr. Archive, you had better choose your battles wisely lest we sue you!" :) :) :) (Thought about that one for the first time in ages yesterday and have been looking for any excuse to use it!) |
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The price tag associated with this magnanimous gesture? It amounted to annual payments of between $7,500 and $10,000 per player. That future got even brighter for the veterans of the Negro Leagues in 2004, when MLB agreed to make payments to more of these ballplayers on the grounds that baseball had not been totally integrated until 1959, when the Boston Red Sox became the last team to field a black player. The terms of the agreement weren’t exactly the same as with the 1997 group of ex Negro Leaguers. Players who never played in the major leagues were given the option of electing to choose pensions totaling $375 per month ($4,500 annually) for life or $10,000 a year for four years. |
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I think recognizing the NL is great, and preserving their history is very important. The above post nails it. My sole objection is blending the stats with long established ML stats. For instance, will we now need to re-calculate who won the batting titles for each of those impacted years? |
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Professional baseball players who are retired and white players are not entitled to the pension benefits Major League Baseball bestowed on former Negro Leagues players, a federal appeals court ruled. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that MLB did not discriminate against about 1,000 white players when it gave medical benefits and $1,000 monthly pensions to dozens of elderly black players who didn't qualify for a pension. Until 1979, all players had to be on a major league roster for at least four seasons to receive pensions. The lawsuit was brought by white players who didn't have four years tenure but alleged that not getting the same pensions as blacks was discriminatory. The appeals court disagreed, saying the pension program created for black players who put in time with the Negro Leagues was "created to remedy specific discrimination." Before 1947, blacks were not allowed into MLB. So the league changed the pension rules in 1997, saying tenure in the old Negro Leagues from 1947 and before counted toward an MLB pension if black players also had time in the majors. The 27 players who were eligible for the pensions all played part of at least four seasons after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier in 1947. |
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PE : we about to watch the super bowl, we got a black quarter back, so step back. |
I was going to bring that point up about black pitchers and double standards. If a black quarterback wasn’t accepted until 1988, what makes you think a black man throwing a baseball 90 mph at a white man’s head would have been accepted in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s?
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The NA was part of the evolution of the organization of professional baseball and the best players of the time were involved. I think the key here is "paid" and "best of their time." This is the same argument that has been made in this thread regarding the Negro Leagues. If the best players are involved, the league should be considered "major." If we can not exclude black players for being denied the right to play in white major leagues through no fault of their own, we shouldn't punish early players for being born too soon. This distinction is important regarding HOF eligibility and the "ten year rule." Pioneer players have never received fair treatment from the HOF and are pitifully underrepresented in the HOF. Why aren't more baseball enthusiasts trying to right this wrong? |
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Let’s just keep focused on the issue at hand: the Negro Leagues...
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Gonna be honest, I mentally tackled this sidebar discussion from every possible angle and I really don’t see how it could go horribly, terribly, dumpster fire wrong. So sure, have fun with that. |
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i think the same would be said the other way around, no? |
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