Quote:
Originally Posted by Leon
It doesn't seem like the stats from the Negro Leagues are completely accurate. Not a fan of doing this.
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+1. For me, the issue isn't accuracy, it's just that the situations under which the respective records were made are so very different that makes them apples and oranges. While recognizing that there would have surely been many MLB records set by black, latin, and Japanese players had they been allowed to play alongside the white players, trying to extrapolate specific numbers to compare them seems like a fool's errand to me. An analogy can be made to 19th century numbers: nobody accepts Radbourne's 60 wins as the record, the game was too different then. There is no doubt in my mind, though, that eventually all records and stats prior to 2000, say, will come to be viewed with suspicion and some disregard due to the fact that it wasn't a level playing field before then. And at some point, 2100, perhaps, everything before then might be taken with a grain of salt because women and transgender persons weren't taken seriously as potential major league players--who knows? Why can't we just accept the true history, including the numbers, made by these various groups within their own glorious incarnations without trying to shoehorn them in with each other in disregard of the fact they never got to compete against each other in an environment that would allow for truly rigorous comparisons. That doesn't make a lot of sense, statistical or otherwise, to me, as well as unnecessary.