I don't know enough about the Negro Leagues to have a meaningful opinion re the statistics issue. But, from the FWIW department, below are the first few paragraphs from a piece by Kevin Blackistone that appears is the Sports Section of today's Wash. Post. If anyone cares to read this entire piece, here's the link to it:
https://wapo.st/3RaqMGu
"A chapter inside the 1991 edition of “Total Baseball” written by sports scholar Jules Tygiel, whom I interviewed a few times for his seminal research on the Negro Leagues, recounts offseason whistle-stop games in which White baseball stars played against their counterparts in the Black leagues.
The section came to mind this week after MLB’s Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee, led by official MLB historian John Thorn, concluded that the achievements of Black players during the 60-year segregated era should be included in the official statistics of what, despite that racist history, has been celebrated as America’s pastime.
“Postseason tours against big league stars offered an opportunity for black players to prove their equality on the diamond,” Tygiel wrote in 1991. “Matchups between the Babe Ruth or Dizzy Dean ‘All-Stars’ and black players became frequent. The most famous of the interracial barnstorming tours occurred in 1946, when Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller organized a major league all-star team and toured the nation accompanied by the Satchel Paige All-Stars.
“Surviving records reveal that blacks won two-thirds of all interracial games,” Tygiel pointed out.
In other words, as I argued Wednesday on “Around the Horn”: “The Negro Leagues were never less than major. They weren’t minor leagues.”