[jsfriedm]

I think counting Negro League stats as Major League stats is a bad idea for two reasons:

1)It is a superficial way of making people in the present feel better about the past. The reality is that Negro League players were not allowed to play Major League Baseball. That is the whole reason there were Negro Leagues in the first place. Going back and declaring them major leagues now is like retroactively declaring slavery illegal and then saying no one was ever actually enslaved in the United States. Yes they were. You can deal with that fact, but you can't change it.

2)The Negro League stats we have, as many have pointed out, are terribly incomplete and the truth of players' performance is irretrievable. So it doesn't help to pretend that we have the real stats for Paige, Gibson, etc. We don't, and the numbers we do have will never do them justice.