The Future of Negro League Players in the Hall

[darwinbulldog]

Originally Posted by ElCabron

Apply that math to the NBA and let me know how the results look.

-Ryan

By my calculation, 68% of the top 50 players in NBA history have been black men, compared to about 12% of the U.S. population (demographic average across the history of the NBA), so the average American black man is about 5.6 times as likely to be an elite basketball player as his white counterpart. Presumably you were aware of the outcome, though perhaps not its precise magnitude, a priori. In any case, it's a good point, even if you intended it rhetorically, and perhaps a baseball Hall of Fame in which the average black man in the pre-integration era is 5.6 times as likely as the average white man to be included in the Hall could serve as a good upper bound. And the NHL on the other hand (at 0%) could serve as the strictest lower bound. The correct number, then, if we were to theoretically construct a Hall without any racial bias in the selection process should fall somewhere between those two extremes.

Probably the NFL gives a better comparison than either the NBA or NHL, and in that case, I calculate that 52% of elite players are black, which would suggest that indeed the numbers of white and black Hall of Fame players from pre-integration era baseball should be basically equal.

Someone should check my numbers here, but what I come up with if you throw out the people who were inducted as umpires/executives is that there are 129 white men in the Hall who played exclusively or primarily in the pre-integration era. This is compared to 31 men from the Negro Leagues, so while the black men make up a disproportionately high percentage of the Hall members relative to their demographic numbers, they are well below the NFL proportion.

A better number to look at than the NFL though is from baseball itself. Just look at who made it to the Hall from the 1950s and 1960s. There you find 13 black men and 28 white men. And that, I would suggest, is a better guideline for what the pre-integration ratio should look like if we could judge the players fairly on their merits.

So if we set aside the fact that there are both some bad inclusions and bad omissions among the pre-integration white players and just accept that the 129 number is about right, then there should be 60 Negro League players -- and we should induct 29 more than we have already.

But, if you want to compare the different techniques I walked through above, here's what would be most appropriate based on each ratio:

NBA indicates: We should add 133 Negro Leaguers.
NHL indicates: We should remove 31 Negro Leaguers.
NFL indicates: We should add 98 Negro Leaguers.
MLB indicates: We should add 29 Negro Leaguers.