Negro League Stats included in official MLB records

[G1911]

Interesting brief counterargument: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/...s-not-a-racist. There have been some good book length treatments with full citations in recent years that are much fairer biographies.

I'm not sure if people just repeat the Stump lies out of habit, or if people just really need some targets for their contemporary narratives and do not care whatsoever about evidence.

Trying to shovel contemporary narrative into the past and then vilifying the past for not being the present is a stupid game to play at all, but it's extra stupid when the chosen target was actually much more aligned with the contemporary narrative than the one of their own time and place.

[Casey2296]

Originally Posted by G1911

Interesting brief counterargument: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/...s-not-a-racist. There have been some good book length treatments with full citations in recent years that are much fairer biographies.

I'm not sure if people just repeat the Stump lies out of habit, or if people just really need some targets for their contemporary narratives and do not care whatsoever about evidence.

Trying to shovel contemporary narrative into the past and then vilifying the past for not being the present is a stupid game to play at all, but it's extra stupid when the chosen target was actually much more aligned with the contemporary narrative than the one of their own time and place.

I rarely see mention of a man like Frank "Home Run" Baker who prevented the lynching of a black man accused of assaulting his sister in law in 1924.

[cgjackson222]

Originally Posted by G1911

Interesting brief counterargument: https://bleacherreport.com/articles/...s-not-a-racist. There have been some good book length treatments with full citations in recent years that are much fairer biographies.

I'm not sure if people just repeat the Stump lies out of habit, or if people just really need some targets for their contemporary narratives and do not care whatsoever about evidence.

Trying to shovel contemporary narrative into the past and then vilifying the past for not being the present is a stupid game to play at all, but it's extra stupid when the chosen target was actually much more aligned with the contemporary narrative than the one of their own time and place.

Here is a short piece by Charles Leerhsen, author of Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty that says: "But what about Cobb’s 19th-century Southern roots? How could someone born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? What I found—and again, not because I am the Babe Ruth of researchers, but because I actually did some research—is that Ty Cobb was descended from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for it. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. And his father was an educator and state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and is known to have once broken up a lynch mob.

Cobb himself was never asked about segregation until 1952, when the Texas League was integrating, and Sporting News asked him what he thought. “The Negro should be accepted wholeheartedly, and not grudgingly,” he said. “The Negro has the right to play professional baseball and whose [sic] to say he has not?” By that time he had attended many Negro league games, sometimes throwing out the first ball and often sitting in the dugout with the players. He is quoted as saying that Willie Mays was the only modern-day player he’d pay to see and that Roy Campanella was the ballplayer that reminded him most of himself.

A similar piece by MLB.com echoes the above sentiments, stating that "We have zero evidence to suggest that Cobb was a racist."

[BillyCoxDodgers3B]

It's utterly confounding that this information about Cobb took so many years to come to light. He has descendants. If the ancestors, and Cobb himself, had this type of history, it's very strange that the family wouldn't have been more vocal against what had sadly been accepted as the more awful account of the "truth".

I have not yet read the Leerhsen book. Does he give a differing account of the story of Cobb going into the stands to attack the crippled heckler who allegedly called him the N word?

[cgjackson222]

Originally Posted by BillyCoxDodgers3B

It's utterly confounding that this information about Cobb took so many years to come to light. He has descendants. If the ancestors, and Cobb himself, had this type of history, it's very strange that the family wouldn't have been more vocal against what had sadly been accepted as the more awful account of the "truth".

I have not yet read the Leerhsen book. Does he give a differing account of the story of Cobb going into the stands to attack the crippled heckler who allegedly called him the N word?

The Leerhsen link I provided states: "He was the first baseball celebrity, and he did not always handle well the responsibilities that came with that. And yes, he once went into the stands and repeatedly punched a man who had been heckling him for more than a year, and who turned out to have less than the full complement of fingers—hence the story of him attacking a handicapped fan. This is a mark against him. But was he a racist and an embarrassment to the game? Far from it."

I have not read the Leerhsen book.

[G1911]

Leehrsen's book, as I recall, spends most of the length debunking myths by going back to primary sources. The short of it is that no evidence was found to support most of the common stories told about him. He did commit some assaults and had a bad temper as a young man, for which he is criticized fairly in the book, but these incidents are all very different from what was written in the 60's and then passed on down. He does not conclude Cobb was some flawless individual, just that most of what is said about him is contradictory to the evidence.

[Topnotchsy]

I think that the issues raised by some point to distinctions between the Negro Leagues and the American and National Leagues. There is no doubt that the length of season was different.

Combining the numbers ignores many, many things and may be inconsistent with how other leagues have been handled. Yes, it ignores the length of season. It ignores the conditions that black players played under. It ignores the fact that they had to play semi-pro teams in between their official games because they needed to earn more money. It ignores the racism and discrimination that they dealt with.

What we are left with is trying to figure out what to do in a world where the black players were not allowed to play in the American and National leagues, despite a lot of evidence that they were roughly equivalent players. (Books like Outsider Baseball highlight the evidence but to briefly note a couple of sources: interracial barnstorming games, the success of the black players who integrated MLB and were enormously successful in the years immediately following integration etc.)

At this point we are left with a 'what do we do now?' And there is no right answer. Should Josh Gibson hit over 800 homeruns but the vast majority were in unofficial games. Should he be considered the all-time leader, or should he rank around 250th with 246? He played those games and hit those homeruns and in some cases, the unofficial games were against elite teams. But they were not official games. And so there is a tough decision to be made. Similarly, should we ignore Negro League rate stats (like batting average) because the season was shorter, or find a way to accomodate?
There was no simple, clean, easy decision. And any fan with a degree of nuance will know that Ty Cobb's career batting average was accomplished in far longer seasons, while Josh Gibson's 246 homeruns barely begins to tell the story.

It's not perfect. It never will be. In part because the history is not perfect. There never should have had to have been a separate Negro League. People like Effa Manley, Gus Greenlee, Cumberland Posey etc should have owned MLB teams. Josh Gibson should have been behind the plate catching Lefty Grove or Red Ruffing etc. Satchel Paige should have been pitching to Bill Dickey or Gabby Hartnett. But that was not the case. So we are left picking up the pieces and trying to make the best of it.

Baseball stats more than any other sport are considered sacred. And this is a big change. One that will take getting used to for many and one that some people will not like. I'm sure some of those people will not like it for racial reasons, others because of the inconsistencies and others for many other reasons. As a solution, it is an imperfect one. But I think that some view it as a good start in the right direction.

[BillyCoxDodgers3B]

I'm not sure how exactly the stats are calculated, but if there is any sort of leeway given as described above, then all non-NL payers obviously deserve to have their numbers similarly padded. Wow, Babe Ruth hit 1500 HRs? Amazing! Where would Babe Didrickson rank among professional baseball's all-time greats?

The only solution that works for me (and I stress, for me because it's clearly not happening) is to leave everything as it was. This is what happened in real life. How hard is that to leave alone? We can hate that it happened, making sure to teach our children that it was wrong and that some of the best to ever play were denied opportunities because of racism. It has to be left separate in order to accurately teach the history of the game/American society and to make it less confusing for future generations. By all means, keep celebrating these players. Keep putting up gravestones for those without one. Honor and respect them all, but accept that there's a historical stain that will always be there and needs to remain in place for the sake of accuracy, and due to that, the leagues are forced to stay segreated. That was life at the time. Would it sound silly to anyone else if every African American, dead or alive, was retroactively given permission to drink from Jim Crow Era water fountains and open access to all the other freedoms they were historically denied?

By all means, the NL stats need to be as accurately recalculated as possible using period data, but they should be limited to official games played. Otherwise, it's as silly and pointless as counting every Babe Ruth exhibition and barnstorming stat.