Negro Leagues stats are officially added into the MLB records, making Josh Gibson the major league’s career leader with a .372 batting average, surpassing Ty Cobb’s .367.
More than 2,300 Negro Leagues players from 1920 to 1948 were added to the online database last week — a historical correction that’s four years in the making. It was announced in December 2020 that the MLB would be “correcting a longtime oversight.”
A 17-person committee chaired by John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian, met six times as part of the meticulous process of examining statistics from seven Negro Leagues. Nearly 75% of the available records have been included, according to MLB, and additional research could lead to more changes to the major league leaderboards.
As a result of the Negro Leagues additions, 35 players from the league are now part of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
“African Americans were not allowed to play in the major leagues,” said veteran sports journalist Fred Mitchell, referring to the time before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1948 and Black players were excluded from the major leagues.
“In the minds of many, because this league was Black, they had to be inferior to the league that they were not allowed to play in,” said Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. “It’s a hard pill to swallow.”
An updated version of MLB’s database will become public before the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants play a tribute game to the Negro Leagues on June 20 at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama.
“This is a wonderful, long overdue acknowledgement,” Mitchell said.
