Building a Database of Negro League Baseball Statistics
"dalek" writes:
In sports, it's been said that winning is everything, and if you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'. But for several decades, until 1947, winning wasn't important enough in baseball to justify signing the best players regardless of race. Although there was never a formal rule prohibiting American League (AL) and National League (NL) teams from signing Black players, no general manager was willing to do so. Many of the best Black players instead participated in the Negro leagues, which were professional baseball teams comprised of players who were unwelcome in the AL and NL due to segregation. Although Negro league players have long been included in the Baseball Hall of Fame, it was only in 2020 that Major League Baseball (MLB) formally recognized that the Negro leagues were major leagues, and were of the same quality as the NL and AL. Because of this, MLB decided that the statistical records from the Negro leagues should be merged into their own statistical records.
The achievements of players and teams are often measured through their statistics. These include Henry Aaron hitting 755 career home runs, the 60 home runs Babe Ruth hit in the 1927 season, or Ted Williams being the last player to hit .400, with a batting average of .406 in the 1941 season. MLB's goal is to have a similarly accurate statistical record for the Negro leagues, things like how many home runs Josh Gibson hit, how many bases Cool Papa Bell stole, and Satchel Paige's earned run average during the prime of his career. Although a vast array of data is collected in modern professional baseball, statistics for a few games are missing as recently as the early 1970s. Incorporating Negro league statistics into the MLB historical record has been particularly challenging because the accounts of many of their games have been lost. The process of reconstructing the statistical records of Negro league teams has been somewhat like the search for lost Doctor Who episodes.
AL and NL teams of the era played 154 game seasons, but Negro league seasons were much shorter, instead spending the rest of their time barnstorming. The practice of barnstorming originated because racism and Jim Crow laws forced Black baseball teams to play any willing opponent, and continued even after the more formalized structure of the Negro leagues in 1920. Unfortunately, records of barnstorming games are particularly difficult to find. Many newspapers only reported on home games, so records are incomplete. To the best extent possible, these games are reconstructed, often from reporting in newspapers with a primarily Black readership. In some cases, a box score might be available, providing somewhat detailed statistics from a game. In many other cases there is little more than a sentence or two in an old newspaper describing the outcome of a game, and many editions of these newspapers have not been preserved well. Sometimes descriptions of games and box scores can be found by searching online, but in many cases they can only be obtained from microfilm or actual old newspapers.
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