OC Register: Hoornstra: ‘Elevating’ the Negro Leagues requires more than numbers

[AngelsWin.com]

A Sunday column on the front page of the Kansas City Star ran under the headline “An apology from the Star.”

“Today we are telling the story of a powerful local business that has done wrong,” editor Mike Fannin wrote.

That business? The newspaper itself.

The apology was directed to the Black community of Kansas City. The column accompanied an examination of the paper’s shameful history of racially biased reporting dating back more than a century.

Four days earlier, Major League Baseball issued a press release to announce it would bestow “major league” status on seven Negro Leagues that competed from 1920-48. MLB did not use the statement to apologize – not for the decades of segregation that ended in 1947, or for a later decision by a records committee to exclude the Negro Leagues from its list of six major leagues.

“It is MLB’s view that the Committee’s 1969 omission of the Negro Leagues from consideration was clearly an error that demands today’s designation,” MLB’s announcement read.

There they were: Two statements, four days apart, bearing the same good intentions while striking different tones. MLB’s attempt to revise history by “elevating” seven Negro Leagues without issuing an apology offended some Black Americans. Are the Negro Leagues elevating MLB, or is MLB elevating the Negro Leagues? It’s a quintessential 2020 question.

Institutional racism is a tangled mess. If you need a non-baseball example, one is never far away. Maybe it’s in your own community, or your family’s, or in a recent headline that crossed your eyes. Admirably, many institutions this year began the task of untangling the very messes they created. That task must be carried out by people, and even the most well-intentioned among us make mistakes.

Thanks to the efforts of a small, dedicated group of researchers, Negro League statistics from 1920-48 are now more exhaustive than ever. They’re still less than 100 percent complete. To some, integrating these stats into major league canon is a task better suited for the future. For now, it’s all part of the mess.

It’s more than that, though. Statistics are a form of storytelling. Baseball’s tradition of quantifying every action on a field allows rich stories to emerge if you know where to look.

The 2020 regular season was shortened to 60 games because of a global pandemic. The inflated home run totals of the late 1990s and early 2000s remind us what happens when a performance-enhancing drug policy is not enforced. The 1943-45 seasons missing from the baseball cards of Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio and others testify to the breadth of World War II.

The dissatisfying aspects of Negro League statistics tell a story, too. For now, the home runs hit by Josh Gibson and others against non-league opponents will not count in the major league record books. If Gibson is discovered to have hit six home runs in one game while “barnstorming,” it won’t bring him any closer to Barry Bonds’ all-time record of 762.

Bob Kendrick, the President of the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City, believes it should.

“They should have included every game – against major league teams, barnstorming, local teams – against all the teams,” Kendrick said. “There’s a possibility of marginalizing players who were almost mythical.”

For example, Gibson is known to have hit at least 800 home runs in competitive games in his career, Kendrick said. Yet the greatest home run hitter of all-time might rank outside the top 100 on MLB’s all-time list once his records are integrated. Gibson also batted .441 in Negro League competition in 1943, which would represent a new single-season record.

“It’s a little bit of give and take,” Kendrick said.

Here’s the thing about “barnstorming,” the catch-all term for games against any non-league team that could draw a crowd: it served a purpose. Gary Ashwill, one of the leading Negro Leagues researchers, spelled it out in a recent interview with the Society For American Baseball Research.

“The Negro Leagues’ fan base was mostly black fans in the cities where they played,” Ashwill said. “Because of the limited amount of (fans’) disposable income (Black teams) … had to play against white teams and travel and barnstorm to make up part of their income.”

Prior to 1920, barnstorming might form the entirety of a team’s schedule. It grew in popularity again during the 1930s because non-league games were necessary for economic survival – a side effect of the Great Depression. As a result, the length of the “league” seasons shrank. That’s an important part of the story.

If modifying baseball’s official record books at all feels sacrilegious, remember Hack Wilson. He died in 1948 having driven in a record 190 runs for the 1931 Chicago Cubs.

Then in 1999, a funny thing happened: Wilson drove in another run. MLB’s official historian, Jerome Holtzman, studied box scores from the 1931 season to unearth a missing RBI in the second game of a Cubs doubleheader. Wilson’s RBI total wasn’t the only record altered by Holtzman’s research. Babe Ruth posthumously logged another six walks.

Sacred as they might seem, these numbers weren’t handed to us by institutions on stone tablets. They’re subject to human interpretation, and revision, and re-revision over time. Interpreting Negro League stats is nothing new in that regard. It’s more of the same – just a lot more, one microfilm at a time.

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MLB’s announcement might have included a simple reminder: every statistic compiled by Black major leaguers from 1920-47 should have been recorded already. All that needed to happen was one brave American or National League executive prior to Branch Rickey to desegregate the sport.

Gibson’s home run total is only incomplete because his skin color denied him a career in the actual major leagues of his day. No present-day proclamation can give that back. That’s why an apology is appropriate – and why numbers will never be enough to tell the full story.

“No stats give you the greatness of Satchel Paige, the power of Josh Gibson, the speed of Cool Papa Bell,” Kendrick said. “I don’t ever want to lose the story. I don’t want the legend and the lore to go away. That’s what makes the Negro Leagues special.”

Kendrick began his career in Kansas City at the Star. The coincidence of last week’s announcements was not lost on him. The Star, he said, “always had this reputation as not being as sensitive to the African-American community as it possibly could.” Now it offers other institutions free lessons in sensitivity: It’s better to apologize for the injustices you commit than to describe those injustices as a “backdrop.”

Negro League home run king and Pittsburgh native Josh Gibson’s statue was front and center in Legacy Square at PNC Park in time for the 2006 MLB All-Star Game. Gibson is known to have hit at least 800 home runs in competitive games in his career, yet the greatest home run hitter of all-time might rank outside the top 100 on MLB’s all-time list once his records are integrated. MLB last week announced it would bestow “major league” status on seven Negro Leagues that competed from 1920-48. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar)

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