Rant #3,361: A New World Record

Something monumental happened in the world of sports yesterday.

Major League Baseball believes it is righting a wrong that has festered for the past century, and it is now integrating Negro Leagues statistics into its overall statistics.

Up until the Brooklyn Dodgers and Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues in 1947, black ballplayers and white ballplayers could not play on the same field at the same time.

For a couple of decades, black ballplayers could play in the Negro Leagues, a somewhat loose conglomeration of leagues and teams that served as the only outlet that black ballplayers could play professionally in.

As heinous as this situation was, the major leagues and the Negro Leagues co-existed, but once Robinson broke the color barrier, it was just a matter of time before the Negro Leagues were no more.

Anyway, some great players came out of the Negro Leagues, including Cool Papa Bell, Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson.

And like the major leagues, the Negro Leagues had its own set of statistics, and that is the gist of this Rant today.

Major League Baseball has decided to incorporate the Negro League statistics into its own statistics, and this has turned the overall statistical landscape on its ear.

For instance, for a century, Ty Cobb has been the undisputed batting leader in the major leagues, with a lifetime .367 batting average.

Now that the Negro League statistics are being incorporated into the overall statistical landscape, Josh Gibson has supplanted Cobb as the all-time batting leader, at .372.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg ...

Other long-standing records will be smashed to bits, and the whole situation has become a slippery slope based on the numbers.

Look, nobody is saying that the Negro Leagues weren't real major leagues, and its players were not as talented as those players playing in the major leagues.

To have been barred from playing in the major leagues simply because of one's skin color is disgraceful, and no one is arguing that that horrid situation was the right way to go.

My consternation with this is that statistical information from the Negro Leagues is spotty at best, as statistics were not well kept or well recorded.

Let's go back to Gibson.

He reportedly hit more than 800 home runs during his Negro League career, but Major League Baseball only tecognizes 166 of them.

What constitutes a "recognized" home run versus an "unrecognized" one, and how could more than 600 homers not be recognized?

That, in itself, seems to make all Negro League records somewhat questionable.

Major League Baseball has evidently done its homework, weeding through what statistics are available and made records official for 2,300 players who played in that league during its more than 30 years of existence.

My problem with this is that it legitimizes some very spotty records, and makes them equal to records that are basically set into granite.

Negro League teams often barnstormed across the country, and often played highly questionable games against highly questionable teams.

Since the record keeping was so spotty, it is very difficult to tell whether the records of these players are fully accurate.

But again, Major League Baseball said its years of research have weeded out the truth from the falsehoods, and that the statistics they have now are fully legitimate.

And then, we have the case of Ty Cobb, once arguably baseball's best hitter.

Cobb was supposedly a racist of the highest magnitude, and now, his batting average was eclipsed ... by a black man.

Was this inclusion done to simply negate the career of baseball's top hitter? Does baseball want a racist to hold such a record?

Was Cobb's racism endemic of the period he lived in, however heinous his beliefs were?

I saw a report on this situation, where a white man basically stated that since Cobb was known as a racist, he finally got is comeuppance with the inclusion of Gibson's records.

Is that what baseball wants, or do they simply want to right a wrong ... sounds like a bit of "cancel culture" to me.

Look, all baseball statistics before 1947 and Jackie Robinson's breaking the color barrier were skewered, because white players could not play against black players and black players could not play against white players.

So Babe Ruth could not hit against the greatest black pitchers like Satchel Paige in a legitimate contest; nor could Josh Gibson hit against the greatest white pitchers, including Christy Matthewson, in a legitimate contest.

That is the way it was, and however wrong that was, the slope is even more slippery now that the Negro League statistics have been fully incorporated into the overall statistical mosaic.

Would Gibson have hit .372 against the best white players and teams? 

Would Cobb have hit .367 against the best black players and teams?

We will never know, but Major League Baseball thinks it is important to make what Gibson did equal, and on the level, of what Cobb did.

Of the four major sports in this country, Major League Baseball has seen the most drastic fall of black athletes partipating at this level than the other sports, which have experienced increases in black participation.

Although many of these statistics are also somewhat questionable, I have read that from the 1970s through the 1990s, blacks made up about 40 percent of all major league players, but that percentage has fallen at least 10 percent, to 30 percent, in the years afterward.

Some baseball historians claim thst these numbers are also skewered, because black Hispanic players had been considered to be "black" at one time.

Was Roberto Clemente "black?"

Now, with the inclusion of Negro League statistics into the mix, is baseball acknowledging the decline of black athletes in its rolls, and trying to get that part of the population intetested in baseball again?

And will any blowback about these records' inclusion be called "racist?"

You be the judge whether this is the correct approach, or whether there is something else going on here.

Personally, I simply don't know.