New Negro Leagues Stats

The Baseball Hall of Fame announced the other day that a years-long project studying the statistical history of the Negro Leagues has been made available to the average fan on the Internet. The information will enable baseball lovers curious about African-American players who competed long before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 to learn about them.

This is pretty cool stuff in case you ever wanted to look up the year-by-year record of Cool Papa Bell, or stars like him with no record in the majors. The information is now findable at www.baseball-reference.com.

A study to fill in the blanks on Negro Leagues history and individual players (and there is nothing baseball hates worse than statistical blanks), was commissioned in 2000 by the Hall of Fame. Using a $250,000 grant, the Hall put to work a team called “The Negro LeaguesResearchers/Authors Group. The assignment was to research all African-American players who competed between 1860 and 1960.

Pouring over box scores from 345 different newspapers the first result was that every member of the committe now wears glasses. Wait, just kidding. The end product of all this reading was 800 pages worth of material that covers 3,000 day-by-day playing records, league leaders and all-time leaders in various categories. The authors group included Dr. Larry Hogan, Dick Clark and Larry Lester, all of whom have produced works related to Negro Leagues baseball.

For decades those who have followed the game have been told that there are only sketchy records of how individual players performed in Negro Leagues games. This was frustrating to authors, scholars, or to fans who wished to know more about favorite players, and about how they did when they were at their best. It’s difficult to contemplate the man-hours this project took, but the effort definitely contributes to answering questions that couldn’t be answered before. There was no mention of the material being gathered into book form beyond its availability on the Internet, but that would seem like a useful idea, too.

The numbers are there, but it is sometimes hard to comprehend what they truly mean. Looking at Satchel Paige’s pitching record it totals out as 100-50 for 18 seasons pitched between 1927 and 1947. But knowing as we do that Paige toted his fastball-flinging right arm all over the Western Hemisphere, jumping teams left and right, we still can’t see enough information to truly understand his career.

But much curiosity can be satisfied. Willie Mays, now 80, hit .262 in 61 at-bats for the Birmingham Black Barons when he was 17 in 1948. I didn’t learn until many years after I had become an acquaintance that Chico Renfroe, a prominent sports broadcaster in the Southeast in the 1970s, had played in the Negro Leagues. Now I know he batted .284 in four seasons. Hank Presswood, now 90, whom I have met many times in Chicago, batted .400 lifetime. However, I didn’t realize he had just five at-bats in one year of play.

Legend has it that tormented catcher Josh Gibson, who died young of a brain tumor, and who was called “the black Babe Ruth,” hit 800 home runs in the shadows of the majors. He is credited with just 107 in these statistics compiled from only the short-season Negro Leagues games. How many more he actually hit in Cuba, Venezuela, with touring teams, will almost surely never be known.

This new statistical data base includes 3,420 players and managers, but does not purport to be comprehensive. Players might not be included who competed in other leagues altogether, it is confessed. What these numbers offer are more than the snapshots we previously had to work with in fixing a picture of a player in our mind. But knowing as we do that many, many players, including all of the best ones, played in other countries, on barnstorming teams, and the like, we still understand that the record is incomplete.

We know more than we ever did before, but we will never know it all.

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