Despite being 93 years old and not having played in a Major League game since 1973, Willie Mays got 10 hits on Tuesday. How, you ask? Because Mays got 10 hits for the Birmingham Black Barons in 1948, and those have been added to his career total, giving him 3,293.
Those 10 extra hits are the result of MLB's 2020 decision that the Negro Leagues would be recognized as "Major" Leagues and those stats would be added to the Major League record books. In total, seven different leagues that played between 1920-48 were given that distinction. Now, after nearly four years of research, those Negro League statistics have been incorporated and the Major League record books look a whole lot different.
Perhaps the most significant change is at the top of the all-time batting average list. Ty Cobb's legendary .367 career average has been the standard for a century. It no longer is. Josh Gibson's .372 mark is now the record (and likely will remain so). The Top 10 now includes five Negro Leaguers, in fact, as Hall of Famers Oscar Charleston (3rd), Jud Wilson (5th), Turkey Stearns (6th) and Buck Leonard (8th) have also been added. (Shoeless Joe Jackson's name it notably absent despite his .356 career average, which would place him fifth on the updated list. Not sure if it's because of his lifetime ban or not because Pete Rose is still listed.)
Gibson has actually jumped to the top of the all-time list in several different categories. His .718 slugging percentage and 1.177 OPS are also the new career standards. Gibson's .459 on base percentage, meanwhile, is now the third-best all-time. Known as the "Black Babe Ruth," Gibson is estimated to have hit 800 home runs. However, not all of those were in official games that can be verified, so his career total (which is subject to change) is officially 174.
That's actually why it took so long (nearly four years) for the Negro League stats to be added in. They very meticulously went through box scores, tracked down incomplete information, double-checked repeat names and nicknames, and so much more in order to get as accurate a picture as possible of the Negro Leagues from 1920-48. It's estimated that what they have is about 75 percent complete, so it's possible, if not likely, that there will be further adjustments as more box scores are found, verified and added to the totals.
Incomplete information was the biggest challenge that came with such a massive undertaking. Another is the inconsistency in the length of Negro League seasons. There wasn't a standard like the 162-game (or, in those days 154-game) MLB schedule. Teams played seasons of varying lengths, and many paid their bills by playing barnstorming exhibition games (which don't count for their career totals). In general, Negro League seasons seemed to average around 60 games, though, so that's the standard they went with in calculating single-season qualifiers. And, MLB played a 60-game schedule in 2020 because of COVID, so there's already a precedent for using that number.
They also wisely applied the same minimums to Negro League seasons as they do in the Majors. Players must have 3.1 plate appearances or one inning pitched per team game in order to qualify. In MLB, those are "hard" standards of 502 plate appearances and 162 innings. For the Negro Leagues, that's a minimum of 186 plate appearances and 60 innings, but those aren't "hard" numbers since they depend on the number of official games a team played, which were different from team to team and even from season to season.
However, as a result of playing so many fewer games, the Negro League players are nowhere near the top in any of the all-time counting totals. Also because of the shorter seasons, the benchmarks for career totals had to be adjusted. For MLB players, it's 5,000 at-bats and 1,620 innings, which is roughly 10 years of meeting the 162-game minimums. For Negro League players, they based it on 10 years of a 60-game schedule--1,800 at-bats and 600 innings.
For the same reason, Negro League players aren't near the top on the single-season list in stats like home runs, RBIs and hits. Much like the career batting average list, though, the single-season batting average list has dramatically changed. The new Major League record is Gibson's absurd .466 in 1943. Rogers Hornsby's equally ridiculous .424 average in 1924, which was the highest in the 20th Century until Tuesday, is now 10th!
On the pitching side, Satchel Paige is the most famous name to have played in the Negro Leagues. He had a 1.01 ERA for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1944. That now qualifies as the third-best for a single season in history. Paige's career totals, meanwhile, no longer include just his time with the Indians and Browns. His career record is now 125-82, and his career ERA of 2.74 is among the Top 50 all-time.
When MLB announced that the Negro Leagues would be recognized as "Major" leagues and those totals would be integrated into the record books, the decision was met with universal acclaim. It was both a long time coming and long overdue. It's an acknowledgement that the baseball played in the Negro Leagues was on par, if not better than, the baseball played in the American and National Leagues at that time. Now that the record books have been combined into one, we have further proof of that.
It also righted a historical wrong. That's probably the biggest reason why this initiative was so important. It's not the Negro Leagues players' fault that they weren't allowed to play in the American or National League. They certainly had the talent for it, as the newly-updated Major League record book indicates.
Whether it was intentional or not, it's fitting that the first wave of this project was completed only a few weeks before the Cardinals face the Giants in MLB's tribute to the Negro Leagues. The game will be played on June 20 (one day after Juneteenth) at Rickwood Field, which opened in 1910 and is the oldest professional ballpark. More significantly, it was the home of the Birmingham Black Barons, where a teenage Willie Mays began his professional career and got those first 10 hits.
Of the more than 2,300 Negro League players who've been added to MLB's database, Mays is one of just three who's still alive (along with Bill Greason and Ron Teasley). The game at Rickwood Field won't just celebrate the living legend, though. It will celebrate all of those 2,300 Negro League players. Scratch that. All of those 2,300 Major League players.
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