Baseball | The record book rewritten in a day

Who holds the major league record for best batting average in a season?

Hugh Duffy.

In career?

Ty Cobb.

The best power average?

Babe Ruth.

That was true – until Wednesday. Now, all three records belong to one player, a little-known catcher from the 1930s whose name you’ve probably never heard, Josh Gibson. How is it possible ?

This is because the major leagues have just merged their statistics with those of the Negro Leagues, a constellation of professional circuits in which the best racialized players played from 1920 to 1948. This was notably the case of Josh Gibson, an exceptional athlete excluded major leagues because of the color of his skin.

This recognition is fully justified. It was not the blacks who refused to play on the big circuit. It was the owners of the major league teams who were conspiring to block their path, out of pure racism. Because in terms of abilities, blacks had nothing to envy of whites. On the contrary.

Since Jackie Robinson broke the barrier of segregation in 1947, players trained in the Negro Leagues have enjoyed remarkable success. In his third season, Robinson won the Most Valuable Player award for his team. Soon after, Roy Campanella won it three times. From 1949 to 1953, all the rookies of the year in the National came from the Negro Leagues. Same thing for the best center fielder in history, Willie Mays. And if Josh Gibson could have faced the pitchers of the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals at the peak of his career, have no doubt: he would have dominated them.

Even so, the merging of statistics will be controversial.

But maybe not for the reasons you think.

* * *

This is not the first time that the major leagues have integrated a posteriori statistics from other circuits. In 1969, they recognized the “major” status of several short-lived circuits, such as the Federal League, in which Farnham glory, pitcher George LeClair, played.

Now the Negro Leagues are big. Much bigger than the Federal, or the obscure Players’ League of 1890. We are talking here about 2,300 baseballers, over three decades. Enough to dust off a record book. This is precisely where it gets complicated.

From the Negro Leagues, we know the pitchers. The batters. The teams. The stages. Historians have collected tons of testimonies from former players, coaches and fans. The leagues even have their own museum in Kansas City. Their statistics, on the other hand, are a little messy.

You have to understand the context of the time. Until 1942, matches were neither televised nor radio broadcast. Of course, the internet didn’t exist. To find out what was happening on the ground, you had to read the newspapers. However, the daily newspapers run by whites covered little – if at all – the activities of the black leagues. Impossible to compile statistics by hand by reading these logs.

Fortunately, media from the black community, such as Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, have better documented the activities of these leagues. It is in their pages that historians have been able to find hundreds of box scores, these statistical summaries which once filled the columns of the sports sections. Except that despite all the efforts of researchers, the portrait remains incomplete. We are still looking for the summaries of 25% of the games.

Among the summaries traced, it was necessary to separate the official games from the exhibition matches. Trust me, it’s easier said than done. For a personal project, I compiled the summaries of the Quebec leagues, from 1900 to 1920. Yes, my lover is still with me. At the end of each season, my calculations differed from the final statistics published in The Press. This is because clubs often added the data from league matches to those from the challenges they played against other teams in the provinces. In the Negro Leagues, these friendly games were numerous. They represented an important source of income.

For the record books, the major leagues only took into account statistics from official games for which quality data exists. In these games, Josh Gibson has a batting average of .373. That’s higher than Ty Cobb’s .366 mark. Afterwards, is this his exact average over his entire career? We ignore it. Likewise, it’s unclear how many home runs he hit. Reading the articles from the time, we can conclude that he achieved around 800. That’s what is written on his plaque in the Hall of Fame. Except that of the number, only 166 appear in the summaries. This is the figure that the major leagues have retained.

Is the method perfect?

No.

Unfinished?

Absolutely.

But I prefer fragmentary results to the lack of recognition which has prevailed for too long.