Rebuilding Rob

Major League Baseball, the professional sports league with a penchant for shooting itself in the proverbial foot, got something right Tuesday. Tuesday, the league announced that they will officially incorporate statistics from Negro League baseball into MLB’s individual, season and all-time statistics. The move comes after decades of painstaking research. Records of official games were often hard to piece together. It was decided that partially-complete records and results of barnstorming games would not be included. For instance, there is a story about a Josh Gibson hitting 4 home runs in a single game. Those number will NOT count as the MLB historians were not able to find a complete box score for said game.

Perhaps the most notable changes to the “all time record books” is that Josh Gibson now becomes MLB’s career leader in batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage.

Within MINUTES of this announcement hitting social media, all the racists-in-denial came out. I’ve been hearing things like:

the Negro League had inferior talent

While it’s true that some Negro League players may not have made any MLB teams, the reverse is true as well. A lot of players in the white MLB would have lost their jobs to Negro League stars, had the MLB integrated sooner. And wasn’t that REALLY the biggest fear the white players had?

Well, we may as well add stats from the KBO (Korea) NPB (Japan) and the Mexican Leagues then.

To be honest, I wouldn’t be totally opposed to this. It would mean the Sadaharu Oh would be the all-time Home Run leader and Ichiro would be the all-time base-hit leader.

But the truth is, those are different leagues in different countries. The Negro Leagues were born out of institutionalized segregation. The reason black ballplayers didn’t play alongside white players is because the were legally prohibited from doing so.

Aside from people freaking out about the fear of Ty Cobb getting “cancelled”, I’m not sure why anyone has a problem with this. In my opinion, integrating existing Negro League stats with MLB stats is LONG overdue.

Thanks for stopping by Rebuilding Rob. Be sure to like, comment and subscribe to my blog below. It’s greatly appreciated! Also, feel free to follow me on social media as well! Check out my most recent posts as well as some earlier, related posts:

• Thoughts that keep me up at night
• Requiem for a mall
• what makes a great teacher
• The O.R. Virgin
• A Day in the Life of Rob

The article “MLB Rights a Decades-Old Wrong” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.