Major League Baseball is elevating seven Negro Leagues from 1920-1948 to official “Major League” status, “correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history.”
The official recognition will cover the Negro National League (I) (1920–1931); the Eastern Colored League (1923–1928); the American Negro League (1929); the East-West League (1932); the Negro Southern League (1932); the Negro National League (II) (1933–1948); and the Negro American League (1937–1948).
The approximately 3,400 players who played in those leagues will now be considered Major League-calibre players and their statistics and records will become part of MLB’s history.
“All of us who love baseball have long known that the Negro Leagues produced many of our game’s best players, innovations and triumphs against a backdrop of injustice,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement. “We are now grateful to count the players of the Negro Leagues where they belong: as Major Leaguers within the official historical record.”
MLB’s statement says that Wednesday’s announcement corrects a wrong made in 1969, when the Special Committee on Baseball Records omitted the Negro Leagues from Major League consideration. The decision to elevate the Negro Leagues comes after a year of evaluation, including discussions with the National Baseball Hall of Fame, as well as past and ongoing research being conducted by baseball historians, among other groups.
“In particular, MLB commends the work of Gary Ashwill, Scott Simkus, Mike Lynch, and Kevin Johnson, who drove the construction of the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, and Larry Lester, whose decades-long research underlies and adds to their work,” MLB’s statement reads.
“What I learned and what we all can learn from the Negro League was how the players persevered against all odds,” Lester told Sportsnet’s Gare Joyce earlier this year in a profile of Lester’s work to keep the history of the Negro Leagues alive. “They had a refuse-to-lose attitude in achieving their goals and objectives. The biggest takeaway is they persevered. They faced systemic racism and played through it.”
This summer, MLB marked the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues with player patches and special ceremonies before games on Aug. 16. That followed a joint $1-million donation from MLB and the Major League Players Association to the Negro League Baseball Museum in Kansas City that was made this February.
MLB says it is working with the Elias Sports Bureau “to determine the full scope of this designation’s ramifications on statistics and records.”
