Justice for the Negro Leagues Will Mean More Than Just Stats

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Henry Aaron, who died in January, will forever cast a long shadow over Major League Baseball. It was Aaron, of course, who broke Babe Ruth’s career record of 714 home runs on April 8, 1974, on his way to finishing with 755 after 23 seasons in the majors. In that time, he drove in more runs and amassed more total bases than anyone else ever has. He ranks fourth all-time in runs created and third all-time in hits. Aficionados of the counting stats — the ones you can add to, one at a time, like hits, home runs, R.B.I.s — like to recite how you can discount all of Aaron’s home runs and he would still have more than 3,000 hits. Proponents of advanced statistics turn to other measures of Aaron’s greatness, such as wins above replacement: According to the essential online database Baseball Reference, if you consider that 19,902 players have played in Major League Baseball through its 150 years — I’m including the National Association, from 1871 to 1875 — Aaron scores higher than 19,895 of them.

But numbers tell only part of the story. Players will come along and surpass Aaron, statistically speaking, at least — Barry Bonds already did, with his 762 home runs (although the persistent specter of doping makes his home-run crown ring hollow). And yet, here was a player mined from the platinum ore nestled deep into the bedrock of the history of Black baseball: Aaron was the last full-time major-league ballplayer to first make his mark in the Negro leagues — and the last Negro-league ballplayer ever to start in a major-league game.

Henry Aaron is where statistics and society meet. As Aaron approached Babe Ruth’s career home-run total, he received constant threats to his life as well as to the lives of his family. His journey to home run No. 715 was a miserable one for him. As he pursued Ruth’s record, he was pursued by mail, much of it vicious. And that’s how Aaron unexpectedly toppled yet another record, the Guinness world record for the most fan mail received in one year by a private citizen: 900,000 letters. About a third of them, Guinness notes, “were letters of hate engendered by his bettering of Babe Ruth’s career record for ‘home runs.’” When Babe Ruth hit his final home run, in 1935, Henry Aaron was a year old. No Black ballplayer had played in what were considered the major leagues in 51 years.

Most players live off their milestone moments, but Aaron always seemed to have simply survived his. It is chiseled into baseball lore: a classic Aaron swing at an Al Downing high fastball in the fourth inning on that warm and cloudy early-spring night in Atlanta. When officials paused the game to celebrate the historic occasion, Aaron stood before a microphone and said, “I just thank God it’s all over.” Who could blame him?

A month earlier, as the inevitability of breaking Ruth’s record was sinking in for him and the nation, an essay by Aaron appeared in papers across the country: “The Babe is a legend now,” he wrote. “He created more excitement than any player who ever lived. What I find so hard to believe is that Hank Aaron, a nobody from Mobile, Alabama, is the first player in 40 years to challenge that home-run record. How did it come about?” Reflective sentences in the third person usually obscure or repress something. The “aw shucks” of Aaron’s line rises in a bubble only to be popped by the pointed question that follows: How did it come about? The question seems rhetorical, but it is intended for us.

Back in 1952, the Boston Braves spent $10,000 to purchase the rights to sign Aaron from the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League. The Braves’ general manager, John Quinn, considered the price a steal. In fact, the Negro leagues paid the steepest cost for baseball’s integration. Their Black fans flocked to major-league games to catch a glimpse of the new dawn; Black newspapers likewise turned much of their attention to the fortunes of Black players in the big leagues; and major-league teams were learning through trial and error how to siphon the best talent from Negro-leagues rosters. Just two years earlier, the Braves had to pay the Montreal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ top minor-league team, $200,000 for the former Negro American League star Sam (the Jet) Jethroe, who at 33 would become the first Black player for the Braves and the 1950 National League Rookie of the Year. (He remains the oldest player ever to win the award.) Aaron, on the other hand, was signed at 18 and, after two years of terrorizing minor-league pitching, joined the Braves in the major leagues. But he would never play with the Jet, who was out of the league before Aaron hit his first big-league home run.

When Aaron made his debut with the Braves — who had moved to Milwaukee — in April 1954, Jackie Robinson was entering his eighth season in the majors, and the game was still being integrated at a slow trickle. Then suddenly, in that one month, Tom Alston became the first Black player for the St. Louis Cardinals, Curt Roberts became the first Black player for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chuck Harmon and Nino Escalera became the first Black players for the Cincinnati Reds. But both Alston and Harmon would be out of the league after four years, Roberts after three. Escalera would play just the 1954 season. Baseball being a numbers game meant something different for Black players, most of whom broke their teams’ color barrier and quickly disappeared from the game. Twenty years later, on the verge of surpassing Major League Baseball’s greatest number, Aaron’s essay would run under the title “I Can’t Do It Alone.”

Baseball was forged amid the fires of the Civil War, and segregated baseball arose from the rancidness that followed Reconstruction. “The end of the Civil War, and the apparent liberation, gave Blacks the notion that there could be mutual benefit in the existence of Black teams, if not yet in the open integration on the ball field,” Mark Ribowsky writes in “A Complete History of the Negro Leagues: 1884 to 1955.” As a result, a Black baseball “scene” had emerged by 1865, centered in the East. In 1867, the National Association of Base Ball Players, the sport’s first governing body, enacted a resolution barring any club whose roster included players of color. For the next 50 years, Black baseball would be a tenuous, peripatetic enterprise. Giants nevertheless walked the earth: the mighty Cuban Giants, Page Fence Giants, Cuban X Giants, Columbia Giants, Leland Giants, Philadelphia Giants and Birmingham Giants were just a few of the Black professional teams that were active around the turn of the 20th century. (Some even chose names without “Giants” in them, like the French Lick Plutos.)

It was not until February 1920 that Rube Foster, whom The Chicago Tribune referred to as a “budding entrepreneur” and “booking agent,” was able to breathe life into his cherished vision of a Negro National League. Under Foster, who had been an outstanding pitcher on the various circuits that popped up and also failed with great frequency across the country before the Negro leagues, the N.N.L.’s flagship teams included the Chicago Giants, Cuban Stars, Dayton Marcos, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABCs, Kansas City Monarchs, St. Louis Giants and his own team, the Chicago American Giants. The league flourished. By 1926, however, the imposing and influential Foster was incapacitated by mental illness, and by 1930 he was dead. Robbed of Foster’s organizational acumen, and battered by the financial impacts of the Great Depression, the Negro National League folded in 1931.

Six other leagues sprang up as rivals or successors to the N.N.L.: The Eastern Colored League ran from 1923 to 1928, before part of it splintered off into the American Negro League for a single season in 1929; the East-West League started in 1932 but made it through only half a season; the Negro Southern League, considered a minor league of the Negro leagues, played the 1932 season as a major league, then disappeared in 1936; a second Negro National League fared far better, lasting from 1933 until 1948; and the Negro American League, home of Henry Aaron’s Indianapolis Clowns, began in 1937 and stayed afloat until 1962. (A version of the Clowns, as much a comedy troupe as baseball team by the end, played exhibition games into the 1980s.) These seven leagues constituted the Negro leagues.

Last December, just five weeks before Aaron’s death, Major League Baseball released a statement intended to change both the history and the future of the game. It began: “Commissioner of Baseball Robert D. Manfred Jr. announced today that Major League Baseball is correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history by officially elevating the Negro leagues to ‘Major League’ status.” The Negro leagues had never been recognized by Major League Baseball as a minor league, let alone a major league. They were cultivated in what little space Major League Baseball allowed them to exist, separate and profoundly unequal. And in calling this injustice “a longtime oversight,” Major League Baseball is wading, rather gently, into the historical mess it has made of the game it champions and represents but does not and will not ever own all to itself.

The potential impact of Major League Baseball’s decision is as if the International Astronomical Union had, in 2006, upgraded a number of celestial bodies around Pluto to planets instead of downgrading Pluto to a dwarf planet, leaving us suddenly with several more planets in our solar system and new names to put to heart — Ceres, Eris, Makemake, Haumea. Life’s day-to-day would have gone on seemingly unchanged, but the very scope of where we begin and where we end — the boundaries and populace of our imagined community, and the scope of our dreams — would have certainly changed. A planet, of course, is not a statistic, and baseball is not astronomy. Nevertheless, the prospect of seeing the Homestead Grays legend Josh Gibson — regarded in his day as “the Black Babe Ruth” (though Black fans often called Ruth “the white Josh Gibson”) — at the top of the list of single-season records for batting average with a .441 in 1943 brings to mind Copernicus’s eventually winning the argument that the sun is indeed at the center of our solar system. From now on, it might be Gibson and not Ted Williams — who hit .406 in 1941 — who will be regarded as the last major-league player to have hit better than .400 in a season. Gibson’s mind-blowing average would also go down as the highest single-season batting average, outpacing Hugh Duffy’s .440 in 1894, when professional baseball was in its seventh year of strictly, although silently, enforced segregation.

Consider other additions to the record books, like Leon Day, who threw a no-hitter on opening day 1946 for the Newark Eagles. Previously, only Bob Feller managed that feat in the major leagues, with his opening-day no-hitter for Cleveland in 1940. The effects of these shifts in the annals of achievement will have a long-term effect on the game’s history. I remember learning about baseball history when current players neared historical marks: George Brett’s and Tony Gwynn’s coming close to .400 brought up constant references to Williams’s .406. Now these records will put players and teams from the Negro leagues in the thoughts and words of many more people.

“That is the intention of what we are working on,” says Pat Courtney, head of communications for Major League Baseball. “If a graph were to pop up saying that ‘Pitcher X is the first to do Y since Pitcher Z back in 1930,’ the goal is to include Negro-leagues stats and game records,” Courtney said, referring to an imagined moment during a broadcast when an announcer might ask, for example, which major-league pitcher threw a no-hitter on opening day. “At some point in the coming months, we will be able to answer, ‘Bob Feller in 1940 and Leon Day in 1946.’”

A small step toward not forgetting. But is it enough? “It doesn’t change history,” Gary Ashwill told me in an email. Ashwill is a baseball historian and co-founded the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database, which Major League Baseball cited as a prime factor in its decision to incorporate Negro-leagues records. “But it might change current perceptions of history, by directing attention to players and teams and leagues that were much easier to ignore before.”

At the height of the Negro leagues, despite the constant challenge of keeping them in operation, the quality of play was extraordinary. That Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, a young Satchel Paige and so many others were barred from playing official major-league games against major-league talent — and also barred from equal wages, barred from full public recognition, barred from earning a pension from Major League Baseball — is a great tragedy for the sport itself. And the current plan announced by Major League Baseball to account for this comes with a severe stipulation: The league intends to incorporate regular-season Negro-leagues statistics from box scores and game reports for only the years from 1920 to 1948. In the estimation of Major League Baseball, teams before 1920 primarily played in exhibition games and barnstorming tours, where the quality was below that of Major League Baseball. And yet, a number of those players are in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Are we separating 29 years of Black baseball from its 100 years of history just because some box scores are available? “This may sound strange coming from someone who compiles statistics,” Ashwill said. “I actually think people are focusing too much on the numbers. To me the important element of M.L.B.’s decision is the recognition of Black players, teams and leagues as equals.” He went on: “There’s no doubt that from the 1880s to 1919, many of the best baseball players in the world — John Henry Lloyd, Pete Hill, Rube Foster, Joe Williams, Dick Redding, Grant Johnson — played for Black independent teams. I’d say recognition is due to them as well.”

Black baseball before 1920 and after 1948 remains outside the Major League Baseball realm for now. (As do — another missed opportunity — the pioneering women who played in the Negro leagues, like Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson and Connie Morgan.) A part of me wonders if Major League Baseball would have given more thought to including Negro-leagues stats after 1948 if Henry Aaron had hit eight home runs for the Clowns instead of five — because those extra eight home runs would have put him back ahead of the controversial and thus far Hall-of-Fame-denied Bonds. But that way a world of archival entropy lies.

Baseball operates on a steady diet of fact and folklore. Josh Gibson may have hit almost 800 home runs in league and independent baseball during his 17-year career — it says so on his Hall of Fame plaque. Research into Gibson’s career home run totals is ongoing, but Baseball Reference thus far has him at 113; Seamheads says 239. Who knows what will become of all those other hundreds of home runs that lived in the hearts and minds of fans of the Negro leagues? There are no plans at present to change his plaque, nor should there be. Folklore needs fact to ground it, but fact needs folklore to thrive. It bears repeating: Baseball numbers never give us the full story. As Tom Shieber, senior curator of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, told me, statistics form part of the whole, but not the how and the why of it. Given the infrastructural inequalities at play, any rush to compare Negro-leagues stats to non-Negro-leagues stats seems willfully ahistoric. Shieber, for example, argues that some of these infrastructural inequalities — borderline unplayable fields, for example, or poor night lighting — could affect player performance in ways that are impossible for statistics to quantify for Negro-leagues players.

And what to do with the numbers when the numbers themselves are not necessarily even the numbers? Did Gibson hit .441 in 1943? Or did he hit even higher: .466? The lower batting average includes all-star and postseason appearances, which are not included in Major League Baseball’s regular-season statistics. Embracing new data means more work is to be done by baseball researchers and historians. Ashwill told me he and his colleagues at Seamheads have box scores for 72.45 percent of known Negro-leagues games from 1920 to 1948. “We will likely nudge this number up, but it’s quite unlikely we will ever get very close to 100 percent,” he added. “Newspapers simply did not publish box scores for every game, and league records were either not kept or no longer exist.”

As we wait for these Negro-leagues numbers to be adjudicated, what we have from Major League Baseball are its words, and the very first words of the league’s statement are reason to feel concerned that Major League Baseball is still stuck in its ways. Who thought it was a good idea to announce that after half a century of segregating and sabotaging Black baseball players in the United States, the organization was now “elevating” the Negro leagues? The implications that the Negro leagues were beneath Major League Baseball are obvious and tired, and they certainly did not escape notice, especially by the families of the former players, most of whom are dead. Should their families say thank you? Courtney could not recall how the language of the statement came to be in there, but he admitted that he realized quickly there was a messaging problem. “I don’t know if that was universally felt,” Courtney told me, “but I do know that there were particular people that felt that way.”

“I think that a lot of people find this disturbing,” Shieber told me. And with good reason. Research by Todd Peterson, who edited “The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues,” has found that between 1900 and 1948, Black baseball teams played against “intact major-league outfits, as well as games against all-star aggregations,” 617 times, posting a record of 315 wins, 282 losses and 20 ties — a winning percentage of .527. These games, however, like so many games played by Negro-leaguers, were not official.

During segregation, white baseball was commonly referred to as “organized baseball.” What is elevated to Major League Baseball status may now be not only a matter of race but also a matter of reliable archival material. “ ‘Disorganized’ is looking at it through the lens of M.L.B.,” Shieber said, as we spent part of our Zoom call looking over old photos and box scores of Cuban Giants games against Wesleyan College’s varsity team from the 1890s. “That’s not a knock against M.L.B.,” he added. “It’s a knock against discrimination.” He paused and thought quietly for a moment. “We at the museum really need help telling this story,” he continued. “There’s just no way of getting around that.”

“There was no written rule barring Negroes from organized baseball,” Robert W. Peterson writes in his 1970 book, “Only the Ball Was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All-Black Professional Teams.” And yet, he wonders, if that was the case, what caused managers like John McGraw and Connie Mack to suddenly get cold feet when they were on the cusp of signing Black players? There was nothing in the rule books against doing so. “Presumably,” Peterson writes, “the answers lie in the attitudes of the other major-league operators.”

And those attitudes were largely upheld in silence, powered by stale rationalizations that still exist today in order to justify the past: namely, that enfranchising Black people would make some white people upset; that an integrated team traveling across segregated America would create logistical nightmares for all involved; and that the players who would be enfranchised lacked the skills required to make such efforts worth all of the upheaval — all of which, if it needs to be said, was overwhelmingly untrue. “Unspoken, but underlying all the stated objections,” Peterson concludes, “was the most compelling reason of all: baseball tradition.”

In a 1942 news release, for example, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the stringent commissioner of Major League Baseball from 1920 until his death in 1944, declared: “There is no rule against major clubs hiring Negro baseball players. I have come to the conclusion it is time for me to explain myself on this important issue. Negroes are not barred from organized baseball by the commissioner and have never been since the 21 years I have served. There is no rule in organized baseball prohibiting their participation to my knowledge.” Major League Baseball’s “longtime oversight” was actually a longstanding blindness inflicted upon itself. When Oedipus finally discovered the horrible truths in front of him, truths he had been hiding from, he blinded himself by stabbing his eyes with golden brooches.

Major League Baseball’s capacity and penchant for self-harm has always been astounding. Barring many of the best players of the game for well over half a century simply because of the color of their skin is but the most egregious example. “Organized baseball was steeped — perhaps a better word would be ‘pickled’ — in tradition,” according to Peterson. “Since there had not been a Negro in the organized leagues in the memory of most baseball men, it must be part of God’s plan that there should be none.” And if things in Major League Baseball were segregated from top to bottom, because of God’s plan, that meant that the tradition of segregation and the history that arose from it were out of everyone’s hands.

I have lived in Williamstown, Mass., for the better part of a year now and have gotten to know it well — as well as one can know a place in the middle of a plague. As with most New England college towns, Williams College’s campus bejewels the Main Street with its manicured quad and latticework of stone and brick buildings.

A quaint one-way street where you’ll find most of the shops in the center of town runs perpendicular to Main Street. This is Spring Street. You know Spring Street: There’s the place to buy Thai or Indian or Mexican or Mediterranean, there’s the wine store where Jason greets you by name, there’s the post office, the ice cream place, an independent bookstore and a corporate chain, a yoga studio, a cinema. If you were to stand under its marquee and roll a baseball southward down Spring Street’s slight slope, in no time it would arrive at a plaque fastened to a stone in the ground. This plaque honors Frank Grant, who was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. The stone represents where he once lived, when he and his family moved to town from nearby Pittsfield.

“Frank Grant, born in Pittsfield in 1865, was regarded by many of his contemporaries as the greatest African-American baseball player of the 19th century. He moved to Williamstown in 1871, where he lived with his family on Spring Street. Playing primarily second base, Grant played first with integrated minor-league teams before playing a decade with top Negro-league teams. His reputation as a premier versatile player with speed and a powerful bat was recognized with his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. Mr. Grant died in New York City on May 27, 1937.”

Grant was born Ulysses Franklin Grant, in Pittsfield, Mass., on Aug. 1, 1865. His given name was an inheritance of the Civil War, as was his love of baseball. The game was already popular in the 1860s and became a mainstay activity for idle troops, prisoners of war and free Black Americans. Although the historical material on Black players in baseball at the time is spotty, Robert Peterson’s research found that by 1867 teams were “sufficiently well organized, at least in the North, to have challenge matches for supremacy.” That same year, the National Association of Base Ball Players was concerned enough with the question of the possible effects emancipation might have on the game that it took the clarifying step at its annual convention — attended by representatives from 237 teams — of voting unanimously to bar individual Black players as well as any Black baseball clubs from membership, and to expel any club with a Black player on its roster. “Beadle’s Dime Base Ball Player,” one of the earliest baseball guides, subsequently summarized the benign intention of the N.A.B.B.P. in the spirit of racial gaslighting later put to use by Landis by helpfully pointing out to its readers that the organization’s goal behind this ban was merely “to keep out of the Convention the discussion of any subjects having a political bearing, as this undoubtedly had.”

This was the world of “organized baseball” — a term that would come into vogue at the height of the Negro leagues to simply denote non-Negro-leagues professional baseball — that awaited Grant. By this time it was 1884, he was 19 and still in Williamstown, pitching for an integrated amateur team, the Greylocks, on the town’s south side. If an apartheid form of baseball was the will of the N.A.B.B.P., the message had yet to either register with or deter Grant, who grew up playing baseball with white kids in town.

One contemporary newspaper article on Grant in his prime remarked that “wherever he had played, he has quickly become a favorite.” But the story of Grant’s prime years is also the story of the color line catching up to him. “Were it not for the fact that he is a colored man,” the article continued, “he would without a doubt be at the top notch of the records among the finest teams in the country.”

Given that the article headlines Grant’s contentious move from the no-longer-integrated Buffalo Bisons to the all-Black Cuban Giants — the first all-Black professional baseball club and a team stacked with late-19th-century heavyweights like George Stovey and Clarence Williams — it was clear that Grant actually was on one of “the finest teams in the country.” The Sporting News, far from an ally of Black ballplayers in that era, said of that vintage of the Cuban Giants, “This club, with its strongest players on the field, would play a favorable game against such clubs as the New Yorks or Chicagos,” referring to teams of the nonintegrated leagues.

Bob Kendrick is the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City. On a recent Friday afternoon, he told me that the museum was busy preparing for its conversion to a Covid-vaccination center for the community come Monday. Kendrick is a gifted storyteller, and the oral tradition flows freely through him. Players flashed and flickered in his voice — Moses Fleetwood Walker, Josh Gibson, Ernie Banks, Roy Campanella, Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, Buck O’Neil, Cool Papa Bell, Monte Irvin, Satchel Paige — but when I brought up Aaron, a melancholy took hold of his voice before he let go and began to reflect joyously.

“For me, the statistical aspect of this is almost secondary. It’s the recognition and the atonement that comes along with the acknowledgment of the Negro Leagues as just what it was: a major league,” Kendrick told me.

“I, for one, don’t ever want the lore and legend to go away,” he continued. “These stories about Josh Gibson should be viewed as larger than life. Babe Ruth was in many eyes Paul Bunyan. Well, for Black folks, Josh Gibson was John Henry. And I don’t want to lose that.”

His favorite photograph in the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum collection is one of Henry Aaron in 1952, when Aaron was 18. He stands on the tracks of the L&N Railroad station in Mobile, posing uncomfortably. The sun is in his eyes, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, so he hides them behind his back. On the ground right beside him is a duffel bag — maybe it holds two changes of clothes, a glove, a baseball. Maybe he has $2.50 tucked away in his pocket. Aaron is waiting for a train to take him to Winston-Salem, N.C., where he will meet up with his first professional team: the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League. He would play only 26 games for the Clowns — hitting for a .366 average, with five home runs and nine stolen bases while playing shortstop. Compared with the statistical legacy he would leave Major League Baseball, these may seem a trifle, a small sample size. Until you ask yourself, as Aaron asked us to, How did it come about?

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of three books of poetry — most recently, “Living Weapon” — two books of nonfiction and a book-length translation of fiction. He is the recipient of, among other honors, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award and the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.