Merging the Negro Leagues into MLB stats has not been seamless

May 11, 2023 8:12 AM

MLB’s plan to integrate Negro League numbers and statistical legacies with its own remains years from completion. More than two years after its announcement, MLB is still in the initial phase of the project: data acquisition. (archive.today link)
posted by Etrigan (14 comments total)

This doesn't seem like a difficult problem until you realize how the Negro Leagues worked with regard to what got into the records and how little attention white newspapers paid to the leagues. Leveraging the Seamheads database was the obvious way to go, but that seems to have broken down over control of the data. Why MLB didn't just buy Seamheads outright?

And, of course, this doesn't even address the looming controversy that rewriting baseball's record books will generate. It's likely to make the issues over data sourcing seem minor. What a mess.
posted by tommasz at 8:32 AM on May 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

the looming controversy that rewriting baseball's record books will generate

Well, while baseball nerds love to give themselves aneurisms about differences that only exist in their heads (see: 'juiced ball era'), they generally just love to integrate new sources of data and come up with even wilder ways of proving such and such player from 80 years ago is better than such and such player of today.

In fact, you can almost see the grins from here while reading the part of that linked story where people have to dig through newspaper basements in forgotten towns to hopefully find box scores for a Negro League game from 1948.

40 years ago the general public liked baseball enough to get worked up about certain records getting changed, but now it's just the nerds that care, and they absolutely love this shit.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 9:00 AM on May 11, 2023

Why MLB didn't just buy Seamheads outright?

seamhead (plural seamheads)
    (slang) A devoted baseball fan.

Occasionally, integrity isn't for sale. From the article:

According to sources familiar with the negotiations, the sticking point for Seamheads was not compensation but rather concerns about control of the data, how it would be used and who would have a say in its implementation.

An MLB spokesperson declined to divulge details of the discussions. Seamheads researchers turned down multiple interview requests for this story.

The listed copyright for Seamheads' Negro Leagues data is Agate Type Research LLC, run by Gary Ashwill and Kevin Johnson. They're necessarily persnickety SABR types, who (along with bunch of other folks) have done a heroic job of tracking down this info, and have a clear passion for historical accuracy. If we're assigning blame for screwing this up, I would need extraordinary evidence to not lay this at the feet of Rob Manfred's MLB.
posted by zamboni at 9:16 AM on May 11, 2023 [13 favorites]

I first learned of this effort by MLB on the PBS NewsHour (YT Video) in 2020.

I wonder if this topic is too esoteric to have been swept up in the culture wars that are consuming certain sectors of American public discourse?
posted by JDC8 at 11:23 AM on May 11, 2023

This is an incredibly cynical project, the intent of which is to handwave away the way that Negro League players were violently, viciously excluded from Major League Baseball. Why would they try to import and integrate these stats into a database where they have no functional relationships? The rules were different. The quality of the play was different. The numbers are not mutually intelligible or comparable, because the gatekeepers of mlb refused to acknowledge or admit the greatest part of the talent pool. The whole project is chaotic and ahistoric.
posted by toodleydoodley at 12:26 PM on May 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

There's a series of long articles about the arguments in favour of this from the standpoint of the stat nerds, later compiled as a book. For me, the surprising and clinching argument was that the comparative quality of the Negro Leagues and the contemporary AL/NL can be examined in a variety of other ways outside of the usual way of analyzing head-to-head games played in an official capacity that we tragically do not have, and that doing so comes down on the side of the Negro Leagues having a measurably higher quality of play.
posted by Quindar Beep at 1:57 PM on May 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

Ben Lindbergh's summary at the time of the announcement, and Clinton Yates' commentary is a good summary of the issues. For me, these sections ring true (Bob Kendrick is president of the Negro Leagues Museum):

Correcting the record reverses course on a long-standing mistake, but MLB’s imprimatur merely ends the league’s failure to recognize reality. Negro Leaguers considered themselves major leaguers even though the leagues that excluded them said otherwise. “In all of my years of having known so many legendary Negro League players, I never heard them even questioning whether or not they would be viewed as ‘major league,’” Kendrick says. “They didn’t need the validation. They knew how good they were. They knew their league was as professional as any. But for history’s sake, this is significant. And I can’t help but think that the spirit of all of those who are now passed away, and the few remaining players, will take a great deed of gratitude by what many believe is a wrong being righted.”

Reached in Detroit on Wednesday morning, the 93-year-old Teasley, who played outfield for the 1948 New York Cubans of the second Negro National League, greeted the news with enthusiasm. “I think it’s a wonderful thing, it’s a great thing,” Teasley says. “It’s a good thing for baseball in general.”

and

The work that Kendrick has done over the years to champion, document, highlight and grow the history of the Negro Leagues is unparalleled in sports. It’s impossible to overstate how important he is to the sport, never mind Black baseball, and for him, today, I’m happy. But overall, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of a basic fact that needs to be recalled while everyone in midtown New York City is patting themselves on the back.

Negro does not mean less than. And never will.

So while the names of generations of players will finally be recognized by people who seem to think that statistics are what make baseball, the entire notion of “recognition” being solely acknowledged through the lens of a league that suspended a Black person for saying “n—a” on a ballfield is absurd. The goal here is not to be more like MLB. The goal is for MLB to get on board with the rest of the world in 2020.

If you recognize that the Negro Leagues were Major Leagues (jinx, QB), you have to grapple with how the different leagues relate. Whether you can do that in a satisfactory, respectful and authoritative way with statistics is part of why this is taking so long.
posted by zamboni at 2:12 PM on May 11, 2023 [11 favorites]

satisfactory, respectful and authoritative way with statistics is part of why this is taking so long.

[stomps on floor]

The posting here has been great and helpful. Is there anything that's more specific about the technical interacting with political?

Thanks.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 3:02 PM on May 11, 2023

800 home runs, dude.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:25 PM on May 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

In the absence of solidly merged stats, every record from a white-only MLB should be marked with an asterisk.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:01 AM on May 12, 2023

800 home runs, dude.

We're going to start hearing stuff like "Oh, sure, some of the Negro League players were pretty good, but the overall level of competition was inferior to that of the Major Leagues, so all those feats were like playing against high schoolers..." and they honestly will not understand that the exact same thing could be said about the feats that were against only white players.
posted by Etrigan at 6:49 AM on May 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

the overall level of competition was inferior to that of the Major Leagues, so all those feats were like playing against high schoolers...

Major Leagues already encompasses more than the general public understands. What determines Major League status? Like a lot of other things, a bunch of old white guys at a conference table. To quote from the Lindbergh piece again:

…the exclusion of the Negro Leagues from the official list of major leagues stemmed from the findings of MLB’s Special Baseball Records Committee, which commissioner William Eckert convened in 1968 as part of the preparations for the landmark Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia. In 1969, the all-white, five-man body bestowed major league status on six circuits, including some (such as the 1884 Union Association) whose level of play was far lower than that of the Negro Leagues. But because of the prejudices of the day, the SBRC didn’t even discuss the candidacy of the Negro Leagues.

Baseball changes, and has always changed. There’s no eternal Field of Dreams where Babe Ruth is perpetually hitting the Platonic baseball. The fact that historical semi-bush league stuff like the Union Association is already on the books undercuts any inferior competition argument.
posted by zamboni at 8:20 AM on May 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Speaking as a baseball stat nerd type guy, I appreciate the project. It's absolutely being done out of respect for the players and their legacies. It's not like MLB has to "handwave" away its history of segregation; they fixed that policy 76 years ago. It's not really a hot topic.

These leagues are considered major leagues because the top players in the country played in them, and some of the greatest players in history. Some of the best baseball ever played was on those diamonds. When players from the Negro Leagues started entering the NL and AL, their performances barely dipped at all. There was no adjustment; they were accustomed to the same caliber of play.

Unfortunately a lot of games were exhibitions, and a lot didn't officially have their stats tracked, so we're never going to have full sets of stats. But to be able to apply modern metrics like OPS+ and WAR to those players is really compelling. There's always been little doubt from a historical perspective that Josh Gibson was one of the greatest hitters ever, on par with Babe Ruth and Ted Williams, but to see that quantified to any degree is awesome.

It really effin' sucks that baseball was segregated. We can't undo it. But this acknowledges that Negro League players' accomplishments are directly comparable to those of AL and NL players of the era, and it's also a sobering reminder of how recent and comprehensive apartheid was in this country.
posted by mellow seas at 8:14 PM on May 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

If baseball fixed its segregation problem back in the wayback, how come there are fewer black players playing now than since the late 1950s?
(from Newsweek or something )


I looked at a couple of data arguments from SABR, (https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/baseball-demographics-1947-2016/ ) but they are incoherent, showing a table that presents columns labeled white, black, Hispanic, and Asian, like these are equal comparisons.

As you know, Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race, and Hispanic people may identify as any race. It is not ok to put them in a wholly separate category and claim the Hispanic is the same as “not white” or even “not black”. If these are the standards of the project over all, disingenuous is not even the worst thing you can say about it.
posted by toodleydoodley at 2:55 PM on May 15, 2023