“Postseason tours against big league stars offered an opportunity for black players to prove their equality on the diamond,” Tygiel wrote in 1991. “Matchups between the Babe Ruth or Dizzy Dean ‘All-Stars’ and black players became frequent. The most famous of the interracial barnstorming tours occurred in 1946, when Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller organized a major league all-star team and toured the nation accompanied by the Satchel Paige All-Stars.
“Surviving records reveal that blacks won two-thirds of all interracial games,” Tygiel pointed out.
In other words, as I argued Wednesday on “Around the Horn”: “The Negro Leagues were never less than major. They weren’t minor leagues.”
Black people aren’t in need of White institutions to validate our greatness. But the work done by Thorn’s 17-person committee — as well as by Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick and Negro Leagues legend Josh Gibson’s great-grandson Sean Gibson, just to name those of late — is commendable. It further evidenced how talented Black ballplayers not allowed to play in the White majors were and, as Tygiel long ago revealed, how level the talent was in both halves of segregated baseball.
Or, as I further argued on “Around the Horn,” “The major leagues maybe were not as major as we’ve mythologized them to be.”
The accomplishments of the first half of the 20th century deserve an asterisk as prominent as any in sports. All of them — Babe Ruth’s home runs, Ty Cobb’s hits, Walter Johnson’s strikeouts — took place in their own racial vacuum.
Their statistics always should have suffered the same suspicion as those of Black players, whom detractors noted accomplished their feats against only those of the same racial progeny.
But not enough people dared question whether, for example, Ruth could have hit as many home runs had he regularly faced Willie Foster, who won at least 150 games in the Negro Leagues with 39 shutouts and a 2.59 ERA, according to the research Thorn’s committee acted upon. Foster was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1996.
Not enough people dared question whether Johnson would have racked up all those strikeouts had he pitched regularly to the likes of Gibson, long considered the Negro Leagues’ greatest hitter. This week, much of the data from Gibson’s career was corroborated by Thorn’s committee. As a result, Gibson was elevated to the major league leader in batting average, slugging percentage and OPS, ahead of Ruth and the irascible racist Cobb.
Thorn told Andscape’s Clinton Yates that the committee couldn’t, however, authenticate Gibson’s 800-something home runs.
“We didn’t have any trouble in getting [Sean Gibson] to agree that the 800 home runs or nearly 800 home runs attributed to his great grandfather on his Hall of Fame plaque were probably silly and, if not silly, then included a whole range of games that we could not possibly count as being a major league baseball quality,” Thorn explained.
That inability was a byproduct of segregated baseball, too. The White press rarely covered Negro Leagues baseball, and the Black press sometimes may not have committed space to box scores when so many pages were reserved for news attempting to liberate Black people from Jim Crow.
A few times, Black sportswriters even used their space to point out the preposterous assumption of the White majors, as Phil Dixon noted of Associated Negro Press sportswriter Al Monroe in his 2019 book “The Dizzy and Daffy Dean Barnstorming Tour: Race, Media, and America’s National Pastime.”
“This Wednesday, the Cards and Detroit start the world’s series, which is supposed to name the world’s champions. To some it does,” Monroe reported in 1934. “Truly I cannot see how any team can call itself champion of the world that hasn’t batted against Satchel Paige, ‘School Boy’ Jones, Bill Foster and [Ted] Trent. And I’m wondering if the Dean Brothers can gloat over their strikeout records and world’s series wins over teams that failed to include Josh Gibson, Turkey Stearns, Jud Wilson, Oscar Charleston and others.”
The perniciousness of baseball’s long segregation is not properly acknowledged, given how — as much as any corner of society — the sport endorsed, propagated and popularized racial discrimination in this country. Once it finally decided to tear down its segregating wall, the alike talent between White and Black ballplayers was revealed.
After Jackie Robinson won the inaugural award in 1947, five of the first six National League rookies of the year were Black. After Robinson won the National League stolen bases title in 1947 and 1949, players of color in the NL such as Mays, Maury Wills and Lou Brock won every title except one until Craig Biggio in 1994.
Tygiel quoted Judy Johnson, one of the legendary Negro Leagues players, about those games against White stars in the 1930s and 1940s in which Black teams so often prevailed. Said Johnson: “That’s when we played the hardest, to let them know and to let the public know that we had the same talent they did and probably a little bit better at times.”