New York, (APP – UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News – 30th May, 2024) Major League Baseball formally adopted statistics from the racially segregated Negro Leagues into its official history on Wednesday, rewriting the record books at a stroke in a landmark move which confronts the sport’s racist past.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said the decision gave long-overdue recognition to the achievement of African-American players in the league who deserve to be ranked alongside baseball’s most iconic Names.
“We are proud that the official historical record now includes the players of the Negro Leagues,” Manfred said. “This initiative is focused on ensuring that future generations of fans have access to the statistics and milestones of all those who made the Negro Leagues possible.”
Black players were barred from competing in the major leagues due to racism and segregation laws until Jackie Robinson famously broke baseball’s color barrier by debuting for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.
Instead, African-American players plied their trade in the Negro Leagues, which ran from 1920 to 1948.
However while the segregated league produced many players who would go onto forge dazzling careers in Major League Baseball, their statistical achievements from that era were never recognised.
In 2020 however, with the United States plunged into nationwide soul-searching over racial injustice following the death of George Floyd, MLB chiefs said it was time to finally grant “Major League” status to the Negro Leagues, in a move Manfred described as “correcting a longtime oversight” in the game’s history.
A panel of Negro Leagues experts and historians subsequently pored over the record books to evaluate statistics from the era and determine how to incorporate them into MLB history.
Baseball historians welcomed Wednesday’s announcement, with Negro Leagues Baseball Museum President Bob Kendrick hailing it as a “major milestone in baseball history”.
“The Negro Leagues were a product of segregated America, created to give opportunity where opportunity did not exist,” Negro Leagues expert and historian Larry Lester told MLB.com.
“As Bart Giamatti, former Commissioner of Baseball, once said, ‘We must never lose sight of our history, insofar as it is ugly, never to repeat it, and insofar as it is glorious, to cherish it,'” Lester added.
Wednesday’s announcement means that the likes of Negro Leagues stars such as Hall of Fame catcher Josh Gibson are now etched into baseball’s official pantheon alongside iconic figures such as Babe Ruth, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron.
