The Elevation of the Negro Leagues

The legacy of all-black baseball has touched off a new debate

Sports Biblio Reader 12.20.20

The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture

Also In This Issue: Baseball’s Oldest Living Player; Renaming the Cleveland Indians; The Man Who Brought Babe Ruth to Japan; College Football’s Weirdest Game; The Rose Bowl; Fan Hockey Jerseys; “Love Story” on Ice; Wayne Gretzky’s Rookie Card; A Pioneering Jockey; The World Sports Hall of Fame; Tara VanDerveer; Remembering Peter Alliss

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The usual Hot Stove and Hall of Fame chatter that abounds among the baseball faithful in December was dropped in a hurry this week when Major League Baseball made a stunning announcement.

Seven Negro Leagues will be elevated to major league status, meaning statistics from those circuits between 1920-48 will be blended in with the long annals of the American League and National League.

The news was greeted with general euphoria, especially by the likes of Bob Kendrick, head of the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City.

Much of the baseball writing corps concurred, mindful of the injustices of baseball’s Jim Crow “gentleman’s agreement” that kept the Major Leagues all-white until 1947.

Thomas Boswell of The Washington Post tried to get ahead of the arguments over statistics involving more than 3,400 players that are sure to come, as MLB conducts a review with the Elias Sports Bureau. Among them are Josh Gibson’s .441 season for the Homestead Grays in 1943, which would make him he last man to hit .400, and would stand as the highest single-season average of all time:

“Since grade school, I have loved baseball records and how they are intertwined with the game’s history and the sport’s place in American life.

“But I also have understood that everything must be swathed in context and generosity of spirit when discussing, or enjoying the numbers from a sport that sweeps back to the Civil War and dates its first ‘major league game’ to 1869. Walt Whitman, who published ‘Leaves of Grass’ in 1855, was a baseball fan.

What the true baseball fan wants to know is: everything. All the data that is available. We will figure out, each in our own way, what to make of it, how to rank it and, in some cases, how to get our jaws off the floor.

But data is only part of the issue as the ramifications of the decision to include the Negro Leagues are being assessed.

A familiar historical narrative of the Negro Leagues also is being challenged in some quarters, and bears watching given recent clashes over The New York Times’ 1619 project about slavery, and in the wake of the George Floyd protests this summer.

At The Undefeated, Clinton Yates takes exception to the idea that the Negro Leagues are being “elevated,” and that they shouldn’t have ever been regarded as inferior:

“If you are the kind of person who genuinely ever viewed Major League Baseball as the summit of what the sport could and should be, then you were never paying attention to begin with. It’s the top flight of the most economically abusive sport in this country. Baseball is the sharecropping of American sports.”

Yates isn’t the first critic to make such a claim about baseball, and to call out its attempts to present a more racially and ethnically inclusive message that may be more show than substance.

But ESPN writer Howard Bryant was especially scathing in his own column and during a PBS interview, accusing MLB of a cynical ploy to absolve itself of its troubled past on race:

“Instead of accepting its history as a reminder of its past and its human cost, to remain as an institutional conscience, baseball took the easy way out. It decided to make itself feel better by rewriting the history books.

“Conveying Black inferiority was the cultural justification for the separation, and this statistical rehabilitation in 2020 also slyly attempts to rehabilitate baseball's architects of segregation as having been respectful of Satchel Paige, and Rube Foster and Oscar Charleston, when they were not. They did not want to live next to Black people and they did not want to play baseball with them. The Negro Leagues did not play alongside the major leagues. They survived despite the major leagues. That intentional subjugation cannot be undone with a pen stroke. It cannot be forgotten that baseball spent a half-century undermining the credibility of the Negro Leagues.”

Bryant isn’t just another general cultural commentator looking to jump on a hot topic for attention; he’s written deeply for many years on baseball, and wrote a fine biography of Henry Aaron and a history of race and baseball in his hometown of Boston.

But in recent years, as American culture has entered the Age of Woke, Bryant’s work has taken on an increasingly harsh tenor. His most recent books have focused on recent black athlete activism and his own thoughts on race, culture and the woke bugaboo of “whiteness.”

Racial progress is little more than an illusion, and there’s especially no forgiving baseball of its historical sins of segregation:

“While baseball has taken what it considers to be a step toward reparation, it has taken another away from accountability. . . .At some point, baseball, like the rest of the country, must wear what it has done to Black people.”

The wages of perpetual guilt don’t just apply to those declared guilty because of their race. Even Josh Gibson shouldn’t be acknowledged as a major league batting champ because:

“Josh Gibson never played in the major leagues. His statistics were never considered on par with the big leagues because Major League Baseball did not respect the institution of the Negro Leagues, even though Gibson's individual talent was unquestioned. The reason was not an oversight, but a mandate from the very top of the game.

“If Gibson and several generations of Black men had to carry that injustice to their graves, the institution of baseball can carry it too.”

Part of Bryant’s argument is about the statistics, which is understandable to a degree. He said he doesn’t want anybody “to mess with the record book,” and that’s a topic that’s certain to emerge in the coming months.

Yet he doesn’t acknowledge long-standing and sustained efforts to update Negro Leagues statistics that eventually prompted MLB to take another look.

As I wrote in August, it’s been 50 years since the publication of “Only the Ball Was White,” by a white author named Robert Peterson, which set off a couple of generations’ worth of dedicated research into black baseball.

Bryant’s relentlessly punishing argument stands in contrast to the perspective of Sean Gibson, the great-grandson of Josh Gibson, one of 35 Negro Leagues stars who’s in the Baseball Hall of Fame:

“We were gratified and felt that our fathers, uncles, grandfathers, and in my case, great-grandfather, were validated. Not that they were not already in our own eyes. But for those with little or no knowledge of the Negro Leagues and the era in which they took place, the story must be told.”

This is putting history in context, instead of applying contemporary attitudes to previous times.

Baseball historian John Thorn posted on Twitter that he admires Bryant for writing “many sensible and commendable things herein—for the victim, injustice is best worn as a badge of honor—but some points may be challenged if we are to believe in America's ongoing attempt to attain a more perfect Union.”

In a new biography of Oscar Charleston that I just finished reading, author Jeremy Beer made an observation along similar lines, noting how the highly professional Charleston thrived in the Negro Leagues, making it his life, and not just his career:

“Black men in America played in all-black baseball leagues because they had no choice. Once they were given the choice, those leagues and their teams died remarkably quick deaths. But black baseball was nevertheless a good thing. The talent that flourished in the Negro Leagues was not ‘wasted,’ as is sometimes said by condescending writers. As the embodiment of a living tradition that demanded the achievement of excellence with respect to specific practices, the Negro Leagues provided an institutional venue for the creation of meaning and the achievement of virtue. To portray the players in those leagues as the mere victims of history is certainly not to portray them as they saw themselves.”

A Few Good Reads

• Eddie Robinson turned 100 years old on Tuesday, making him the oldest living major league baseball veteran. He was part of the Indians’ last World Series title team in 1948, and retired as a front office executive after a 65-year career in the game. Friends and family celebrated the special occasion with a drive-through salute;

• It’s been 50 years since the release of the Oscar-winning movie “Love Story” starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw. It was partly filmed on the Harvard University campus and included hockey scenes. For The Athletic, Steve Buckley talks to a former Harvard hockey player who was a technical advisor in the film, and who later served as the Crimson’s longtime head coach;

• This may be the holy grail of hockey cards: Wayne Gretzky’s 1979 O-Pee-Chee’s bubblegum card that was included in a 20-cents-a-pack collection at the time has fetched $1.29 million at an auction last week;

• From Bruce Berglund’s newly published “The Fastest Game in the World: Hockey and the Globalization of Sports,” an excerpt on how many hockey fans made replica jerseys their standard attire for attending games in person. The jerseys of the Original Six, by the way, are still the biggest-sellers of all the NHL teams;

• First-year Jackson State football coach Deion Sanders—yes, that Deion Sanders—pulled off the best recruiting class among Historically Black Colleges and Universities, also known as HBCUs. On National Signing Day this week, he plucked one of the nation’s top high school defensive backs in De’Jahn Warren, who had committed to the mighty University of Georgia. “Prime Time” is quickly making his mark in his coaching debut at Walter Payton’s alma mater;

• Top-ranked Stanford had no trouble defeating Pacific University Wednesday as the women’s college basketball season is getting underway. The victory for the Cardinal was 1,099 for head coach Tara VanDerveer, who surpassed the late Pat Summitt at the top of the all-time career list. But VanDerveer coach be eclipsed in what figures to be a leapfrogging situation, as UConn’s Geno Auriemma notched his 1,095th win on Saturday. Both are going strong late into their 60s, and with teams that are Final Four-caliber;

• At Our Game John Thorn dusts off an old tribute to Bruce Prentice, who died this week and came up with an idea he has always liked: the World Sports Hall of Fame. Prentice was the founder of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame and was a former scout for the Toronto Blue Jays;

• For the first time since World War II, the Rose Bowl won’t be played at the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day. The College Football Playoff committee announced Saturday is was moving the national semifinal game from Pasadena to the Cowboys Stadium in Dallas due to COVID-19 restrictions in California. In 1942, the Oregon State-Duke Rose Bowl game was moved to Duke’s campus in Durham, N.C., less than a month after Pearl Harbor and amid fears of Japanese bombing raids along the West Coast. The game was the subject of a 2017 book by Brian Curtis, who noted that four players in that game would die in World War II;

• This weird football season may have been punctuated above all by an unlikely battle of unbeaten teams earlier in December when Brigham Young traveled to Coastal Carolina. It was among the many “pickup” games scheduled on the fly due to COVID-related cancellations, and turned out to be one of the most entertaining;

• At Sports History Weekly, an interview with Diane Crump, who in 1970 became the first female jockey in the Kentucky Derby, and is the subject of a new biography of her pioneering life;

• At the Sports Stories newsletter, the tale of Matsutaro Shoriki, who worked to bring Babe Ruth to Japan in 1934 that helped launch that nation’s baseball mania. But it also offended conservative elements of society who tried to have Shoriki assassinated;

• After years of prodding from Native American and other activists, the Cleveland Indians announced this week they’re going to change their nickname, a move the Tribe’s current manager, Terry Francona, says is long overdue. Like the former Washington Redskins, there’s not a new name that’s been chosen yet, but there’s a good bit of support for the Cleveland Spiders, who played in the late 1890s.

Passings

Peter Alliss, 89, known as “The Voice of Golf,” was a BBC golf commentator for more than half a century, overlapping with a career in which he won 31 tournaments in the 1950s and 1060s and took part in eight Ryder Cup events. In 2012, he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. For further reading: “My Life,” by Peter Alliss;

Life magazine has put together a special issue honoring the baseball legends who died in 2020, including Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson and Whitey Ford.

Happy Holidays!

This is the final issue of the newsletter for 2020, and I wouldn’t know where to begin describing what’s happened over this last year, and especially the last 10 months.

At times I feel like I’ve dwelled too much on the surreal world we’re inhabiting, especially on the sports front. It has been an indescribable experience, and we’re far from returning to the world as we once knew it.

But it’s been encouraging to hear from so many of you as this year has gone on, sharing greetings, links, suggestions and corrections. Switching to the Substack platform also has been beneficial, and I’m eagerly looking forward to flipping over the calendar to 2021.

For the next couple weeks I’ll be catching up with reading and preparing the first few issues of the new year, and enjoying the holiday season. The next newsletter will go out on Jan. 10, 2021.

My best wishes go out to all of you for a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year! And of course, Happy Reading!

The Sports Biblio Reader e-mail newsletter is delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search recent archives. The full archives for Sports Biblio Digest can be found here. This is issue No. 228, published Dec. 20, 2020.

PLEASE NOTE: The newsletter will return Jan. 10, 2021, after Christmas and New Year’s. Happy Holidays and Happy Reading!

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