Starting Wednesday, the Homestead Grays star will stand atop MLB’s career leader boards in batting average and slugging percentage.
Baseball history will change forever Wednesday. Major League Baseball plans to officially incorporate Negro Leagues statistics into its record book, according to a person familiar with the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity Tuesday night because MLB was planning an announcement for Wednesday morning., meaning all Negro leaguers would be considered major leaguers from that point forward.
The top-10 lists for such hallowed statistics as batting average, slugging percentage and on-base percentage will change dramatically. The list of career batting average leaders will include Oscar Charleston , Jud Wilson , Turkey Stearnes and Buck Leonard . Satchel Paige will now have the third-lowest single-season ERA of all time. And the top of the leader board for on-base percentage will read “Williams, Ruth, Gibson.
Incorporating Negro Leagues statistics into the MLB record book is an acknowledgment that, had Black players been allowed to compete with their White counterparts in MLB’s early decades, its leader boards would look very different. Still, because this is baseball, in which numbers foster spirited debate, the fix is likely to reinvigorate decades-old arguments about the greatest players of all time.
For years, those arguments did not make clear that numbers registered in the Negro Leagues were accumulated against some of the best players in the world, just as those achieved in the major leagues. Now, players who could not compare themselves to one another on the field can at least have their résumés in the same record book, that treasured yet flawed chronicle of baseball’s statistical lore.
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