A new Major League Baseball career batting average leader dethroned Ty Cobb this week. He last competed more than 75 years ago and never played in a single Major League Baseball game.
Josh Gibson batted .359, according to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which enshrined him over a half-century ago. Major League Baseball now categorically states that he hit .372 over his career. Who’s right? We do not know. More importantly, we cannot know.
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Fans speak of the Negro League, but, in reality, many African American leagues competed over the course of several decades. Major League Baseball recognizes seven such leagues as on par with its level of competition. Some of these leagues overlapped chronologically with other leagues. Their competition level varied. So did their thoroughness with regard to record keeping.
Negro League seasons generally scheduled fewer than half as many games as did the Major League Baseball season. Through barnstorming, they played nearly as many games by also competing against semi-pro and local teams. Which games amounted to MLB-level play, and which games rate exclusion from official statistics? A generous amount of subjectivity governs such decisions.
Major League Baseball’s own website concedes the sketchiness of the statistics compiled for Negro League play. Andrew Simon states: “[R]esearchers estimate that the 1920-48 Negro Leagues records are about 75% complete, and further updates could come in the future, if more verifiable information comes to light via box scores. It’s also important to note that there is nothing new about historical records shifting over time. In fact, baseball history has always been a living, breathing thing.”
Actually, no, not really. Never in the lifetimes of anyone reading this did official statistics include Babe Ruth’s 1935 exhibition game as a first baseman against the Holy Cross Crusaders or his time competing for the Providence Grays and the Baltimore Orioles in the minor leagues. Contrary to Simon’s relativistic claim, the most famous player in the game’s history’s statistics stagnated. They include no more hits and home runs than they did when baseball saran-wrapped his stats when he retired less than two months after the exhibition game against collegians at Fitton Field.
It gets more convoluted. Josh Gibson allegedly batted .466 in 1943, which now puts him ahead of the highest single-season batting average in the MLB record books (let nobody call Ted Williams the last major leaguer to hit .400!). So, neither Henry Duffy nor Rogers Hornsby (modern era) can claim the highest single-season batting average. Gibson, though appearing in just 69 recognized games in 1943 without the plate appearances of Duffy or Hornsby, somehow set a new record — and did so with a brain tumor slowly killing him. But his league did not recognize him as their batting champion that year, which puts an exclamation point on the nonsensicalness of all this.
Is someone named Tetelo Vargas the new record holder for single-season batting average?
Statistics provide certainty. Major League Baseball wants them to provide comfort. To do the latter, one must destroy the former. As a game far more deferential to tradition than, say, football, which periodically changes its rules to such an extent as to make the game unrecognizable and its numbers meaningless, baseball remains a static game in which statistics matter. We know this because your male peers growing up collected baseball cards and not football cards, because analytics conquered baseball before any other game, and because the popularity of rotisserie baseball predated the popularity of fantasy football by decades. In almost every other sport, fans talk winning when they talk history. In baseball, they talk numbers.
Alas, changing the records does not change the history books.
This Orwellian rewrite is about what’s happening now and not what happened then. It would make more sense for the NFL to erase its records during those dozen or so seasons that excluded African Americans — Sammy Baugh’s distorted passer rating against white cornerbacks unsurprisingly far beats his passer rating against integrated defensive backfields — than it would to include in MLB statistics players who never stepped to the plate during an MLB game.
Many people dislike that McMurphy gets lobotomized at the end. Should we change One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, too?
Baseball executives do not honor the greatness of Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard, and Satchel Paige by incorporating their statistics into their record books. They celebrate their own virtue. Beyond this, they showcase their unbounded arrogance in their presumption that they possess the power to rewrite the past. This is baseball’s version of destroying a Christopher Columbus statue.
Josh Gibson undoubtedly would have been an all-time MLB great if racial discrimination had not barred him from competition. The fact that he played catcher, and played his final seasons battling cancer, only serves to amplify his greatness. But he never played in the major leagues, and no amount of post–George Floyd reparations can amalgamize him into a Major League Baseball player. He belongs in the conversation for all-time great baseball players (as does Sadaharu Oh). He does not belong in the Major League Baseball record books.
MLB did not right a wrong here. It covered one up in its statistical legerdemain.
That invisible asterisk dogged Roger Maris when he broke the single-season home run record. It now obscures the entirety of Major League Baseball statistics.
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