Josh Gibson and the Negro Leagues are finally getting proper recognition, rewriting record books

It took 25 years after his death for the best baseball player in history to reach the Hall of Fame. It took 77 years for his statistics to be validated.

Better late than never.

After years of research, much of which continues, Major League Baseball announced Wednesday that it now will recognize the statistics of more than 2,300 players who played in seven of the varied Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1948. This means that, finally, the best hitter in history will be recognized as such.

Josh Gibson, the second of 37 Negro Leagues players inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, immediately becomes the all-time and single-season leader in batting average, slugging percentage, and OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage). Gibson, who mainly played for the Homestead (Pa.) Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords also hit well over 800 home runs, but only 174 of them came in what MLB deemed to be the sorts of games that were verifiably and properly recorded against elite competition. “Barnstorming” games, the lifeblood of Black players in the era, didn’t make the cut.

Sigh.

“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,” said much-maligned MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, who is on a rare hot streak.

Within the last 14 months, Manfred has overseen the implementation of the snappy pitch clock, which shortened games; the resignation of horrendous umpire Ángel Hernández, which made games fairer; and, on Wednesday, further validation of the Negro Leagues.

A constellation of other stars joined Gibson in baseball’s statistical heavens. Satchel Paige was the first Negro Leagues player inducted to the Hall of Fame, in 1971, and was perhaps the greatest pitcher in history. His 1.10 ERA in 1944 with the Kansas City Monarchs now ranks third in single-season ERAs. In a delicious irony sandwich, Gibson’s .372 career average is 5 points better than Ty Cobb’s, and Negro Leagues center fielder Oscar Charleston is 7 points behind, in third, which certainly would enrage Cobb, a notorious racist.

» READ MORE: The night West Philly’s Arlington Henderson faced the legendary pitcher Satchel Paige

Grays first baseman Buck Leonard ranks eighth in average and, more significantly, seventh in OPS, a stat that better indicates a player’s power numbers. This is especially significant to me, and not just because I played baseball and I am Black.

It’s especially significant because, on April 9, 1997, the Daily News produced an award-winning special section celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s major league debut. My assignment involved explaining the significance of the Negro Leagues. I researched with the Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues, which remains on my bookshelf. I toured the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., which I visit every time I’m back in K.C.

Finally, in the most poignant experience of my part of the project, in March 1997, I visited Buck Leonard in his hometown of Rocky Mount, N.C. He was not well, but he knew why I was there, and it made him very happy. Me, too.

Buck Leonard died eight months later.

» READ MORE: Dave Dombrowski built the Phillies to be this good. They’ve just never been this whole.

As much as I love sports, I’m not much of a stats guy. None of the records that precede desegregation in any sport impress me much. What Pete Rose did was much more impressive than Cobb, even if Rose did play in more than 500 more games than Cobb. Rose got 35 of his 4,256 hits against Bob Gibson (no relation to the aforementioned Josh Gibson), and hit .307 against Gibby to boot. What Hank Aaron did was better than Babe Ruth, who never had to face, say, Don Newcombe. (Hammerin’ Hank hit three of his 755 homers off Newk, and had a .316 lifetime average against him.)

As a matter of fact, if you think that the Negro Leagues don’t belong in the same record books, frankly, you probably have a good argument. We tend to focus on the Negro Leagues’ best players, and there certainly seems to be a dense concentration of talent among the small number of teams at any given time.

Personally, it’s not something I would waste time arguing over. Statistics often ignore context, especially in eras that not only perpetuated discrimination but also operated without payroll restraint and essentially shackled players to teams for life.

But stats connect fans to the industry and stats connect fans to their heroes, so if that’s how you get down, rock on.

The important thing, to me, isn’t that the numbers are perfect, it’s that we’re recognizing that the era in question was far from imperfect.

Anything that highlights, glorifies, or validates Black culture and achievement in the midst of the Jim Crow era, well, I’m all for it. My folks were born in the 1930s. These were the baseball heroes of my mom and dad and my aunts and uncles. These were the players I heard about growing up, not Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx, or Ruth.

While many of my friends heard about their dad and granddad being at, say, one of the games during DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, I heard different stories. I heard how Gibson was in a coma and was diagnosed with a brain tumor in early 1943, refused to have an operation, then won two batting titles and three home-run crowns from 1943-46. He died of a stroke in 1947. He was only 35.

» READ MORE: Selfless, disciplined Phillies like Bryce Harper and Bryson Stott aren’t chasing as many bad pitches

Josh Gibson and Paige were the legends of my youth. Robinson, noble and strong, was a demigod. My mother, now 92, spent much of her five difficult pregnancies bed-resting on our couch in the living room in Newark, N.J., listening to or watching baseball. She remains a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. (I know they’re in L.A., but I’m not sure, these days, if she remembers that.)

Segregation existed in all other sports. Baseball was different. Bigger. Baseball, from the segregated 1920s through the 1960s, was America’s game. It’s the only thing that mattered. Boxing and horse racing were mammoth enterprises as well, but baseball was America’s common religion. Blacks just weren’t allowed to worship the way whites were, and Blacks weren’t allowed to be worshiped the way whites were.

On this day it is a hodgepodge of irony, paradox, contradiction, and coincidence that baseball — the sport best known for its segregation and the sport most responsible for desegregation (in a time when simple truths about America’s shameful, racist past are being muzzled by racist educators and politicians) — is taking such a progressive and proper step toward recognizing a people who played as large a role in building this country and its national pastime as any group or race.