Major League Baseball announced Wednesday that it’s reclassifying the Negro Leagues as a major league, meaning the statistics and records of Negro League greats like Pittsburgh’s Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and others are set to join the MLB books. The announcement came on the centennial of the Negro Leagues founding, with MLB saying it was, quote, “correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history.” The Negro Leagues consisted of seven leagues, and MLB will include records from those leagues between 1920 and 1948.
The Negro Leagues began to break up one year after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line when he was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. The MLB will work with the Elias Sports Bureau to review Negro Leagues stats and records and figure out how to incorporate them into MLB’s history.
Although there was no standard method of record keeping for the Negro Leagues, there are enough box scores to put together some verifiable statistics.
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