Evaluating Negro Leaguers FAQ V 1.0 David Marasco With help from Sean Lahman and David Grabiner Comments/Corrections to marasco@nwu.edu Intro: From time to time people will argue about the best baseball players of all time on rec.sport.baseball. At some point somebody will jump in and declare something along the lines of "How can you not include Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson." There normally follows a long discussion not about the players in question, but the quality of certain kinds of evidence. Since the same points seem to be argued again and again, rather than ask people to folow long threads through dejanews we've decided to place some of the major points in a FAQ file. The point isn't to squash discussion, rec.sport.baseball in general encourages arguments and ideas, but we want to avoid seeing the same thing over and over again. This document exists so that new concepts come to the table. What's Inside: Q1 - Why do some people on rec.sport.baseball object so strongly to discussing Negro Leaguers in terms of "best ever?" Q2 - What is the current state of Negro League stats? Q3 - Why can't we just go along with what knowledgeable observers reported about the players? Q4 - What about games played between blacks and whites? Q5 - How about numbers like Paige's 2000 wins and Gibson's 900+ home runs? ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q1 - Why do some people on rec.sport.baseball object so strongly to discussing Negro Leaguers in terms of "best ever?" A1 - The main reason is that we simply don't have enough data to play with when it comes to the Negro Leaguers. The situation should not be viewed as rec.sport.baseball posters discounting the players due to lack of talent, but rather as their saying "look, we have no honest way of comparing these players to major leaguers." This newsgroup is a place where a lot of serious analysis takes place. In discussing a player's worth posters will often ignore certain stats (eg RBI's) which they feel do not correlate well with talent, and instead lean on other stats such as slugging and on base average. Often these numbers are adjusted to normalize for home park, and if the players are from different eras, an adjustment will be made for league offensive levels. Often defensive numbers will also be brought into play. Sadly, we do not have access to these kinds of numbers for Negro Leaguers. In the best case we may have some statistics, but often not things like OBA or SLG. So far no effort has been made to evaluate park effects for Negro League teams, and given the sample size of our availible information, this would probably prove fruitless anyway. For the most part defense must be judged soley on reputation. In general most posters are willing to make the statement "My top five pitchers are A,B,C,D,E and I agree that Paige/Redding/Williams should have a part in that discussion but we have no proper way of evaluating their true value." This seems to satisfy both sides, but it isn't normally said until about a dozen posts into a thread. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Q2 - What is the current state of Negro League stats? A2 - The good news is that we know a lot more than we did 30 years ago. The bad news is that even if we recorded the results of every existing box score we would not have a very good database. In many old boxscores AB's are not recorded, so something as simple as batting average cannot be calculated. Even in later boxes RBI's might not be mentioned. Walks are hit and miss, so OBA is also up in the air. Also, not every game has a boxscore. Many times only a final would be reported. This is especially true for the years during WWII. Also, teams in big cities got better coverage, so a slugger in a smaller market loses home runs simply because when we search for them today we find that nobody was there to record his feats. The Negro Leagues themselves from time to time tried to compile seasonal statistics, but these too were incomplete. Both Jim Riley and John Holway are rumored to have statistical encyclopedias in the works, and MacMillan has a Negro Leagues section. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q3 - Why can't we just go along with what knowledgeable observers reported about the players? A3 - After the lack of statistics has been covered, the next step in the thread normally talks about things like managers claiming a black player was worth a certain amount of money or that a certain player hit so many home runs on a certain date. Why are these stories discounted? The answer is because many posters in rec.sport.baseball look at the current crop of baseball "insiders" and feel that in some cases they don't deserve a lot of respect. The general attitude is along the lines of "If today's insider doesn't understand that Coors Field really helps a batter's stats, why should I believe what yesterday's insider said about player X?" The general mistrust of so-called experts is not the only reason that anecdotal evidence is so widely discounted. The sad truth is that the Negro Leagues suffered from poor reporting and many of the legends about the players were handled in an oral tradition. This tends to create inflated stories. As an example, one July 4 Satchel Paige tossed a no-hitter. He came in and proceeded to lose the second game of a double header that day. After some time on the road he pitched in a game in Chicago on July 8. This was in 1934. I have found newspaper articles from several years later that claimed he pitched the no-hitter, hopped into a car, and then drove all night to pitch a shutout the next day in Chicago. This version of the story ends up in Satchel's autobiography. In a similar vein, Josh Gibson is said to have once hit a home run out of Yankee Stadium. Several Negro League vets claim that this was done in 1934. But when 1934 newspapers are checked no evidence for the homer is found. Also, Josh gave an interview just before the 1943 season where he discussed his greatest home runs. No Yankee Stadium blast was mentioned. Too many of these stories fall apart when the details are checked. While there is no doubt at least some truth in most of them, they are very hard to trust. Hence these stories don't count for a lot in rec.sport.baseball threads. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Q4 - What about games played between blacks and whites? A4 - The quality of Negro Leaguers is often argued in terms of how they did against white competition. "Joe Blow bat .472 when Negro Leaguers played whites" is often the type of statement we'll see. But there are at least two problems with this evidence. The first is that the sample size is just too small. Most of these players don't have a month's worth of playing time recorded against white competition. It would be similar to deciding the league MVP based only upon stats from April. Second, many times white teams did not take the games as seriously as did the Negro League teams. While black teams often played as whole units, Major League rules did not allow more than 3 major leaguers from any one given team to barnstorm together (this rule was introduced in the early 1920's). This meant that many times a well-practiced Negro League team would run into teams that were semi-thrown together with players playing out of position and minor leaguers filling holes. Note: This isn't to say that the white players didn't want to win as much as the black players, only that they had some handicaps when putting their teams together. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Q5 - How about numbers like Paige's 2000 wins and Gibson's 900+ home runs? A5 - These are impressive numbers, but it is important to remember that they were made against all levels of competition. Negro Leaguers might play two games against local talent for every game against Negro League talent. To put this in a different light, home many home runs should Babe Ruth get credit for if we include all of his spring training home runs, his minor league home runs, his barnstorming home runs, the home runs he hit in Japan, his post-season home runs, etc. ? It is important to remember that Satchel never had a 20-win season in official Negro League play (although some of this is due to the fact that it was more profitable for his owners to rent him out than it was for them to let him pitch for their teams). In short, these numbers are not a good measuring stick because we have no idea how to normalize for the talent level that they faced. David Marasco marasco@nwu.edu http://pubweb.nwu.edu/~dmarasco "An object at rest cannot be stopped." - The Tick