Social Justice

Negro Leagues now part of Major League Baseball

Major League Baseball has announced that records of Negro Leagues players will be included in the game’s official statistics

Published

5 years ago

December 18, 2020

UVM Staff

East Team, 1948 Negro league East–West All-Star Game, Comiskey Park, Chicago, Illinois. Back row: Lester Lockett, Monte Irvin, Rufus Lewis, Henry Miller, Luke Easter, Robert Griffith, Pat Scantlebury, Wilmer Fields, Bill Cash, Vic Harris and manager Jose Fernandez. Front row: Buck Leonard, Bob Harvey, Marvin Barker, Frank Austin, Pee Wee Buts, Minnie Minoso, Luis Marquez, Louis Louden, Bob Romby, Junior Gilliam. (Photo: Ernest C. Withers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons | https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1948_Negro_League_East_All-Stars.jpg)

Major League Baseball has announced that records of Negro Leagues players will be included in the game’s official statistics. A “long overdue recognition,” reports NBC.

Before Jackie Robinson broke race barrier with the Dodgers in 1947, Black players were barred from playing in the MLB. Denying many baseball fans to witness some of the best hitters, pitchers and fielders of the 20th century.

“All of us who love baseball have long known that the Negro Leagues produced many of our game’s best players, innovations and triumph against a backdrop of injustice,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement.

Officials said MLB will include the records of 3,400 players who competed in seven Black leagues between 1920 and 1948.

“For historical merit, today is extraordinarily important. Having been around so many of the Negro League players, they never looked to MLB to validate them,” Negro Leagues Baseball Museum President Bob Kendrick said in a statement. “But for fans and for historical sake, this is significant, it really is.

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Unheard Voices, an award-winning, family-operated online news magazine, began in 2004 as a community newsletter serving Neptune, Asbury Park, and Long Branch, N.J. Over time, it grew into a nationally recognized Black-owned media outlet. The publication remains one of the few dedicated to covering social justice issues. Its honors include the NAACP Unsung Hero Award and multiple media innovator awards for excellence in social justice reporting and communications.