Major League Baseball announced yesterday that the Negro Leagues — the seven leagues in which Black baseball players were allowed to play baseball during the first half of the 20th century — will be reclassified as major leagues, which means a few things. It means that the statistics of the Black players will now be regarded as official major league statistics, for one. More importantly, it means that the Negro Leagues are now officially equal with the major leagues of their time, a separate, but equal baseball league.
Weird how the early 1950s saw the end of a separate but equal facility for Black people. Probably the only time that happened in America.
Offhand but probably badly thought out jokes about integration aside, the end of the Negro Leagues really was a mixed blessing. Yes, it was a Good Thing that Black players were finally allowed into MLB, but for the first decade or so, there still weren’t that many actually allowed to play, and a lot of Negro Leagues stars ended up toiling in the minors for bad pay, outclassing their teammates daily and still not getting called up to the majors just because the parent team had already hit its quote.
Add in to that that the talent flight to MLB caused a drastic decrease in the quality of baseball in the Negro Leagues. In 1947 there were two full leagues, an American and a National; after 1948, the Negro National League had folded, and the Negro American League had become minor-league quality by 1951. The last remnant, the Indianapolis Clowns, lasted into the ‘80s, but as a Harlem Globetrotters-type sideshow, not a competitive baseball team.
None of that is to say that MLB shouldn’t have integrated, but it’s important to recognize the effect that integration had, and the way MLB’s extremely slow rollout of Black players did a lot of damage without being nearly as strong a symbol of civil rights as they would have us believe. They destroyed baseball for Black people in order to get a couple Black people on most teams. It’s easy for me to say it was worth it, but as anyone who has caught a glimpse of my forearms can tell you, I am extremely white, and therefore my opinion would likely undervalue the pain experienced by people whose lives were very little like mine.
So there’s damage there, even after the happy ending. It certainly can’t be undone, and maybe the good that came was worth the price. But it’s still a positive for MLB to recognize those baseball teams for what they were, which is legitimate major league teams full of legitimate major league players. The racism of the time is not some get out of jail free card that means today’s racists can technicality their way out of this. This is recognition that these players have long deserved.
Is is worth a ton in the grand scheme of things? Maybe not, because it doesn’t change any material conditions of anyone who suffered at the time. But that doesn’t mean this shouldn’t happen now. If this is the best that baseball can do, then it’s better to do it now than to not do it at all. They could have done better yesterday. They probably couldn’t do better tomorrow.
So yes, I think this is a good, long overdue move that won’t change how most people think about anything. But it’s not supposed to. It’s just recognition of the facts, and it’s increasingly rare in this country to treat facts like they matter, so when an organization goes out of its way to do that, we can give them kudos.
And besides, this made Willie Mays happy, and that’s the loftiest goal of all.