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Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson were two of the greatest Negro League players of all time.
Now, their statistics and records, along with those of roughly 3,400 other players, will join Major League Baseball’s books after the league announced on Wednesday that it is reclassifying the Negro Leagues as a major league.
Major League Baseball said that it was "correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history." The Negro Leagues, which consisted of seven leagues, will be included in MLB’s record from those circuits between 1920-48.
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In 1947, the Negro Leagues started to disappear after the legendary Jackie Robinson broke down the color barrier and became the first Black player in Major League Baseball when he played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
"It is MLB’s view that the Committee’s 1969 omission of the Negro Leagues from consideration was clearly an error that demands today’s designation," the league said in a statement.
Major League Baseball will work together with the Elias Sports Bureau to review statistics and records from the Negro Leagues, and they will try to figure out a way to incorporate them into MLB’s history.
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"We couldn’t be more thrilled by this recognition of the significance of the Negro Leagues in Major League Baseball history," said Edward Schauder, legal representative for Gibson’s estate and co-founder of the Negro Leagues Players Association. "Josh Gibson was a legend who would have certainly been a top player in the major leagues if he had been allowed to play."
Major League Baseball said that it considered different ideas from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, the Negro League Researchers and Authors Group, and studies by a host of other baseball authors and researchers.
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"The perceived deficiencies of the Negro Leagues’ structure and scheduling were born of MLB’s exclusionary practices, and denying them major league status has been a double penalty, much like that exacted of Hall of Fame candidates prior to Satchel Paige’s induction in 1971," baseball historian John Thorn said. "Granting MLB status to the Negro Leagues a century after their founding is profoundly gratifying."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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