Major League Baseball (MLB) is in the middle of rewriting its history. It’s a very popular activity these days.
Just look at Democrats, who pretend their party wasn’t the party of slavery or didn’t create Jim Crow and segregation laws, after they fought and lost a war to preserve the institution of owning other human beings.
Baseball refused to allow Black players into its ranks until 1947. MLB would like to be applauded for finally doing the right thing, all the while pretending that the reason for that applause never existed. To that end, they are rewriting the record books to include records from the Negro Leagues, as though they had occurred in the major leagues.
There is a big problem with this: Those records did not occur in the majors. And lying to the public about it won’t change MLB’s bigoted past. Nothing ever will. The only answer is to get used to having a past you cannot be proud of.
Once everyone involved or affected is dead, it is impossible to right historical wrongs. You cannot “woke” the perpetrators or the victims back to life. And everything else, including this statistical gimmick, is just performative virtue-signaling.
Pandering is already pathetic, but what self-respecting person would embrace this form of pandering by proxy? MLB would now tell us that the all-time career batting average leader for Major League Baseball is a man who never played an inning in the major leagues. Josh Gibson, who would be the all-time leader in batting average instead of Ty Cobb, died four months before Jackie Robinson made his debut.
Gibson was a great player in the Negro Leagues. He should been a great major leaguer. And he wasn’t, because people now long dead wouldn’t let him play. Pretending he was in the majors won’t ever change that fact.
More than that, even if you took every game Gibson played and pretended all of his games were big league games, he would not have led the league in anything, because he didn’t play in enough games or take enough at-bats.
In 1955, Ted Williams hit .356, but he didn’t win the batting title. Al Kaline did. Kaline hit only .340, but Williams didn’t have enough at-bats to qualify for the crown. Baseball required about 400 at-bats for the batting title, and Williams had only 320 in 98 games out of a 154-game season. He simply hadn’t played enough. Everyone understood this at the time, and every baseball fan still does.
The most games Josh Gibson ever played in during a single season was 69. He played over 60 games in a season only three times in 14 years. How many major league players have had a really good April and May, only to slow down dramatically over the course of a long season? Thousands?
Granted, Negro League seasons were short, and Gibson was never allowed the opportunity to play in the majors. It wasn’t his fault. Baseball was segregated. It was stupid and evil, but it was a fact. Pretending it didn’t happen doesn’t change anything.
Ty Cobb, the actual all-time career batting average leader, hit .366 over 11,440 at-bats in 3,034 games, over a span of 24 years. Gibson, in contrast, played in only 602 games over 14 seasons, with a total of only 2,168 at-bats.
Yes, Gibson hit .373 over that span, which is very impressive. But there have been many players, including Cobb, who have flirted with .400 in the middle of the season, only to falter over the course of a long, hot summer. Should we recalculate all the averages to the mid-season numbers for an apples-to-apples comparison to the new holder of MLB’s all-time batting title? If the number of at-bats doesn’t matter, then maybe we should go back and credit batting titles to players who went on the disabled list after hitting .500 during the first week of the season.
I realize that you can play all sorts of games with statistics, but they’re usually just for the sake of arguments among fans. Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs, but most of his first four seasons were spent as a pitcher. This denied him a lot of games and at-bats. What might he have done in those seasons? We’ll never know, but we can speculate whether Hank Aaron would have ever caught him if he had been allowed to hit the whole time.
Willie Mays was denied two seasons due to military service. With his 660 home runs, he probably would have beaten Ruth’s 714.
And for that matter, what do you do about Barry Bonds?
And should we count Sadaharu Oh’s 868 total home runs, even though they were hit in the Japanese pro league?
We can all debate these points, but we can never know.
Likewise, to give Gibson something he didn’t earn, for whatever reason, is just condescension masquerading as justice. No ballplayer worth his salt would accept accolades he hasn’t earned.
Josh Gibson was a very talented athlete. He was robbed when he was born, thanks to the bigoted attitudes of those who had segregated the game in the first place. Whatever his faults, Cobb did not make that decision. He was far and away the greatest hitter in the majors over a very lengthy career, and he doesn’t deserve to be demoted in the history books for it.
If MLB wants to come to terms with its past, it can do so by simply accepting that it happened. No amount of self-flagellation or pretending can ever change it.
Gibson was a great player and the best in the Negro Leagues. Was he the best ever? We’ll never know. What we do know is Ty Cobb did more for longer, as did all the other MLB players on the all-time average list. Gibson’s batting average is higher, but given his number of career at-bats, he would not have qualified for the list if the rules had not been changed and the bar lowered.
Josh Gibson deserved better, and he still does. He deserves the dignity he was denied throughout his lifetime, to be treated honestly and fairly while being celebrated for what he actually did. That is decidedly not what MLB is doing now.
Derek Hunter is host of the Derek Hunter Podcast and a former staffer for the late Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).