By any measure, baseball superstar Willie Mays exuded greatness. Widely recognized as a spectacular five-tool ballplayer who could do it all, Mays may have been the greatest of all time. And he was also a terrific human being.
Mays passed away at age 93 on June 18. He missed one more Juneteenth by a single day, but he did experience the great integration of baseball, fought in the Korean War, and witnessed the space race, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, computers, the smart phone, and baseball’s steroid era. And he lived just long enough to see one of the greatest of all baseball transformations.
On May 29, 2024, Major League Baseball made a bold move to incorporate the statistics of Negro League ballplayers, a long-overdue metamorphosis that actually began four years ago. On Dec. 16, 2020, baseball officially bestowed major league status to seven Negro Leagues that existed from 1920 to 1948, affecting about 3,400 Black players.
Several records were changed, some did not. Josh Gibson’s lifetime .372 average has replaced Ty Cobb’s career .367, and five of the reconstituted top 10 career averages now belong to former Negro League players. The top two on-base percentage leaders, Ted Williams (.482) and Babe Ruth (.474), are unchanged, but Gibson took over the top single season slot with his lofty .466 mark for the Homestead Grays in 1943. The top career home run leaders have not changed: Barry Bonds (762) and Hank Aaron (755).
Interestingly, Mays himself had once played for the Birmingham Black Barons, where he got 10 hits that have now been added to his career total. His spectacular 660 home runs were diluted by the steroid era, when he was bumped to sixth place. Still impressive, especially since he missed two full major league seasons serving in the Armed Forces during the Korean War.
The logic behind this new baseball order is compelling. In 1969, a Special Committee on Baseball Records recognized six various major leagues going back to 1876. The committee neglected all the Negro leagues. Now baseball has revisited that oversight and added the Black players from seven overlooked leagues. But this should have been done in 1969.
The upper echelon of Negro League talent, where the records are made, has long proven itself. Mays promptly became a major league wonder with 24 All-Star appearances, two MVP awards and a 1954 World Series title that featured one of the great signature catches of all time. But there were others. After integrating in 1947, 11 of the next 15 National League MVP’s were Black, including the Cubs’ Ernie Banks, who did it twice (he had begun with the Negro League Kansas City Monarchs in 1950). Hank Aaron, who supplanted Babe Ruth as the lifetime home run king, started with the Negro League Indianapolis Clowns in 1952. Dodgers great Don Newcome pitched two years in the Negro Leagues, and the legendary Satchel Paige finally got to pitch in the majors when he was 41 years old. Chicagoan Bill Veeck signed him to the Cleveland Indians where he went 6-1 with a 2.48 ERA in 1948.
After decades of unfair exclusion, adding the Negro League players and statistics is eminently justified. Perhaps the 1954 Supreme Court edict in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision says it best. From public education to water fountains, lunch counters, and America’s pastime, separate but equal is inherently not equal at all. And 1954, as it happens, was also the breakout year of Willie Mays, the Say-Hey Kid.
Eldon Ham is a member of the faculty at IIT/Chicago-Kent College of Law, teaching sports, law and justice. He is the author of five books on the role of sports history in America.
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