In response to an inquiry from The Ringer earlier this year, the league began exploring the possibility of reclassification, as we reported in August. But until 2020-when the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro Leagues coincided with sweeping societal protests of racial injustice and an abbreviated, jury-rigged MLB regular season-MLB hadn’t considered the subject. Last year, a collection of Negro Leagues scholars and researchers published a book of essays called The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues, which laid out the strong statistical and ethical case for inclusion. They wouldn’t let us play in the white leagues and we great ballplayers in the Negro Leagues, so how can you say we major league?” In the decades after the 1970 publication of Robert Peterson’s influential book about Black baseball, Only the Ball Was White, researchers such as John Holway and Larry Lester led painstaking efforts to assemble comprehensive statistics from long-buried box scores. As Hall of Famer James Thomas “Cool Papa” Bell once said, “The Negro Leagues was a major league. Negro Leagues players and historians have advocated for reclassification for decades. “We are now grateful to count the players of the Negro Leagues where they belong: as major leaguers within the official historical record.”
“All of us who love baseball have long known that the Negro Leagues produced many of our game’s best players, innovations, and triumphs against a backdrop of injustice,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement provided by the league. Mays is one of a multitude of Black or Hispanic players whose performances in the seven leagues collectively called the Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1948-a period during which thousands of Black players were barred from joining the segregated National and American Leagues-will finally be afforded the designation they deserve. More than 70 years later, The Ringer can report that Major League Baseball is belatedly designating the Negro Leagues as major leagues and adjusting its records accordingly. The fleet center fielder’s hits- 17 of which have been documented, although seven of those came during the NAL Championship Series-helped propel that team to a pennant, but they aren’t represented in Mays’s major league résumé. Before he debuted for the New York Giants in 1951, Mays played for the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League. Soon, though, that career count will climb slightly higher. That mark has stood ever since, undisturbed except for the passage of the few players who’ve subsequently hurdled him on the all-time leaderboard, where he ranks 12th. That hit, the last Mays ever recorded during the regular season, raised his career total to 3,283. On August 29, 1973, 42-year-old Met Willie Mays smacked a fifth-inning single to left off Padres southpaw Rich Troedson, driving in Bud Harrelson from second to put the Mets ahead 2-0.
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