Josh Gibson, Ty Cobb and Rethinking Baseball Statistics

by Lincoln Mitchell

June 2024

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NOTE - This article comes from Lincoln Mitchell's Substack page, Kibitzing with Lincoln . Please click HERE to follow Lincoln on Substack. (This was originally published on April 7, 2024.)

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Major League Baseball recently changed its official records so that Negro League players and Negro League statistics count towards official, whatever that means, MLB records. The particularly case that has drawn the most attention is that Josh Gibson, the great Negro League slugger, is now is the all-time batting leader as his .373 lifetime batting average is higher than Ty Cobb’s .367.

The best Negro League players including Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige were among the very best players of their era. Paige may have been the greatest pitcher ever. He dominated the Negro Leagues, was a very effective American League pitcher in his 40s and even threw three shutout innings against the Boston Red Sox when he was 57-years-old.

Any discussion of the greatest position player of the pre-World War II era must include Gibson and Charleston alongside white players like Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Honus Wagner. Baseball was mostly integrated in the post-war era, so the question of the greatest player since 1947 is an easier one-because the answer is Willie Mays.

Recognizing that those Negro League stars were great players and important parts of the story of both baseball in the US and African American history is essential, so anything that highlights their contributions to the game is positive.

Incorporating Negro League statistics into official MLB statistics is one way to draw attention to those great players as well as to the uglier, but no less important, side of baseball and  American history. However, recognizing these statistical accomplishments should not allow us to ignore some of the stark differences between the Negro Leagues and the white big leagues in the first half of the twentieth century.

Precisely because of the same racism that kept African American players out of the white majore leagues, the Negro Leagues struggled. League executives and team owners had a difficult time keeping teams and leagues afloat in an era when African Americans had little access to capital from conventional sources like banks and cities were not about to build facilities for African American athletes.

Negro League players confronted very difficult conditions not least because of cruel and harsh segregation in much of the country. The result of this was that the Negro Leagues were an amalgamation of some official seasons, a lot of barnstorming, some truncated seasons and some seasons or parts of the seasons in the Caribbean. Thus, Negro Leagues records are incomplete. No player had a ten or twenty year career that was as regular and scheduled as their white counterparts.

The American and National Leagues were also very different in those years from what they are today because they did not draw the best talent. In the 21st century, to a great extent, the best players in the world compete in MLB, but that was not true before 1947. Not only were African American players excluded, but dark-skinned Latinos did not play in white baseball either. Similarly, it was not until the mid-1990s that significant numbers of players from Asia entered MLB. It is also the case that many very solid players who were white and could have played in the American or National League in the 1930s and 1940s decided to stay in the west coast and continue playing in the PCL.

The inclusion of Negro League statistics, and Josh Gibson’s newest batting title raise other questions and challenges for baseball historiography. The first is that if Cobb is supplanted by Gibson as the player with the highest lifetime batting average, then we should probably revisit the question of who is the real home run king.

The home run title is already contested because Barry Bonds has the most big league home runs with 762, but many believe that because Bonds was connected with PED use, Henry Aaron’s 755 home runs is still the top mark. However, Sadaharu Oh hit 868 home runs while playing at the highest level in Japan from 1959-1980. During those years, MLB was the stronger league, but Oh had essentially no chance to play in the US, so his home runs have to be considered as well.

A more recent example is Ichiro Suzuki who had 3,089 hits in the Major Leagues and an additional 1,278 hits in Japan for a combined total of 4,367 or 111 more than Pete Rose. Ichiro’s claim at the title of all-time hit king cannot be ignored-and recognizing Josh Gibson’s extraordinarily accomplishment with the bat only makes that more evident.

All baseball statistics from before 1947, and in some cases later, are shrouded in uncertainty. Neither Gibson, Ruth, Cobb, Aaron, Oh, or even Willie Mays played against the best competition in the world. Similarly, for the Negro Leagues the line between official and unofficial games was much greyer, and the record keeping much more erratic than for the American and National Leagues during the same time period. This makes truly comprehensive and meaningful statistical comparisons across continents, oceans and racial dividing lines even more difficult than comparing Mays to Barry Bonds or Babe Ruth to Henry Aaron.

It is perhaps true that we may never know for certain who had the highest batting average, most wins or most home runs ever, but it is much more meaningful to that future baseball fans will now know more about the accomplishments of Paige, Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Charleston and so many others.