Negro Leagues stats officially incorporated into MLB record books

Negro Leagues Statistics Leaderboards Baseball — *Kansas City Monarchs pitcher Leroy Satchel Paige warms up at New York’s Yankee Stadium before a Negro League game between the Monarchs and the New York Cuban Stars on August 2, 1942.*

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Negro Leagues stats officially incorporated into MLB record books

Baseball legends like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth have been dethroned from their record titles.

Kansas City Monarchs pitcher Leroy Satchel Paige warms up at New York’s Yankee Stadium before a Negro League game between the Monarchs and the New York Cuban Stars on August 2, 1942.

Matty Zimmerman

By Micah Yason

In 2020, Major League Baseball announced it would recognize seven different Negro Leagues as official major leagues. And after a years-long project of researching the statistics of more than 2,300 Negro League players, MLB has incorporated those statistics in its record books.

Hall of Famer Josh Gibson has replaced Ty Cobb as all-time batting leader and Gibson is also the career leader in slugging percentage and on-base plus slugging percentage.

Reset checks in with an author and baseball expert to learn more about the history of Black baseball in the U.S. and what these recent changes mean for the legacy of those ball players.

GUEST: Larry Lester, co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, author of Rube Foster in His Time and Black Baseball in Chicago