On Wednesday, Major League Baseball added the statistics of 29 seasons from seven Negro Leagues to its official database, broadening the depth of the statistical pool and even jockeying the list of all-time leaders in some categories.
Josh Gibson, for example, is now the career leader in batting-average (.372, moving ahead of Ty Cobb), slugging percentage (.718, moving ahead of Ruth) and OPS (1.177, ahead of Ruth), and he holds the all-time single season records in each of those categories. He takes a more official place in the conversation of greatest baseball player to ever live.
The process of their addition has been painstaking, with historians searching for records, determining their veracity and gauging which leagues met the standard of "Major League."
There's one thing that won't change, however: Milwaukee sports star Hank Aaron still officially has 755 career home runs.
Aaron's three months with the Negro Leagues came after the newly recognized era
Aaron, who spent 12 of his illustrious 23 big-league seasons as a member of the Milwaukee Braves and two more seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers, famously broke Babe Ruth's home-run record in 1974 and finished with 755 career home runs, a figure that came to represent one of baseball's greatest achievements.
That number isn't going to change, although Aaron did play about three months with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro Leagues in 1952, discovered while playing in Mobile, Alabama. The Boston Braves bought Aaron's contract from the Clowns later that season and shipped him off to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where he began playing affiliated ball. By 1954, he was a Rookie of the Year candidate in Milwaukee with the Braves.
Several outlets have reported that the Howe Sports Bureau credited Aaron with a strong three-month run in Indianapolis, including five homers. If those home runs were added to the database, he'd jump up to 760, not enough to bypass Barry Bonds (762) as the all-time home run king but close enough to be interesting.
But the era of Negro Leagues getting added to the database runs from 1920 to 1948, "at which point the Negro National League collapsed and the World Series was a dead letter," said Major League Baseball historian John Thorn, a Beloit College alumnus.
"The Negro American League continued to play, with an added emphasis on barnstorming games," Thorn said. "So, our decision not to include the Indianapolis Clowns post-1948 or Henry Aaron at all had nothing to do with either (team or player), but instead our evaluation of the major-league caliber of the surviving NAL."
In other words, the league wasn't at the same level as Major League, and "barnstorming" games included a variety of competition levels.
"Ernie Banks, Toni Stone and other noteworthy players came into the NAL after 1948," Thorn said. "Their Negro League record will not, in this Release 1.0 of the newly integrated MLB database, be included."
The Milwaukee Bears join the fray, but not Pete Hill (completely)
The Milwaukee Bears played one rough season in the Negro National League in 1923, finishing 14-47-1 in a year that included a bevy of road games. The Milwaukee Brewers have often paid homage to the Negro Leagues by wearing Milwaukee Bears jerseys in one-off games over the past few seasons.
The best offensive player on that team? First baseman Percy Wilson, who had an OPS of .823
Dicta Johnson led a very rugged pitching staff, with a 3.68 ERA, though he wasn't one of the team's two primary starting pitchers.
The most notable figure with the Bears was the manager, Pete Hill, a baseball Hall of Famer but not someone whose own playing stats are fully reflected in the new database, having spent most of his career in the pre-Negro Leagues prior to 1920. The baseball pioneer's career began as far back as 1889.
More:These are the Wisconsin connections to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown
Hugh Duffy takes a back seat to Josh Gibson in single-season average
Josh Gibson's .466 average for the 1943 Homestead Grays became the new best single-season batting average, bypassing the .440 posted by Hugh Duffy of Boston with the National League in 1894.
Duffy spent the 1901 season with the old version of the Milwaukee Brewers. His own Hall of Fame plaque indicates the storied average was .438, a number that was tweaked as more information became available through history.
CC Sabathia was part of the committee process
Former Milwaukee Brewers great CC Sabathia was part of an extensive committee known as the Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee, tasked with discussing the research findings and determining which leagues merited inclusion.
Listen to MLB historian John Thorn discuss the process below
Thorn spoke to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Brewers podcast (now called Microbrew) in 2020 about the process of adding Negro Leagues stats to the MLB database. Hear below, beginning at the 34-minute mark.
