Colin Sheridan: Baseball finally catching up with troubled racial past
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Last Wednesday, Major League Baseball took a major - if long overdue - step, correcting the sport’s troubled past regarding race relations in America. From the 1920s to the 50s, Negro League Baseball (NLB) was the home for black players who were segregated from the other, whites-only, baseball clubs. And for decades, the stats of those black players were kept separate from the official Major League Baseball (MLB) record books. Last week, the MLB officially merged the NLB stats with their own. The immediate effect of this was many MLB records have now been supplanted by the achievements of previously overlooked black players.
Josh Gibson, for example, now holds the record for highest career batting average, surpassing Ty Cobb. Gibson's on-base plus slugging percentage also beats the great Babe Ruth, while his career on-base percentage now ranks as the third-highest of all-time.
Gibson played for teams with names completely unfamiliar to most American sports fans; the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords primarily, before spending the latter part of his career in the Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican leagues. To many, he was known as the "black Babe Ruth.” Others who saw both men play called Ruth "the white Josh Gibson.” In 1972, he became the second black player into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but up until last week, most baseball nerds would never have heard his name.
Tragically, Gibson died of a stroke at the age of 35 in the same year Jackie Robinson became the first black player in modern major league history in April 1947. Larry Doby, who after Robinson became the second man to break baseball's colour barrier, regarded Gibson as Robinson’s superior at the time, saying: "One of the things that was disappointing and disheartening to a lot of the black players at the time was that Jack (Robinson) was not the best player. The best was Josh Gibson. I think that's one of the reasons why Josh died so early — he was heartbroken.”
Major Leage Baseball first announced its decision to incorporate Negro Leagues statistics in 2020, and formed a 15-person committee to help determine how to do so. In the past, concerns about whether Negro Leagues data was comprehensive enough were among the reasons it wasn’t fully included. Baseball is easily one of the most stat-driven mainstream sports out there, and the leagues recordkeeping suffered in comparison due to lack of resources and appropriate funding. Thanks to the work of hundreds of dedicated fans, including those behind Seamheads, a data research group that has focused specifically on compiling and verifying data about the records of back baseball players, played a significant role in filling these gaps by analysing countless newspaper reports to find and verify information.
For the families of those players long ignored, as well as the activists who mobilised to advocate on their behalf, this day was a long time coming.
“Black baseball history still remains a separate ghetto outside the mainstream history of white baseball,” researcher John Holway wrote in 2001. While such disparities are improving, MLB is still grappling with a number of racial inequities, as the number of black players in the league has decreased over time, and as management of teams has stayed predominantly white.
This statistical recognition of the Negro Leagues is happening at a time when the percentage of African American professional baseball players is in single digits, after being at or near 20% during much of the 1970s and 1980s. The hope is that the MLB’s Negro Leagues-enhanced database will expose new fans to scores of forgotten ballplayers such as Bullet Rogan, a two-way star in the mould of current MVP Shohei Ohtani who pitched every fourth day while also batting cleanup for the Monarchs — despite standing 5-foot-7 and weighing 165 pounds.
Of America’s big three sports - the NFL, NBA and MLB - baseball is languishing in a distant third. Yet, its core base remains as die-hard as ever. It is the definitive game of ritual and tradition. Steps to quicken the game up, such as the pitch timer introduced last season, have certainly shortened game times, but proof of whether it’s enough to reclaim fans has yet to be seen. Regardless of rule changes or PR campaigns, the sport can at least rest easy with the fact that, when it comes to reckoning with its difficult past, it has at least started to move in the right direction.
Scotland may have defeated Israel 4-1 in their Women’s Euro 2025 qualifier last week, but the real winner was the protester who delayed the game for 30 minutes by chaining himself to a goalpost at Hampden Park. Despite the game taking place behind closed doors, a protester wearing a “Red Card For Israel” t-shirt was able to evade security and attach himself to one of the goal frames just before the scheduled kick-off time of 7.05pm.
About 400 pro-Palestine protesters also gathered outside the national stadium in Glasgow. Whatever FIFA, UEFA and the International Olympic Committee made of it all is anybody's guess, but what we can be sure of is this type of peaceful disruption is likely to occur more and more over the summer months, as Israel continues to compete in international sport, and as its athletes prepare to participate at this summer's Olympic Games in Paris.
An empty Hampden Park is likely to be as easy as it gets with regard to security and protests, yet the disruption was executed with little fuss, and maximum impact, earning far more exposure and reporting than anything that happened during the actual game of football. Calls for Israel’s expulsion from the Paris Olympics are getting louder and louder, and are not just limited to pro-Palestine activists and organisations such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
In France, there have been protests outside the Paris Olympics headquarters, while French lawmakers have written to the IOC, demanding that Israel be banned and its athletes forced to participate as neutrals. The IOC, though, remains unmoved, with its head Thomas Bach saying in March that there is “no question” about Israel’s participation, comments that have also been repeated by other IOC officials.
As the humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens by the day, and the links between the IDF and ordinary, everyday Israeli athletes become more transparent, the dissent is due to grow louder and louder. Pretty soon, a peaceful protester chaining himself to an unharmed goalpost will seem like a happy memory of more innocent times.
Spare a thought for Ross Byrne. The Leinster 10 no doubt endured a tortuous week of rumination after his side's loss to Toulouse in an epic Champions Cup final last weekend, and this week, as the post-mortems themselves were forensically picked apart, it was Byrne who bore the brunt of many experts' criticisms.
Byrne, it appears, is regarded by his doubters as too safe a pair of hands. Good, but not great. His fall guy status thrusts the often ignored Ciarán Frawley into the role of misunderstood genius, a la Wes Holohan. I’m sure the truth is a little more nuanced, and perhaps Byrne would welcome Frawley getting more time at first receiver, if only to show his detractors how hard his job actually is.
I’d like to consider myself a compassionate chap, but having never recorded a 10 on any golf hole, it’s difficult for me to sympathise with world number one, Nelly Korda, who did just that on her third hole of the Women's US Open at Lancaster County, a tournament she was odd-on favourite to win. Her septuple-bogey 10 on the par-three 12th included hitting three balls into the water. Despite rallying on Friday, Korda failed to make the cut. Proof that golf, like life, is often very hard, no matter who you are.