Black Baseball
NOTE: THIS PAGE CURRENTLY MIRRORS MY Negro League Baseball (Black Baseball) PAGE AT MY OTHER BASEBALL-HISTORY-FOCUSED SITE, RetroPlay.net. SO, AS THINGS NOW STAND, IF THE CONTENT IS, FOR SOME REASON, UNAVAILABLE AT ONE SITE, IT MIGHT STILL BE AVAILABLE AT THE OTHER (FYI).
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5/10/23: “UPON FURTHER REVIEW, …” IN THIS UPDATE SESSION, THE REALLY FINAL NLB/BLACK BASEBALL FILES HAVE BEEN POSTED AND MADE AVAILABLE FOR YOUR (FREE) DOWNLOADING. THIS BATCH, THEN, REPRESENTS THE “PUBLISHER-READY” DATA THAT I WAS AIMING FOR IN THE 5/2/23 PARAGRAPHS BELOW. FOUR OF THE FIVE CATEGORIES ARE PRESENTED HERE IN 2-WIDE FORMATS (TWO CATEGORY SORTS SIDE-BY-SIDE ON A SINGLE LANDSCAPE-ORIENTED, SCROLLING PAGE). RANKINGS BY PRIMARY POSITION(S) ARE ALSO AVAILABLE IN THIS SCROLLING FORMAT FOR EASE OF ACCESS AND YOUR OWN EDITING/RE-ORGANIZING. JUMP TO THE “REALM” OF THESE FINALIZED VERSIONS BY CLICKING HERE…
5/2/23: WITH ONLINE ACTIVITY STALLED FOR A WHILE — THOUGH THE OFFLINE WORK WAS DILIGENTLY CARRIED ON — IT’S TIME TO UPDATE ALL OF OUR NLB/ORGANIZED BLACK BASEBALL DATA (FROM THE LATE 19TH CENTURY THROUGH 1948). WE CAN NOW CLOSE THE BOOK, I CAN SAY WITH A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF CONFIDENCE, ON THE CAREER NUMBERS OF THE PLAYERS FROM THOSE OFF-THE-MAIN-PATH CIRCUITS WHO QUALIFIED FOR THE OPEN BASEBALL LEAGUE (O.B.L.). (SEE BELOW THE TILDES/SQUIGGLIES FOR OBL REQUIREMENTS).
THE UPSHOT: IF I WOULD BE PLANNING ON PUBLISHING “HARD COPY” (PHYSICAL BOOK) NLB-OBL DATA ON THIS SEGMENT OF THE OVERALL PROJECT (AND THAT IS A POSSIBILITY), WHAT I’D SUBMIT FOR FINAL-DRAFT PUBLICATION WOULD VARY VERY LITTLE FROM WHAT’S NOW POSTED ON THIS PAGE. JUMP TO THE MAY, 2023 UPDATED SECTION HERE. MEANWHILE, I’LL BE TAKING A LOOK AT HOW MUCH OF THE INTERVENING CONTENT NEEDS TO EDITED/UPDATED — WHEN I SET ASIDE THE TIME — AND THIS PAGE CAN BE “FINALIZED.”
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On this page now resides a fairly-comprehensive Negro Leagues/Black Baseball Register. RetroPlay.net OBL (Open Baseball League) rules set minimums of 10(+) Plate Appearances (PA) or 9(+) Innings Pitched — in any one season — for any player to be included within the OBL. Consequently, many historical Major-League Baseball (MLB) and Negro League Baseball (NLB) players didn’t make the “cut”; thousands of players — between MLB and NLB — didn’t make enough official game appearances to qualify for this replay/simulation project. Another OBL requirement is simply having a “full name” (two names, or at least initials [plural] and a surname) to identify a player as an authentic individual in time, and on a MLB/NLB diamond. Here again, all of those designated as simply, “Jones” or “Smith” or “L.J.” or “J. Williams” will not be found in RetroPlay player directories, registers, or rankings. All of this is to explain that while every player that could be found is listed at the Seamheads.com Negro Leagues Database, only qualified players will be listed here; so this directory will necessarily be narrower than the Seamheads, state-of-the-art version, but broader than the NLB portion posted at Baseball-Reference.com. HUGE CAP TIP: Long before Baseball-Reference.com recognized and included 7 leagues’ worth of Negro League players as MLB players, the folks at Seamheads were painstakingly gathering NLB data into an unsurpassed NLB database, upon which I relied nearly 100%. [It’s my understanding that one of the principals/founders — Dan Hirsch — moved to Baseball-Reference from Seamheads/The Baseball Gauge a year or two ago and has taken his data with him; it seems that it’s his data, primarily, that is now largely featured at Baseball-Reference. This link should help explain what I’m talking about, but I do miss “The Gauge”]
Important note of grateful recognition: I urge you to remember that without the Negro Leagues Database, I’d have never been able to flesh-out a major portion of this long-time dream project, and its creators and website “curators” deserve a big thank-you! IMO. My humble compilations and extrapolations lean heavily on what they’ve done at Seamheads AND Baseball-Reference.
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MAY, 2023 UPDATED NLB-OBL DIRECTORY/CATEGORY SORTS
NOTES: In these 30-year “grids,” the user can read across from a player’s name to see his WAR values in the individual seasons (columns); his career WAR and position(s) played (either left or right margin, where space permits); and gauge his career arc, from start to finish (many players can be found in two successive eras; they “cross over,” for example, from 1930 (end of era/grid 2) to 1931+ (beginning of era/grid 3). Other features: average WAR-per-162-games-played ( “_._ PER 162”) indicates average WAR numbers for a standardized “full season” of 162 games, or 68 (Games + Games Started) for pitchers. Of course, NLB players didn’t ever schedule or play 162 LEAGUE games in any season, but the total number of games they played in a calendar year — against all levels of competition — could easily approach (or exceed?) 162 games (when winter league activity is included). In any case, that’s the standardization devised and employed by my go-to data suppliers, baseball-reference.com and seamheads.com; it works for me ! “RC” stands for Regional Code, and it starts with the NE tip of the U.S. (Maine is RC 10), increases with movement down the Atlantic seaboard, and around to the Gulf of Mexico; into the Eastern interior, through the Midwest; onward through the West and Northwest to the Pacific; back to the Caribbean (Cuba, et al) and Central and South America; to the other nations of the Pacific, Asia, Europe, and finally, the full circle is completed with Canada (RC 700). This geographical pattern is followed in the grids, and is the first criterion for sorting the player groups (chronological appearance is next, and when 2 or more players logged WAR values in the same region and debut year, the higher WAR value takes the “top bunk.”
NLB-OBL PLAYERS AS THEY ARE REPRESENTED IN THE GRIDS, AND IN REGIONAL ORDER
1,687 NLB-OBL PLAYERS IN ALPHABETICAL AND REGIONAL ORDER (SIDE-BY-SIDE SCROLL FORMAT):
1,687 NLB-OBL PLAYERS IN CAREER WAR AND RetroPlay Rating (RPR) ORDER (SIDE-BY-SIDE SCROLL FORMAT):
NOTES ON THE POSITIONAL RANKINGS: The first 37+ pages of either version are NLB players (both NLB-only and NLB-MLB players) ranked in primary position groups by RetroPlay Rating and Career WAR. At the bottom of the 38th page is the icing on the cake: Offered there is our Top 25/All-NLB (only) team. Criteria: the 8 best pitchers; 2 best catchers; 3 best first-basemen (+); 4 best middle-infielders (2b/SS); 2 best third-basemen; 5 best outfielders; and the incomparable multi-position superstar, Martin Dihigo, all 25 of whom never had the opportunity to play in the American Major leagues (as defined in their playing days, and all the way up until 2020). So this is, in effect, the NLB-ONLY All-star/All-time team according to RPR.
[Notes on middle-infielders: going by RPR and any other performance metrics that might be used, there’s apparently quite a drop-off from any of our four shortstops (primarily) and the top “pure” second-baseman, Bingo DeMoss (88 RPR; Wells comes in at 451, Lloyd at 336, Moore at 320 and Lundy at 220). Because 1) most MLB-caliber shortstops can handle second base successfully (one step down the “defensive spectrum,” so generally regarded as a slightly less-demanding position to play) — a premise that is consistently a part of the thinking throughout this RetroPlay system, and 2) “Pop” Lloyd DID play over 250 NLB/NLB vs. MLB games at 2b and “King Richard” Lundy DID record 38 games played in the Negro Leagues at 2b, the thought here is that many/most managers of this All-Star squad would prefer to have Lloyd and Lundy at 2b, rather than DeMoss and Bonnie Serrell (70 RPR); wouldn’t you?]
With all that having been said, here are the Excel (top) and PDF versions of the NLB by-position rankings:
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To my knowledge, what you’ll find here on this site and on this page is a unique compilation; nobody else has assembled it all, and in the same way. So explore the content, catch up with some history, and feed your imagination about what might have been.
5/11/2023 SIGN-OFF: COMING SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE? SCANNED IMAGES FROM BOOKS I OWN OF SOME OF THE LESS-FAMOUS BUT NOTEWORTHY NLB/BLACK BASEBALL PLAYERS. WHEN TIME PERMITS, I HOPE TO ADD THIS FEATURE AND BRING MORE PLAYERS INTO THE SPOTLIGHT.
