Jan 10, 2022
We geek out this week with
Sports Reference, LLC founder and president Sean Forman
("The
Negro Leagues are Major Leagues:
Essays and Research for Overdue
Recognition") for an inside look into the
complex and detailed process of integrating the statistics of the
recently elevated Negro Leagues into the official records of Major
League Baseball.
Advocated for decades by
countless baseball researchers and historians - and buoyed by MLB's
long-overdue proclamation in December 2020 that seven of Black
baseball's segregated professional leagues between 1920-1948
finally deserved "major league" status - the incorporation of Negro
League player data into the sport's overall statistical record has
been both swift and meticulous.
Forman talks us through how the
company's vaunted
Baseball Reference team partnered with Negro League stats
specialist
Seamheads.com to onboard and combine data from the Negro
National League (I) (1920–1931); the Eastern Colored League
(1923–1928); the American Negro League (1929); the East-West League
(1932); the Negro Southern League (1932); the Negro National League
(II) (1933–1948); and the Negro American League (1937–1948).
And how the process will remain
iterative for some time to come.