Museum Head: Baseball's Embrace Of Negro Leagues Is An Atonement, Not A Validation

Numbers drive baseball, a game whose managers, analysts and fans obsess over matchups, tendencies and results. Its box scores, those proto-spreadsheets, instantly turn human accomplishments into history. The quest is for clean, comparable data.

But for decades, the human aspect of the game — specifically, the racism that pro baseball both reflected and perpetuated — clouded that data. While the feats of white players were carefully recorded and celebrated, the accomplishments of Black players in the Negro Leagues were set apart or forgotten entirely.

But that's been changing: Baseball Reference, a gatekeeper of the game's statistics, is integrating data from the Negro Leagues era of 1920-1948 into its record books — a move it calls "long overdue."

"We are not bestowing a new status on these players or their accomplishments," Baseball Reference said. "The Negro Leagues have always been major leagues. We are changing our site's presentation to properly recognize this fact."

The change follows Major League Baseball's recent move to the Negro Leagues, which has 35 playersin the , as having "major league" status. In both cases, the shift was framed as the correction of an oversight. And in Kansas City, Mo.