Negro League Statistical Review Committee

The Negro League Statistical Review Committee was created by Commissioner Rob Manfred on December 16, 2020, when he announced that Major League Baseball had decided to recognize a number of Negro Leagues active between 1920 and 1948 as being full-fledged major leagues. The Committee was headed by John Thorn, baseball's official historian, and included representatives from the research community and from the Elias Sports Bureau. Its mission was to determine how to integrate statistics from the Negro Leagues into the official record of baseball. The Committee has 16 members.

The Committee made its first determinations public on May 29, 2024 with an announcement explaining its findings and their impact on the statistical record. The most prominent of these were changes to the leader boards for certain statistical categories, most prominently batting average (Josh Gibson was now recognized as the all-time leader) and ERA. Also, some players who had played in either the National League or the American League and also in the Negro Leagues saw their career totals increased as a result of the findings (Willie Mays was the most prominent name among these, but there were many others).

Other organizations, most prominently Baseball-Reference and SABR, had gone ahead well before the publication of the Committee's first findings to integrate all the major leaguers from the Negro Leagues in the summer of 2021 (this site was part of that effort).

It should be noted that reconstituting the statistical record from the Negro Leagues remains a ongoing task, and that statistics are bound to change, sometimes in ways that will be disruptive, when more data is discovered and integrated into the official record. Frustratingly, this data is bound to remain incomplete as parts of the record have been lost to history, either because it was never properly recorded, or the records there were have been lost or destroyed.

Further Reading

• "First set of findings from the Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee", mlb.com, May 29, 2024. [1]
• Anthony Castrovince: "What to know about Negro Leagues stats entering MLB record", mlb.com, May 29, 2024. [2]
• Sean Forman and Cecilia M. Tan, eds.: The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues: Essays and Research for Overdue Recognition, Baseball-Reference and SABR, Phoenix, AZ, 2021. ISBN ISBN 978-1-970159-63-9