NEGRO LEAGUE STATISTICS (a thread): There is a stigma associated with stats from Black professional baseball. This stigma dates back to the 1970s and 80s, and it goes a little something like this:

"the Negro leagues didn't have a centralized stat bureau, the box scores are missing and the ones we DO have are riddled with problems and so it's too bad, but we'll never know what this guys did and we'll just have to stick with the tall tales, folklore and hyperbole"

This is no longer true. In fact, the more this tired trope is repeated, the harder it makes things for today's Negro league researchers, writers and historians. We're constantly having to swim upstream because of this bullshit. Here are the facts, as of Fall 2020:

The seamheads team would like to change this. So, here goes....

1. Most Negro league games were covered in local papers (or the weekly African-American newspapers) and most of them had box scores. Sometimes there are multiple sources for individual games.

2. They can be HARD to find! Sometimes, the only source for an official Negro League game was the newspaper in the neutral site city where the game was hosted. This could be places such as Lima, Ohio, or Springfield, IL, or Des Moines, IA.

3. But after 50 years of labor, from the heroic efforts of Bob Peterson, to John Holway, to Dick Clark, James Riley, Larry Lester, Phil Dixon, Patrick Rock and Gary Ashwill (and others), after three generations of research...WE HAVE MOST OF THE BOX SCORES!

4. The seasons were short. The teams might have played 150 to 175 games each summer, but they only played 40, 50 or 60 games against fellow Neg league clubs. Some years, they played 80 or 90. Occasionally they played more than 100 "official" Negro Leagues games, but this was rare

5. The number of games played against Black opponents varied wildly between teams in the same league, same year. The 1st Place Homestead Grays played 102 games against major Black opponents in 1943. The last place NY Black Yankees (same league, same year) played only 40

6. We have 71 box scores for the Homestead Grays 102 regular season games. And 31 of the NY Black Yankees' 40 contests. The 1940s are actually a more difficult period to research than earlier decades and yet we managed to recover 72% of the box scores. Not too shabby.

NOTE: Go look under point #5 to continue the thread. My tweeting got derailed while walking the dog.