Quote:
Originally Posted by diesel230
Pelican, i don't think anyone is challenging the idea that the players weren't talented. It's the amount of games, the talent level of some of these barnstorming teams they played and the fact that a lot of these games were exhibition in nature. On top of of all that, the statistics and record keeping were shoddy at best. Saying "Seamheads" for some reason seems to mean with 100% certainty that Hoss Walker went 1 for 4 in August of 1941, even though a quick search will show that even the people accumulating the Negro League Stats say its not very accurate.
The new ERA season leader is based off of 28 innings. You know that small a sample size throws the whole thing off.
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There are a lot of issues.
Sample size is one of them, obviously
Another issue is the talent level of the league. No one can or should argue that the top NLB players would not have been top MLB players, but how deep was that talent over the entire league? If the depth was thinner, then that could arguably pad the stats of the top NLB players.
To give you an idea of what I mean, I selected a year at random: 1930. In that year, there seemed to be 15 NLB teams and 16 MLB teams. In other words, 48% of what we now consider to be "major league quality" teams were composed of black players. But in 1930, they represented only 9.7% of the total US population. So clearly the talent level of the NLB was thinner, and that would have inflated the stats of the top players.
And after 1947, the NLB talent level absolutely cratered. There were guys making the NLB all-star teams in the 1950s that were equivalent to milb talent and could not crack MLB rosters. So do we count pre-integration NLB players differently from post-integration players?
Race is such a loaded topic in the country so it's hard to imagine having a numbers-oriented conversation without it degenerating into name-calling.
Mixing NLB stats with MLB stats doesn't make any statistical sense because they were created by two completely segregated player pools. It has the same mathematical rigor as adding in Japanese stats.
But obviously, it's being done to redress a social injustice so ultimately none of the other arguments even matter.