Quote:
Originally Posted by uruguru
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.
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Not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. In 1930, I would guess that most MLB teams carried around 22 players on their rosters. They were allowed to carry more (I think the limit was 25 at the time, but I don't have that information in front of me), but for cost-cutting reasons most teams didn't carry the full limit and some teams might have even carried fewer than their normal complement on road trips.
In contrast, my guess (and, with the Negro Leagues, it's almost always a guess) is that most teams carried around 15 players on a normal basis. And MLB only recognizes the NNL as a major league in 1930, so, although Seamheads lists 15 NeL teams in 1930, only 8 of them were "major." So if we calculate that MLB teams carried 22 players and NeL teams carried 15, we get 352 MLB players and 120 NeL players, which means that NeL players represented around 25% of all major-league players in 1930. And if you did an analysis based on player-games-played, the proportion would be even more heavily weighted in favor of the white MLBs, as the NNL teams only played around 80 league games that year.