This is a thread for posting historical Negro League schedules. I encourage anyone to post their schedule files here, although, like in the historical minor league thread, I ask that you follow the same format when you post (see the second post in this thread for an example of the format).
Major League Baseball decided that the following Negro Leagues will count as "major" for statistical purposes:
Negro National League (I) (1920-31)
Eastern Colored League (1923-28)
American Negro League (1929)
East-West League (1932)
Negro Southern League (1932)
Negro National League (II) (1933-48)
Negro American League (1937-48)
But the history of the Negro Leagues stretches back to the nineteenth century, and there were leagues that were considered "minor" as well as leagues that were planned but never got off the ground. They all have a place here.
A few words about the schedules. Very early on, most of the leagues adopted a split-season format, which saw the winner of the first half face the winner of the second half in a post-season series for the pennant. The first half usually ended around July 4 while the second half would end some time in September after Labor Day. The official split dates will be noted, but be aware that OOTP, at present, doesn't handle split schedules very well (see
this post for further details).
As for the leagues' schedule-making process, that also was usually split in two. The first-half schedule would be published before the season opener - sometimes only a few days before. The second-half schedule would be published - if at all - around the time the first half ended. That was in contrast to the white leagues, both major and minor, which, after 1876, always released their schedules for the entire year during the pre-season. There were a few reasons for this difference. The Negro Leagues, for instance, often didn't know what venues were available in advance. More importantly, the leagues couldn't anticipate which teams would survive into the second half, so a schedule released in April would often be made irrelevant by events two or three months later. Waiting until June or July to craft the second-half schedule, therefore, saved a lot of wasted effort.
That's not to say that the Negro Leagues followed their own published schedules. DeHart Hubbard, sportswriter for the Cleveland
Call and Post, echoed a common complaint when he wrote in 1943:
The Negro National League and Negro American League, as now constituted and organized can in no true sense of the word or stretch of the imagination be construed as real "leagues." Close scrutiny reveals them at best as loosely organized associations or booking agencies comprised of teams each going its own merry way, booking the best games it can regardless of "schedules" and totally oblivious to anything except making money for itself.... Our team owners do not respect their leagues, their players, other owners, their rules and regulations, or anything, except the chance to play before a "big gate." They are unwilling to post sizable forfeit fees to insure conformance with league rules and schedules. They deliberately break rules. They ignore scheduled games if there is a chance to make two dollars extra at some other park.
The problems that Hubbard pointed out in 1943 were endemic to Negro League baseball throughout its history. It might have been less common when the leagues had a firm hand at the tiller, such as in the early 1920s when Rube Foster was in charge, but teams were always liable to skip a league game to play a white semi-pro club if it meant earning more money - and it usually did. As such, an official schedule for any of the Negro Leagues should be viewed, at best, as aspirational.
Another problem for the OOTP schedule maker is that second-half schedules are hard or impossible to find. In my hours of searching, I've found plenty of first-half schedules but relatively few second-half ones. And that is, perhaps, understandable. Given the tenuous financial state of the leagues and the way that teams appeared and disappeared at random, it's possible that some leagues, if they survived past July 4, just never released second-half schedules and let the teams - whichever ones still existed - make their own arrangements to play other league teams and decide among themselves who won the second half.
The obvious solution, then, is to make "as-played" schedules, right? Well, believe it or not, that's even more difficult. Negro League teams were notorious for not reporting game results to the black press or submitting official scoresheets to the league offices. If you take a look at Seamheads or Baseball Reference, they don't post the game-by-game results for any of the Negro League seasons - and if they don't have them, nobody does. It's true that there are researchers who are working hard right now to compile that information, but until they publish their results "as-played" schedules will be even harder to create than "as-published" ones.
Most of the schedules posted here, therefore, should be understood as approximations of seasons that the Negro Leagues wanted to play, rather than accurate recreations of the schedules of the games that were actually played. Nevertheless, for the OOTP gamer who wants to get as close as possible to playing out historical Negro League seasons, these schedules are a "good enough" solution until something better comes along.