Negro Leagues Entering MLB Records Nice Gesture, But It's More Fantasy League Than Practical | Glenn Guilbeau

Josh Gibson should have been the first black player to go from the Negro Leagues to Major League Baseball ahead of Jackie Robinson on April 15, 1947, with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Gibson was a better and much more powerful, legendary, Ruthian player. But he died on Jan. 20, 1947, at age 35 of a stroke from a brain tumor.

Gibson, Robinson, Satchell Paige, Larry Doby, who was the second black player in MLB after Robinson, and many other black players should have spent their entire professional careers playing for MLB teams or in their organizations on the way up.

The great Josh Gibson's statue at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. (Blair Kerkhoff/The Kansas City Star/ via Getty Images)

That is a wrong that cannot be fixed.

Once black players began playing in the Majors, many of them were great, such as Robinson, Paige, Doby, Minnie Minosa, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Monte Irvin, Willie Mays, Ernie Banks and many others. And virtually all of them proved they belonged or more than belonged. So, they should have been there all along. The same sort of stupidity kept the number of starting black quarterbacks down in the NFL until only recent years and decades.

But to put a huge portion of the statistics from the Negro Leagues (1920s through 1950s) into the MLB record book now is a mistake. MLB did this on Tuesday. The new MLB record book and database will go public on June 20, when the St. Louis Cardinals play the San Francisco Giants in a Negro Leagues tribute game at historic Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama.

That's a wonderful idea, but it doesn't add up statistically.

"While writing my latest book, I generally steered clear of stories about the old Negro Leagues," noted baseball author Rob