As MLB Changes Records, Josh Gibson, Not Ty Cobb, Is All-Time Batting Leader

It’s been an article of faith for nearly a century, as engraved on a tablet by Abner Doubleday himself: the greatest hitter in major league history is, and always will be, Tyrus Raymond Cobb.

But history evolves. We know that Doubleday did not, in fact, invent baseball. And starting Wednesday, Josh Gibson will replace Cobb as the leading hitter in the game’s official records. At .372, Gibson’s career batting average eclipses Cobb’s by six points.

Major League Baseball on Wednesday will announce the results of a new integrated statistical database covering Negro League records that operated from 1920 to 1948. Formal acceptance of the data comes three and a half years after MLB officially recognized the Negro Leagues as major leagues in December 2020.

“People will be, I don’t know if the word upset, but they might be uncomfortable with some Negro League stars now in the career and season rankings,” said Larry Lester, author and researcher veteran on the Negro Leagues who served on the Committee.

“The hardliners may not accept these statistics, but that’s okay. I enjoy conversations at the bar, the hair salon or the pool hall. This is why we do what we do.

John Thorn, the official MLB historian, said that with the St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants playing at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Ala., next month, the time was right to release the conclusions of the committee. Thorn estimated that about 75 percent of all Negro League scores have been documented and that MLB would update the records as more were discovered.

To some extent, the Negro League numbers will always be a work in progress. Barnstorming games, essential as a financial lifeline for Negro League teams, are not included in the statistics.

“For example, the Kansas City Monarchs travel to Chicago, and once they get to town, they play as many games as possible,” Lester said. “So instead of a three-game series, they play five — and on the way, they might stop in Moline and play the home team to pick up some change.

“From the players I interviewed, they say they played almost every day, sometimes two or three games a day and not in the same place. So they probably played 150 to 175 games a year, but only 60 to 80 games counted in the league standings.

These shorter official seasons, MLB noted in a statement announcing the change, naturally lead to “extremes in the standings.” But the league verified a 60-game season during the COVID-19 pandemic, and with that as recent precedent, Thorn said, it made sense to verify Negro League seasons as well.

“The irregularity of their championship schedule, established in the spring but improvised in the summer, was not their fault but rather born of MLB’s exclusionary practices,” MLB said in the statement.

The committee used the same statistical minimums for the Negro League leaders as for the American and National Leagues: 3.1 plate appearances or 1 inning pitched per scheduled team game. Scheduled games range from 26 (Negro American League, 1942) to 91 (Negro National League I, 1927).

The new accounting gives Gibson not only the career batting average record, but also the single-season mark at .466 in 1943, followed by Chino Smith’s .451 mark in 1929. The previous record, the mark of .440 by Hugh Duffy for Boston in 1894, fall. at the third.

However, in the baseball reference, Gibson’s .466 caliber is not even listed in bold in his career record. That’s because another hitter in Gibson’s league, Tetelo Vargas of the New York Cubans, hit .471, which the website considers the career best.

Vargas is credited with 136 plate appearances this season. But MLB considers that league’s schedule to be 47 games, so Vargas doesn’t reach the minimum 146 plate appearances required to be recognized as a league leader.

In baseball’s benchmark single-season batting average rankings, Vargas and Gibson are followed by another .466 hitter – Lyman Bostock Sr., the father of the Twins and Angels star outfielder who was murdered after a game at Chicago in 1978.

Bostock Sr.’s .466 mark is recognized by Baseball Reference as the highest average in 1941 (which is why Ted Williams’ legendary .406 for the Red Sox in 1941 is not listed in italics on the site). But MLB doesn’t recognize Bostock Sr.’s average in the new single-season rankings because he did so in just 84 plate appearances.

“Here’s the difference,” said Sean Forman, president of Sports Reference LLC. “In the Negro League statistics, there are games missing; maybe we have the score for the game that was played, but we don’t have a score in the box for this one.

“So I’m looking at Bostock in 1941. We have a record 23 games for him, and we have the Birmingham Black Barons (Bostock’s team) with 45 games that season. Bostock, with 84 plate appearances, would therefore be below 45 times 3.1 (threshold). The fact is it’s over 3.1 per game for games we have box scores for. We use this number to define the minimum.

“We have certain reasons for making the choices we made, and MLB has certain reasons for making the choices they made.”

Baseball-reference uses Negro League statistics from the Seamheads database, a project that Lester said began with an MLB grant in 2000. Researchers Gary Ashwill and Kevin Johnson exhaustively researched verified scores boxes, and although both are members of the committee, it took years. for MLB and Seamheads to agree on data implementation.

“The negotiations were tough,” Thorn admitted. “And part of the difficulty was not financial – that was almost set aside and agreed – but rather how the statistics would be used and the level of involvement that Seamheads could have on an ongoing basis. It took a long time to reach an agreement, but once we did, we brought on Retrosheet as an additional statistical partner. And, of course, we already had Elias on board as official statistician, responsible for auditing the data.

It took more than two years for these entities to come together. But once they did, it seemed like the pace picked up. Thorn said the committee was careful to rely only on box scores, not just game counts. Gibson reportedly hit four homers in a game in 1938, for example, but without a score there’s no way to make all the numbers work.

“If a man hits a home run, he hits it on somebody,” Thorn said. “Thus, in the absence of the double-entry accounting that is necessary to balance the entire historical record of Major League Baseball, we cannot make exceptions for anecdotal evidence.”

Likewise, Thorn said, a 1948 game account indicates Willie Mays scored for Birmingham. But without a score to verify it, Mays’ career home run total remains at 660 — all with the Giants and Mets.

The records are not complete, but they are accurate in what they cover, as it relates to MLB. Careful research demands it.

“It takes me about 30 minutes to enter a box score – line by line, number by number, and then I do data integrity checks at the end of the season,” Lester said. “I have about 16,000 box scores in my database, so it took me years to accomplish this task.

“But it’s fun. We welcome the critics, the skeptics. But we know the numbers are solid.

Decades ago, Lester said, people told him the numbers simply didn’t exist — “that African Americans were apathetic about recording baseball history,” he said. -he declares. He’s proud to have helped subvert that trope, uncovering the numbers that validate the accomplishments of Oscar Charleston, Bullet Rogan, Turkey Stearnes and others.

Revised documents – even certified official – will not influence everyone. Lester understands this. And despite all the meticulous record keeping, the assumptions of segregation can never be resolved.

“Critics will say, ‘Well, (Gibson) only played against other black teams,'” Lester said. “Well, Babe Ruth never hit a home run off a black pitcher, and Josh Gibson never hit a home run off a white pitcher. So I guess what I’m saying is that the amount of melanin or lack thereof does not indicate how great a baseball player is.

(Photo from the top of the Gibson statue in Washington, DC: Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated/Getty Images)