How a Group of Amateurs Rewrote the History of America’s Pastime

Gary Ashwill’s dissertation was slow going.

Poring over his research on 18th- and 19th-century American literature and culture in Duke University’s library in 2000, Ashwill looked for distractions during breaks. He found them in Duke’s collection of Black newspapers. In their pages, sandwiched between community announcements and the news of the day, were the results of Negro League baseball games.

Baseball is a data-mad sport. Every play yields figures upon figures: the speed of the pitch, the angle of the hit, the accuracy of the fielding. Box scores unspool the narrative of each game, chapter by chapter, inning by inning. “You can read all the drama in the statistical lines,” Ashwill said.

Ashwill had grown up as a baseball fan in the 1980s. He “lived and died” each season rooting for his hometown Kansas City Royals, and devoured baseball encyclopedias and the work of statistics gurus like the writer Bill James. But those books hadn’t told the stories he now found in fading newsprint.

For a century, the Negro Leagues were absent from baseball’s almanacs and fact books, omitted from its official story. Some detractors said Black players weren’t Major League caliber; others argued Negro League teams’ irregular game schedules made their stats impossible to collect. Whatever the excuse, the play of some 3,400 athletes had largely gone untold and untallied because of the color of their skin.

Yet in Duke’s archive, Ashwill found records, albeit imperfect, of Negro League games played 70 and 80 years earlier. He began to spend more time scrolling through old reels of microfiche, copying scores, then comparing them to local and national coverage to compile more-complete game summaries. After months of research, he worked up the nerve to post some of his findings, on a Y2K-era online message board for baseball fans and researchers.

Ashwill never did finish his dissertation. Instead, in the ensuing years he became part of a small community of mostly volunteers dedicated to painstakingly documenting Black baseball history. They have pieced together fragmented box scores, confirmed the identities of little-known ballplayers, and tracked down accounts of individual games in out-of-print publications in small-town libraries. Eventually, Ashwill and others started an online database to spotlight the achievements of players kept out of baseball’s all-white major leagues.

They had little expectation, though, that the Negro Leaguers would receive official acknowledgement from professional baseball. “It can be really hidebound,” Roberta Newman, a professor at New York University and a baseball scholar, said of Major League Baseball.

But in December 2020, the league did just that: Robert D. Manfred Jr., baseball’s commissioner, announced it was “correcting a longtime oversight in the game’s history” and integrating the records of seven Negro Leagues that operated between 1920 and 1948. He credited the work of a half-dozen researchers, including Ashwill, for the change.

Finally, this May, MLB released revised record books. Josh Gibson became baseball’s all-time batting and slugging champion. Negro League greats like Oscar Charleston, Buck Leonard, and Turkey Stearnes now share the leaderboards with Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams — even though they weren’t allowed to compete on the same playing field.

World-changing research often rests upon the largesse of government grants and the support of tenure. Although Ashwill’s search began in a college archive, he and his collaborators did their dogged work outside the well-worn path that runs through college campuses. In doing so, these passionate amateurs pulled off the quintessential underdog narrative: They rewrote the history of America’s pastime.

Baseball wasn’t segregated from the start. In the sport’s earliest days, following the Civil War, a handful of Black athletes played alongside white teammates. By 1887, there were 20 Black players in the pros, most with minor-league teams.

But it wasn’t long before a color line was drawn. As more white players refused to suit up against Black competitors, club owners came to a tacit agreement not to sign Black prospects. When racial segregation became the law of the land at the dawn of the 20th century, Black players had been exiled from professional baseball.

They wouldn’t play in the major leagues again until April 1947, when Jackie Robinson stepped onto Ebbets Field for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Black players didn’t put down their bats and gloves for a half-century, though. All-Black teams continued to compete against one another, and in 1920, a group of Black team owners met in Kansas City to form the Negro National League, the recognized start of organized professional Black baseball.

For Black America in those decades, baseball played an important cultural and community role. Negro League games drew crowds as large as 10,000 in industrialized cities of the Midwest and Northeast, like Chicago and Indianapolis, that had become magnets for Black migrants from the rural South. The games were the “big Sunday social event,” said Kevin Johnson, who started the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database with Ashwill and others. “People would even leave church early.”

Larry Lester, another baseball researcher, was born two years after Robinson’s big-league debut. By then, the Negro Leagues had begun their decline, as white teams raided them for their talent and fans followed. Within a decade, the era of professional all-Black baseball would be over; the only teams left were novelty acts.

Still, Lester’s childhood was steeped in Negro League lore. He went to school with the children of Satchel Paige, the legendary pitcher, and retired players lived in his Kansas City neighborhood. To him, the Black game’s stars shone just as bright as the Kansas City Athletics teams he watched play at Municipal Stadium, selling newspapers and collecting bottles to scrape together the price of a ticket. If there was change left over, he’d buy a scorecard and pencil to record the plays of the game. “In baseball,” he said, “we’re bean counters.”

But when Lester wanted to see how his Negro League heroes stacked up against stars of that era — to see, say, how a young Paige’s stats compared to those of Catfish Hunter, who would go on to be elected to the Hall of Fame — he was stymied. Its players were missing from baseball’s official statistical compendiums. The Sporting News, baseball’s bible, had no coverage of the Negro Leagues. The last book on the subject, Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, had been written in 1907.

The baseball pasts of former Negro Leaguers were tabula rasa, their statistical histories wiped clean when they joined the once-all-white teams. It didn’t make much difference for Robinson, who’d played a single year, for the Kansas City Monarchs, before being signed by the Dodgers. For others, it created a bizarre incongruity. Paige’s stats began when he joined the majors in 1948 — as an 18-season veteran of the Negro Leagues and a 42-year-old rookie.

A player like Gibson, who had died at 35 just months before Robinson’s first big-league game, had no place in the record books. When it came to counting, it was as if “African American athletes just suddenly became good enough in 1946,” said Todd Peterson, a co-chair of the Negro Leagues Research Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research, or SABR.

The omission was partly a reflection of the Negro Leagues’ instability, even in their heyday. Teams, and leagues themselves, came and went from year to year, and the Depression exacerbated the precarity. Though the teams drew crowds, few had their own ballparks, making their schedules erratic and dependent on the white teams that were frequently their landlords. They often “barnstormed” the country, playing exhibition games against minor leaguers, semi-pro and college teams, and one another in small towns where locals would pay to see a bit of baseball. These itinerant matchups could be more frequent than official league competition.

Systemic racism undercut the Negro League’s stability, said Peterson, editor of The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues: Historians Reappraise Black Baseball. “They would have loved to play 160 games against each other, but they had to make a buck.”

But Lester refused to believe that baseball talent could only be decided on white America’s terms. In the pages of bygone Black newspapers, he, too, found another side to the story.

As a teenager, he began taking the bus to Kansas City’s downtown public library, spending hours feeding dimes into the microfilm reader. When he had exhausted the local Kansas City Call, he ordered back issues of other Black weeklies from around the country through interlibrary loan, rushing to copy as many box scores as he could before he had to return what he had borrowed.

The work was tedious but addictive, Lester said, the payoff when a season’s worth of records showed which player was a team’s best batter or who had notched the most strikeouts. “You could quantify their greatness,” Lester said. The racism behind Black players’ exclusion from best-of lists was clear to him. It was, he said, “apartheid baseball.”

Over the years, Lester’s statistical collection ballooned to fill two-dozen filing cabinets, including some 16,000 photographs. He recorded more than 8,000 minutes of interviews with aging Negro Leaguers like Cool Papa Bell, Quincy Trouppe, and Tweed Webb about their playing days, preserving stories of Black baseball that might have otherwise died with them. In 1990, he co-founded the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

Today we may be in a “golden age” of Negro League scholarship, said Gary Gillette, a baseball writer and researcher, “but it’s built on the shoulders” of Lester and others of his generation.

When the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, which is operated separately from Major League Baseball, assembled a group of authors, historians, and researchers in 2000 to compile a comprehensive account of Black baseball, Lester was one of three experts asked to lead the study. Based on its findings, 17 players and executives from the Negro Leagues and from less-organized eras of Black ball were elected to the Hall of Fame, joining earlier inductees such as Paige and Gibson.

Ashwill was also among the experts enlisted by the Hall of Fame. By then, he was working as a writer and editor but spending as many as 20 hours a week on his “weird, obsessive hobby” churning out detailed posts on baseball listservs.

In addition to Duke’s archives, Ashwill had discovered an extensive collection of Cuban newspapers at nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Many Negro Leaguers supplemented their salaries by playing during the winter in independent leagues in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America. The Cuban box scores had additional value — the winter leagues allowed white and Black players to compete alongside one another. Black players like Pete Hill, a star before the organized Negro Leagues, soundly outhit white big leaguers over several seasons in Cuba.

Ashwill liked how the data held the answers: “There was a solidity to the numbers.”

That’s not to say that the work of reviving baseball history was straightforward. Far from it.

To begin with, there was the issue of 100-year-old source material: newsprint fades, reprints blur, ink bleeds through pages. Recordkeeping could be spotty. Box scores might be truncated for space in a newspaper column or a week’s worth of results published together, without clear dates for each game. Players with similar names — box scores don’t have first names and many Negro Leaguers went by nicknames — could be confused, causing statistics to be conflated or misattributed. Teams, too — consider the Cuban Giants, the Cuban X Giants, the New York Cubans.

“The past,” Ashwill said, “is very imperfectly preserved.”

Piecing together the results of a long-ago season is mostly detective work, reassembling fragments of information from a miscellany of sources. Maybe the daily newspaper reliably catalogs the previous day’s scores, while the black weekly offers full color coverage. Teams barnstorming through baseball-starved small towns might get front-page write-ups.

Identifying a single player can require similar forensics. Birth records and draft cards can establish an age, affirm a given name, or corroborate right- or left-handedness. Local papers might note the accomplishments of a hometown star who made big-time ball. Photos can offer clues, in the details of a uniform or the background of a ballpark.

In the days before digitized records, fetching primary-source material came with particular challenges for researchers like Ashwill. Many libraries balked at lending out fragile microfilm reels. Finding information meant going to the source — dusty courthouses, out-of-the-way archives.

Any travel became an unofficial research trip for Ashwill. On vacations home to Kansas City, he’d head to the public library. Catching up with friends in Ann Arbor, he roamed the University of Michigan’s stacks. During a visit to Washington, D.C., he spent a day at the Library of Congress, paging through hard-to-find newspapers.

Increasingly, Ashwill could also rely on the help of others to send him materials from places like Erie, Penn., and Muncie, Ind. A fellow Negro League enthusiast drove hundreds of miles to Zanesville, Ohio, to hunt down local clippings from an unaccounted-for exhibition game in which Gibson hit an incredible four home runs.

Ashwill’s work had begun as a solitary undertaking, transcribing box scores onto yellow legal pads. Over time, he taught himself how to use spreadsheet programs and file sharing. He started a blog, Agate Type, where he detailed his discoveries like the impact of big-city race riots on Negro League teams and crowdsourced information such as the identity of a squad in distinctive checkerboard plaid.

In 2011, he was approached by Kevin Johnson, a baseball-fantasy-league acquaintance who had been “blown away” by the statistics Ashwill had unearthed. “I never thought we could be that comprehensive,” Johnson said.

A data analyst by day, Johnson had been working on a ballpark database for Seamheads, a baseball-history website. He had an idea: Why not make a similar one, publicly available and easily searchable, for the Negro Leagues?

Their creation has helped democratize Negro League data. The site is a baseball geek’s dream: Want to know the best Negro League team in 1943? (Washington’s Homestead Grays.) Which player has the career highest wins above replacement? (the center fielder Oscar Charleston.)

Even with technology, the work remains time-consuming. Box scores aren’t scannable, so each piece of information must be entered manually. Still, the Seamheads database, which incorporates the substantial findings of Lester’s Hall of Fame research team, now contains statistics from about 72 percent of all known Negro League games.

Unusually, the data is more comprehensive the further back you go, before the major leagues began to divert Black talent and attention.

The surprise 2020 announcement wasn’t the first opportunity Major League Baseball had to recognize the Negro Leagues.

In 1969, a special committee on baseball records was named to be the arbiter of statistical disputes. Among the responsibilities of the five-person panel — which was all male and all white — was to decide which leagues since 1876 would be granted major-league status and thus count in baseball’s records.

None of the Negro Leagues were among the six the committee said should receive such a designation. There’s no sign that the commission decided to leave them out, said Adam Darowski of Sports Reference, which publishes pro and college sports statistics. It seems that members didn’t even consider them.

By 2020, times had changed. Across the United States, cities were rocked by racial unrest and anger, leading many American institutions — colleges, sports teams, Fortune 500 companies — to affirm their commitment to diversity and equity.

The pandemic reduced baseball that year to just 60 games, played with no fans in the stands, the shortest regular season in more than 140 years. Baseball’s decision that the 2020 season would count as a full one — there’s no asterisk next to the Los Angeles Dodgers’ World Series win — undercut a longstanding argument against inclusion of the Negro Leagues: That their regularly irregular schedules and fewer official games made it impossible to compare their stats to those of white contemporaries.

Covid was a “central precipitating cause” for the Negro Leagues “to come in for reconsideration,” said John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, who argued they should be counted.

“That 2020 was the centennial of the founding of the Negro Leagues was not lost upon us, either,” he added.

In fact, there’s a good argument that the adverse conditions in which Negro League teams operated — constant travel, shoestring budgets, competition in unfamiliar ballparks, some little more than pastures — speaks to the quality of their play, said Darowski, executive director of design and product management for Sports Reference.

Today, Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers is celebrated for his prowess both at the plate and on the mound, but many Negro Leaguers were strong two-way players. Because cash-strapped Black teams fielded smaller rosters, many played multiple positions.

White major leaguers are held up as the standard of greatness, but the first players to integrate the sport should have quelled doubts about the quality of Black baseball: Nine of 11 National League MVP winners between 1949 and 1959 came from the Negro Leagues, including Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Willie Mays.

Yet today, nearly eight decades after integration, the number of Black major leaguers is historically low. Just 6 percent of big-league ballplayers were Black in 2023, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, at the University of Central Florida.

Meanwhile, nearly three and a half years after the announcement of MLB’s plans, the Negro Leagues’ stats became official. By then, just three former Negro League players were still alive. One of the three, Mays, died a month later.

“They shouldn’t have had to wait to see their names in the official records,” Gillette said. “They were robbed of recognition.”

The slow rollout had some Negro League advocates, like Sean Gibson, Josh Gibson’s great-grandson, questioning whether the original announcement was a “publicity stunt.”

One reason for the delay was negotiation over what should count and who should do the counting. Ultimately, Major League Baseball largely relied on findings of the Seamheads database, naming Ashwill and Johnson, as well as Lester, to a review committee to set minimum qualifying standards for player records.

“We were blessed to have these guys who loved the game of baseball and wiped the dust off the Negro League stats,” said Gibson, who is executive director of the Josh Gibson Foundation. “We couldn’t have done it without the baseball geeks.”

For Ashwill, it’s a strange and unexpected arc. Work that had been read by an ardent few is now in the national spotlight. “I suppose it’s like an alternative band that suddenly has a big hit,” he said.

Despite publishing peer-reviewed articles in publications like Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game and Black Ball: A Journal of the Negro Leagues, Ashwill had long thought of his work on the Negro Leagues “as a hobby like stamp collecting,” ancillary to his original academic aspirations. “There wasn’t a professional reward for it.”

Newman, the NYU professor and a co-author of Black Baseball, Black Business: Race Enterprise and the Fate of the Segregated Dollar, said there is “more acceptance of critical sports study” now within academe, but agrees it hasn’t always been an easy fit for universities. Fellow college-based baseball researchers have come from disciplines as varied as history, sociology, and kinesiology, she said.

Newman balks at the word “amateur” for baseball historians without an academic home. “These are serious researchers and writers,” she said. The Negro League scholarship done by dedicated researchers like Lester and Ashwill “is super-important, and it’s about time that it is recognized.”