Major League Baseball took a welcome and long overdue action two weeks after recognizing the Negro Leagues (1920-1948) and confer on them Major League status. This was a step to right a historical wrong that denied some of the best baseball players in history the opportunity to showcase their awesome talents only because they had the “wrong” skin color.

Some background about this momentous step to right a historical wrong. The seven Negro Leagues, which included the Negro National League, the Negro American League, the Eastern Colored League, the Negro Southern League, the American Negro League, and the East-West League, were excluded in 1969 when the Special Committee on Baseball Records identified six official “major leagues” dating to 1876. These white defunct leagues included the National Association, Union Association, the Players League, the Federal League, the American Association. “It is MLB’s view that the Committee’s 1969 omission of the Negro Leagues from consideration was clearly an error that demands today’s designation,” Major League Baseball said in announcing this change.

According to MLB, the decision took into account discussions with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, a 2006 study by the Negro League Researchers and Authors Group, and an expanding historical record of Negro League statistics, among other factors. In its announcement, MLB specifically commended historian Larry Lester, a co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, as well as Gary Ashwill, Scott Simkus, Mike Lynch, and Kevin Johnson for their construction of Seamheads’ Negro Leagues Database, which has pieced together newspapers, scorebooks, photo albums, and microfiche to provide the most complete statistical record of the Negro Leagues to date.

As a member of the Society for American Baseball Research’s (SABR) Negro Leagues Research Committee for the past 27 years, I am deeply grateful and heartened by this momentous step to truly honor and recognize the accomplishments of these men who played their excellent and exciting brand of baseball in the shadows. This action can’t reverse or be a reparation for the wrong done to these outstanding athletes, but perhaps it can help bring belated recognition and respect to them.

The knock on bringing this respect to the Negro Leagues, and perhaps why more Negro Leaguers have not been enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, has been the so-called spottiness of Negro League records. There is a certain amount of truth to that, but that has been brilliantly reversed by the hard work of researchers and historians across the country, particularly people such as my friend Larry Lester, Gary Ashwill, Scott Simkus, Ted Knorr, and many others. They have been meticulously and thoroughly combing microfilms of newspapers across the country, including some of the great black newspapers such as the “Chicago Defender, the “Pittsburgh Courier,” the “Baltimore Afro-American” and many more.

The database of verifiable statistics is growing daily. It should help bolster the cases for the inclusion of at least a dozen or more players who have thus far have been overlooked for enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame.