Hot Take: Who Really Benefits From MLB's Decision on Negro Leagues?
On Wednesday, MLB announced it would recognize the Negro Leagues as a Major League, meaning 3,400 players from seven leagues will now be considered major leaguers. Many celebrated the move, but who does it really benefit? Amira is joined by ESPN’s Howard Bryant, who says, “I understand the intention. The intention in a lot of ways was a reparation. … I don’t think this was the right way.”
This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is a member of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Amira: Hey flamethrowers, Amira here with a Burn It All Down hot take. There was an announcement that made shockwaves across the internet yesterday when Major League Baseball announced that they were going to recognize the Negro Leagues as a Major League – that means 3400 players from seven leagues that operated roughly between 1920 and 1950 will now be considered Major Leaguers. This was an attempt to right historical wrongs, and also will have implications for record books. I wanted to parse this out, and there’s no better person to do that with than my friend, Howard Bryant. Howard, welcome to Burn It All Down.
Howard: I’m back! I’m loving this. Actually – am I even back? Is this the first time…?
Amira: It’s the first. It’s the first.
Howard: I’m here! [Amira laughs] I just wanna thank everyone who made this possible, for me to get here.
Amira: All the people.
Howard: Everybody.
Amira: All the people!
Howard: Especially the little people. [Amira laughs] I’m loving this.
Amira: Well, we’re happy to have you, and what a good time to do it because…I know you have thoughts. So, when this announcement came I think the initial response was like, “Long overdue! The Negro Leagues were always Major.” Then it was this kind of celebratory moment, and for me that gave me pause, because I wasn’t quite sure what was being celebrated and I wanted to ask you if you had some similar ambivalence. What was your first take on this announcement?
Howard: Yeah, I think that absolutely the check list was the same. It was long overdue, okay, check. Well, recognition…Well, they didn’t really need your validation, but okay, check. But also what actually just took place? What are we doing to the record books here? Are they adding the stats? That was the number one thing, it was are they adding the stats. It was Kendrick, who runs the Negro Leagues museum in Kansas City, his initial thought was more about validation – he thought it was a great thing in a lot of ways, but he was also trying to make sure we understood that it wasn’t as though all these Negro League players were just waiting for MLB to finally tap them on the shoulder and say, “Hey, you’re worthy!” It’s not that. For me, my position was: was it possible for Major League Baseball to recognize the status, which is long overdue, and leave the record books alone? To me, leave the record books alone. You wanna leave the record books alone not only because to me the records are sacred and the stuff doesn’t make sense when you start adding people in that didn’t play in the Major Leagues, but also are you creating – and as a historian I think you can appreciate this especially, Amira – are you creating a huge problem 50, 60, 100 years from now when everybody’s gone and you’ve conflated all these numbers and the institutional memory’s already dead and people don’t realize that the leagues were separate and people don’t realize that you had incredible differences between the Major Leagues and the Negro Leagues? Most importantly for me I think my issue was that these African American players have already carried the pain and they’ve already carried the consequences of segregation, they carried it for their whole lives. Doesn’t the institution have to carry something too? Or do you just get to decide with a pen stroke that now everything’s fair? That was my issue. The biggest problem I have with this is the idea that the institution gets to determine and choose how long it’s gonna carry its historical stain. You can’t do that.
Amira: Yeah, no, I think that you put a lot on the table that’s so important. I think the validation piece, you know, is kind of quick, but it’s so important to say again that it’s not something that needed to be bestowed on the Negro Leagues. Everybody already knew that they were the best talent. People already knew that they were valid. So I like how you phrase it, like, is one pen stroke righting a wrong? Does Major League Baseball get to wake up and be like, “Guess what? We made this announcement. All’s good, all’s fair.” I think one of the biggest things that you point to is that there is huge disparities with Negro Leagues and the Major Leagues because there’s huge disparities with Black institutions that were needed to survive during Jim Crow. But I had to put it to somebody like this: when you think of Black colleges or Black schools or Black medical facilities that came up during segregation, that carried the kind of stain of subjugation, those resources were not fairly allocated. You’re talking about sub-par things and the Negro Leagues, as much as we talk about them, there’s a sense that sometimes we romanticize, and I don’t think that it does anybody a service to act like they were just two parallel leagues – one happened to be Black and one happened to be white. Can you speak to that a little bit? What were the conditions of the leagues?
Howard: Yeah, and that's exactly right. The reason why we call them the Negro Leagues, plural, is because there was so many of them, and they were also unaffiliated – they weren’t always connected because they kept folding, because they didn’t have the money. The original Negro National League, which was founded 100 years ago by Rube Foster in the YMCA in Kansas City, that Negro League lasted 11 years, 1920-1931. There were other Negro Leagues: there was the Eastern Colored League, then there was the Negro American League, then there was the New Negro National League. There were all these different leagues, all trying, hunting, and pecking to stay alive. The Negro National League, the original, got wiped out by the Great Depression. Some of the games were official and some of these guys to make ends meet they had to play in official league games, then they had to play some community team as barnstorming thing for lodging and for food. This is not the equivalent. My problem with this isn’t only that it’s not equivalent, it’s also that you can’t run from your responsibility to those conditions if you are Major League Baseball. You helped contribute to those conditions.
The reason why one year some Negro League teams played 40 games and another year they played 75 games and all of those different types of scattershot record keeping is because of you! It’s because of your effect on those Black businesses, and you’ve got to carry that. You’re responsible for that. I think that is the part that really sort of gets to me, because it does speak to this idea of the sort of romanticizing the idea of “separate but equal.” The Negro Leagues were separate but they weren’t equal. The players were destroyed, the players weren’t equal, the record books weren’t equal, the conditions weren’t equal, the accommodations weren’t. None of it was equal. It would be easier to sort of annex this if you could say that. If you could say, okay, there were just these two leagues and one was Black and one was white. But what baseball is doing by doing this is they are taking the easy way out, in my opinion, and escaping their role in how hard segregation was.
The other thing, the biggest thing to me, is that Major League Baseball, because it’s fashionable now to celebrate Josh Gibson and to celebrate Buck O’Neil and to celebrate Satchel Paige and the Homestead Grays and the Negro Leagues and the rest of it – they get to escape the fact that they used the Negro Leagues as justification for segregation. The way they ridiculed those players – that the players were “undisciplined,” that the league was illegitimate, that the owners were gamblers and the owners were a part of the underworld. That it wasn’t just that it was another league that was separate and had Black players, it was that your behavior is the reason why you can’t be part of the mainstream integrated society. And now they wanna co-opt all of this? Doesn’t work that way.
Amira: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that for me I’m thinking about how they benefited from using the Negro Leagues as a farm system, they weren’t compensating talent when we get to integration, and I think this liberal integrationist narrative…As if it’s the goal. As if we all then get folded into that dominant institution and have this shared history that then flattens the very real power dynamics there, and I think about this a lot when I think about all the ways that Major League Baseball has tried to clean up this image over time, right? I’m thinking of Satchel saying, “You’ve turned me from a second class citizen into a second class immortal.” When you have this kind of initial folding in of the Negro Leaguers and you have their separate wing in the Hall and things like that. I feel like they’ve struggled with that. I think back to earlier this summer, which I know feels like a millennium ago in pandemic years, but how late to even post their corporate statements. So many teams in Major League itself were, and how when those statements came they were all very watered down, predictably using images of Jackie Robinson. It’s like, if that is still what you’re hooking into, how much work have you really done here? We know that there’s rife inequities still plaguing the Major League. So the sandpapering effect that you point to, Howard, this idea that “Who does this move benefit?” Well, I look around and I’m like, who benefits from this except for the MLB? Like you pointed to, in 60 years and 100 years, if the record books look like it was even-keeled and just they’re integrated with no sense of disaggregation, with no pointing to of this very specific history, you can see how the MLB’s image stands to rewrite history – flatten it out, sandpaper it over, and make it smooth where it was really really rocky.
Howard: No question, 100% right on that. The other part of that is I understand the intention. The intention in a lot of ways was a reparation. The intention in a lot of ways was to say, “Let’s make amends for this.” I don’t think this was the right way. I feel like it was completely possible for them to elevate the Negro Leagues to Major League status and leave the record books alone.
Amira: Yeah.
Howard: They also could have, if you wanted to honor the history, is you could have elevated the Negro Leagues to Major League status. You could have had every single one of the 30 owners go into their petty cash and hand over $1 million and send it to Bob Kendrick and keep the Negro League Museum going in perpetuity.
Amira: I was about to ask about that! Because Taye Diggs is raising money for the Negro League Museum. [laughs] Like, put your money where your mouth is!
Howard: Major League Baseball is now a partner with the museum and everyone knows that that museum will have a very difficult time surviving without the Major Leagues. So let’s also not forget, let's go back 26 years to right before the ’94 strike with the Cooperstown Collection where the MLB started to get into the really trendy, fashionable Negro League apparel game. So, all those Homestead Grays jerseys and all those Kansas City Monarchs jerseys – MLB gets a piece of that. So there’s a lot to this that has to be considered. I think the other part of it too, just from a records standpoint, is now you’re looking at this and you’ve got these 3400 players who are affected, and so now Willie Mays’ batting average just went down. He hasn’t even swung a bat since 1973. So, his batting average went from .302 to .301 over a number of at-bats. I think get got 17 more hits because he was playing as a 17 year old in the Negro Leagues in 1948, and so now he’s got 17 more hits that came 3 years before his debut in Major League Baseball.
Amira: Right.
Howard: Is it well-intentioned? Yes. Is it smart? I don’t love it, I don’t like it. I’m not hostile to it, but I don’t understand the necessity for it. I just didn’t think it was necessary. Also, I think the other piece to that is the fact that this was a reaction to 2020.
Amira: Yeah.
Howard: A remarkable, amazing year. I think that the George Floyd impact, the Black Lives Matter impact, the pandemic impact, all of these different things…Sometimes institutions feel like they have to do something. I had spoken to a source over at MLB about this who told me that we wouldn’t have done this in 2019 and we wouldn’t have done it in 2021 – which tells me that you probably shouldn’t have done it at all.
Amira: Right, and I think that that kind of brings me to my concluding point, that when I see the Negro Leagues I see something that, yes, we celebrate the talent, but they’re very existence is pointing to a condition of inferiority. The very existence…And this is the hardest thing even Black people within institutions during Jim Crow talked about: the hardest thing to do was love and pour love and resources and sweat into an institution that you knew existed to remind you of your inferiority. I think to kind of tie it all together, you talked about this as a kind of sort of reparations, and it’s funny because reparations are demanded, they’re not usually easily given. That’s kind of, I think, the lens through which to see this. Like you said, it’s that pens stroke, it’s that borne of 2020, it's this thing.
It’s like, if we really sit and consider what are some steps that Major League Baseball can do, should be doing, or who are people they could actually be in conversation with? What are the asks moving forward? Do we live with this past, or are there actual tangible things to do to address it? I know for me when I think about this I think about opening up access to the game in a variety of ways, opening up the front office in a variety of ways. I think kind of forward looking for it, but that doesn’t necessarily wrestle with the historical harm. It’s a hard question, doesn’t necessarily need to have an answer, but I’m wondering what an actual atonement and reckoning for their complicity in segregated baseball and in the historical sins would look like beyond a pen stroke.
Howard: Yeah, exactly. All of the above. All of the above, and believe in what you’re doing and support the institutions and support the memory of it, and also change the culture. You really wanna honor the Negro Leagues? Support your culture and have a different culture. Commit to a new culture, and also the strength of an institution to me oftentimes is dependent on your willingness to carry your own mistakes, to admit your mistakes. Not to erase them, just to admit them. To admit them and to hold onto them as a guide as to what not to be going forward. I think that the service that has been done with the Negro Leagues, I think a lot of good work has been done to keep those stories alive and to keep those people alive. The legend of the Negro Leagues and of the Negro League players is far more valuable than some statistical batting average. Whether or not the actual Paige did what Satchel Paige did – did he really sit down all the outfielders and bring everybody off the field to strike a guy out? Did Josh Gibson really hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium? Did he really hit 800 home runs? All of these different things, the story of these legends is more important because what it did that the numbers never did is it gave the players their dignity, it gave them their lyricism, it gave them their poetry, it gave them all the things that baseball took from them. That’s more valuable to me than trying to a hundred years later decide who gets a higher batting average.
Amira: Absolutely, and a hundred years later in a year when we’ve suddenly seen the Washington Football Team change its name, the Cleveland Baseball Team change its name, MLB decide that Negro Leagues are Major Leagues, the Mississippi State flag changes – I think you’re right on the head that 2020 has produced the conditions where all of a sudden the line for corporate response moves. But it just leaves a taste in your mouth, like, these are all things that could’ve been done, right? [laughs] That it’s frustrating that this is the bar.
Howard: Baseball took Kenesaw Mountain Landis’ name, took his name off the MVP awards.
Amira: Right.
Howard: Once again, all of these things that are happening, you try not to be skeptical about it but you do ask yourself the question of, “Who does this serve?” Is this to make you feel better? Because we’ve already carried it.
Amira: We certainly have, and what a heavy, heavy burden that has been. I really appreciate you taking the time to break it down, and I hope that people receive the nuance and think through this in a way that allows us to celebrate those stories that Howard pointed to and the real kind of heart of the people who made up the institution of the Negro Leagues without romanticizing it or giving too many flowers to an institution that did very little other than sign a proclamation. So, here we are. Oh, sports in the year 2020! But Howard, I thank you so much for joining us on Burn It All Down, and we wish you all the best.
Howard: Oh, my pleasure. Happy holidays to everybody.