MLB to include Negro leagues. Did Babe Ruth face Satchel Paige?

There has been significant predictable attention to the recent announcement: 

MLB adds Negro Leagues to official records

By Anthony Castrovince  @castrovince

December 16, 2020

Addressing what MLB described as a “long overdue recognition,” Commissioner Rob Manfred on Wednesday bestowed Major League status upon seven professional Negro Leagues that operated between 1920 and 1948...

The seven leagues are the Negro National League (I) (1920-31), the Eastern Colored League (1923-28), the American Negro League (1929), the East-West League (1932), the Negro Southern League (1932), the Negro National League (II) (1933-48) and the Negro American League (1937-48)...

________________________

Babe Ruth never batted against Satchel Paige. Neither did Jackie Robinson. Friday, May 29, 2009

Babe Ruth never batted against Satchel Paige. That is often mentioned by people who want to emphasize that blacks had been excluded from wide participation in MLB before April 15, 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the modern color line by playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League.

Paige (born 1906) was eleven years younger than Ruth (born 1895). The Babe never batted against Satchel in a MLB game. But neither did Jackie Robinson. Paige finally pitched in MLB from 1948 through 1953, plus a one game three inning stunt in Kansas City in 1965...

Paige would have been 20 in 1926 about the middle of Ruth's career. In 1920 when Ruth hit 50 homers for the first time, Paige was 14 years old.

There is no reason to think that Satchel Paige would have changed Babe Ruth's stats to a significant degree, even assuming that Ruth would have had difficulty hitting Paige.

Paige was probably a great pitcher but what other banned pitchers would have impacted Ruth?

Evidence is anecdotal. It may be uncomfortable for some to address this but great black players were and still are mostly non-pitchers. Why? I don't know.

comment:
Anonymous said...

This article is wrong. Ken Burns's documentary on baseball included an interview with Negro League player Buck O'Neil. Here is a portion of the interview:

Is there one moment in all of baseball you wish you could have seen?

I wish I could have been there when Babe Ruth pointed and hit the ball out of the ballpark in the 1932 World Series. I wish I could have seen that. But I did see something I admired just about as much, with Satchel Paige and Babe Ruth. This was in Chicago, after Ruth came out of the major leagues. He was barnstorming, playing with different teams, and he played us. Satchel was pitching and Ruth was hitting. Satchel threw Ruth the ball and Ruth hit the ball, must have been 500 feet, off of Satchel. Satchel looked at Ruth all the way around the bases and when Ruth got to home plate, you know who shook his hand? Satchel Paige shook Ruth's hand at home plate.

They stopped the game and waited, he and Satchel talking, until the kid went out, got the ball, brought it back and Satchel had Babe Ruth autograph that ball for him. That was some kind of moment.

Saturday, May 25, 2019

________________________

The anonymous comment states that my post is wrong. Obviously, it is correct in that it explicitly states that:

"The Babe never batted against Satchel in a MLB game."

The comment refers to an event that supposedly took place "after Ruth came out of the major leagues". Ruth's last season was with the Boston Braves and Ruth's last game was May 30, 1935. In other words the 40 year old Ruth was so broken down that he could not last even to June.

At some undetermined time after that Ruth faced Paige in a barnstorming game. Was the game included in Negro league stats? Probably not. Should it? And with the new edict by MLB, Inc., will such anecdotal stuff now become MLB data? And the result, Ruth hit a long home run off Paige, supports my point.

Finally, the anonymous comment misses the entire point of my 2009 post, that pitching in the Negro leagues was probably clearly inferior to MLB pitching. I've been told by a reliable source:

"SABR (Society of American Baseball Research) has put together a group of experts to determine which Negro Leagues should be recognized by the organization as major."

MLB has chosen to rush to judgement and rely on its Elias Sports Bureau and the once admirable John Thorn. In recent years Thorn has worked for MLB as its historian, presumably for pay.

Was there criteria for classifying a league as major, including:

Federal League 1914-1915
American Association 1882-1891
Players League 1890
Union Association 1884
National Association 1871-1875?

Was it recently applied to the Negro Leagues?

Has it been applied to other leagues: Japanese, Mexican, especially 1946-1947 when some like Sal Maglie "jumped" and were punished?

Maglie's MLB and minor league stats have a huge gap: 1946-1949. SABR bio on Maglie:

As the 1946 season opened, major league clubhouses buzzed with the news that two wealthy Mexican brothers, Jorge and Bernardo Pasquel, were offering American players fabulous sums to jump their contracts and play in the Mexican League... Maglie took the gamble. He left Organized Baseball and played for two seasons (1946 and 1947) in the Mexican League. Commissioner Happy Chandler banned all the “jumpers” from the majors for five years.

______________________

Nice, huh? MLB has been not nice to many. If we could somehow determine Sal Maglie's Mexican league stats for those two years and add them to his impressive major league stats, might Maglie be a Hall of Fame pitcher? Nonsense has many forms.