i have a friend who lives on korematsu v. united states way

Yeah and at least the trains ran on time when Mussolini was around, yet I don't see people naming Amtrak after him.

Wait the negro league being better off than the mlb is not laughable?

I guess I have no real idea, but my gut would have told me lol.

I believe the kids these days call it WIM.

Baseball reference should compile all the box scores from Negro League vs MLB exhibitions so we can calculate OPS+s and such

The Negro league was pretty clearly superior in talent to the MLB but the idea that they should have stuck around on their own when you have a bunch of white supremacists controlling both government and baseball seems a little ridiculous.

http://www.baseball-fever.com/showth...-Major-Leagues

Negro League vs. Major Leaguers (4-6)
32 – 20 (.615)
Negro League vs. Major Leaguers (7+)
64 – 78 (.451)
Major Leaguers record versus Cuba from 1908 – 1921
92 – 61 (.601)
Negro League Teams versus Cuba from 1903 – 1925
65 – 71 (.478)

here's my scouting report of old timey baseball leagues with modern day league comps

Major Leagues: AL East
Negro Leagues: AL Central, AL West, NL East, NL West
Cuban Leagues: NL Central

I probably should not have said "clearly superior in talent" but rather that the upper eschelon of talent in the Negro League was arguably better than MLB's upper level of talent. The talent pool overall was shallower for various reasons (not the least of which was socio-economic) but the elite talent in the Negro Leagues were very, very good.

Equating racist MLB figures of the early 20th c with Mussolini

This I buy.

i had assumed the negro leagues were not at all close before sigley said the negro leagues were better just now. data shows they were in the same ballpark at the very least

i wonder how much better old timey black ballplayers legacies would be if the negro leagues happened to have MLB quality record keeping that could last for 100 years

https://twitter.com/#!/OldHossRadbourn

someone with a knowledge of the negro leagues and an appreciation for late 19th century black culture should do a negro leagues version of this.

redbean get on this

You would argue that Yawkey and Landis did enough good to put them in the Hall of Fame considering their role in systematically excluding blacks from the game? I find this pretty hard to believe.

Even if you use a contrived metric like "well he was less racist than the rest of the white people" (Racism Below Replacement, perhaps), Yawkey and Landis fail spectacularly from a viewpoint of "acceptable," much less "should be enshrined and remembered as good figureheads of baseball."

quality in negro league was going up and quality in the mlb was going down tho

like that thing is lumping together 40 years of data.

so yes maybe throughout the entire negro leagues history the mlb was better, but around the time of jackie robinson the talent in the negro league was getting better but mlb was getting worse. there's a whole book about it i forget what its called but if i find it i will post

Well if your bar for considering lauding historical figures is "not racist" then that leaves very little to discuss.

I don't think the HoF is putting people in based on "how racist were they relative to their time period", but I don't know a ton Yawkey did to warrant his selection. Landis preserved the game's legitimacy post-Black Sox scandal when it's popularity threatened to decline. Obviously Ruth helped a lot, too-- but KML suspended Ruth for 6 weeks when he broke the rules. He wasn't without major flaws, and very likely was an *******, but he was very important to the game.

is everyone just looking at the same ~140 games though?

i dont think you can much of a judgement about the dynamic competition levels over time without a ton of data. obv just lumping 40 years together and saying "eh, they were pretty close" isnt pretty but it might be all there is to do

would love if there actually is lots of data

You aren't responding to my point: Do you think that the very significant damage that Landis/Yawkey did to the game by trying to exclude blacks is not grounds for being excluded from the Hall of Fame? Or perhaps you reject the premise that Yawkey and Landis tried to exclude blacks from the game?

Landis also blackballed Joe Jackson from the game for basically the same amount of evidence that Selig blackballed Barry Bonds from the game. Jackson pled guilty, then recanted, and all the players testified that Jackson had nothing to do with it - yet Jackson remained banned. Jackson's on-field performance in the WS would indicate that he wasn't taking a dive either.

So no, I don't think a person who was actively trying to exclude black players from the game of baseball should be in the Hall of Fame. Do you?

greatest generation tho

RORWP - racism over replacement white person

i was gonna say it's reasonable to put KML in the HOF just because the hall is supposed to be a museum and hes obv an important figure in baseball history but then you look at his plaque and

That's really relativistic tho. I mean, anyone doing that post-Robinson probably should be barred (I guess this includes Yawkey-- plus it doesn't appear like he did much to warrant selection). My major point was that active exclusion of black players from the league means something completely different in even 1970, then it does in 1935.

RORWP has off the charts IRLRSRORLRSR

IRLRSRORLRSR stands for "implicit replacement level racism stat racism over replacement level racism stat racism"

wait i think that should be

IRLRSRORLIRLSR

implicit replacement level racism stat racism over replacement level implicit replacement level stat racism