Thomas Warren, wtop.com
WASHINGTON – For more than a decade, baseball researchers have combed through thousands of newspaper box scores, score cards, and any other official statistical record keeping system they could find from the Negro Leagues era.
The result is the most detailed compilation of stats on the web from the Negro Leagues, on baseball-reference.com.
The database includes a bibliography of more than 800 pages, and 3,000 day-to-day-records.
“You can look up a particular year for a league, and you can see all the teams that were in that league,” says Jim Gates, a librarian with the National Baseball Hall of Fame, “and you can click on that team and get a roster of how many players were on that team.”
The list of players that can be searched also stretches longer than 3,000.
The numbers were gathered for teams and players in the different Negro Leagues, which consisted of multiple leagues similar to Major League Baseball’s major and minor leagues. The stats cover 1904-1948.
The stats only include sanctioned league games. So, anyone looking up the great slugger Josh Gibson won’t see the 962 homeruns he’s said to have hit in his career.
“So many of his homeruns occurred in exhibition games, or in semi-pro games, which were not counted in this database,” Gates says.
Because statistics continue to emerge, it’s quite possible that Gibson’s homerun total, along with other players, could change.
“There are box scores that are still being discovered, there are score cards that pop up from time to time,” Gates says, “and all that information could be translated into the database to make it better.”
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