PRESS RELEASE
The Hall of Fame needs to restructure its Era Committees to give Negro Leaguers and preleague Black Baseball players a fair chance at election in the future. If not, their inaction will likely exclude any additional Segregated Era Black players from being added to the Hall.
The Hall should restructure the Classic Era Committee into two committees, one for players and one for managers, umpires, and executives. There is no reason to lump these together in the Classic Era when the Contemporary Era has separate committees for each.
The Hall should also limit the time span of the Classic Era to 1950 and earlier, which would be consistent with the structure of previous Era Committees when Early Baseball Era ended at 1949 (2016–2021) and the Pre-Integration Era ended at 1946 (2010–2015). Doing so would require a third Era Committee to cover 1951 to 1979.
Careful analysis of upcoming Classic Era Committee elections shows that Negro Leaguers and their predecessors are probably going to be shut out under the current rules. The huge span of the Classic Era—1871 to 1979—and the large number of attractive candidates from 1951 to 1979 mean that there will probably end up with few slots for Negro Leaguers on the ballots.
That century-long span, plus the small number of ballot slots (10), plus the restrictive voting rules (committee members can only cast three votes) will create a logjam that places Negro League candidates at a severe disadvantage. That logjam will take many years to undo with the Classic Era Committee scheduled to meet only once every three years.
Exacerbating the problem is that Negro League players and managers/executives/umpires will compete with each other on the same ballot, and that previous Era Committees have included few experts on the Negro Leagues.
The combination of the above factors will result in a perfect storm that will sink the chances of adding more deserving Black candidates to the Hall of Fame from the Segregated Era. The Hall of Fame has not been afraid to change the rules for election of veterans in the past, and it should not be afraid now.
OUR MISSION
Justice for Negro Leaguers
There are several ways of looking at how equitably the Negro Leagues & Black Baseball are represented in Cooperstown. One way is to compare the percentage of Negro Leagues & Black Baseball players in the Hall of Fame who debuted in the Segregated Era to the percentage of African American or Latino players in the Hall of Fame who debuted in the Integrated Era.
Currently, only 17 percent of players in the Hall from the Segregated Era come from the Negro Leagues & Black Baseball, while 44 percent of players from the Integrated Era are African American or Latino. That is a huge disparity and shows how much more attention needs to be paid to players from the Negro Leagues & Black Baseball.
Following the lead of the Josh Gibson Foundation's campaign to have the BBWAA’s Most Valuable Player Awards named after the immortal Josh Gibson, we hope to bring much needed attention to these distinguished but overlooked Negro Leagues & Black Baseball players, managers, umpires, executives, and pioneers.
The Holy Trinity of the Negro Leagues: Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Buck Leonard—the first three Negro Leaguers elected to the Hall of Fame. Vintage image one of a series in 1970s marketing campaign for Seagram’s 7 Whiskey.
—Courtesy James A. Riley and BlackBaseball.com