Baseball’s Negro Leagues are generally considered to have ended in 1951, four years after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby respectively broke the National League and American League color barriers. But, more than 70 years later, the story of those leagues is still being written, particularly with Major League Baseball’s move this year to actually start integrating some Negro Leagues stats into their official leaderboards.
Around the implementation (which is far from finished) of the long-promised statistical components of that recognition of these leagues as “major,” education on the Negro Leagues is vitally important. There are lots of discussions still to be had around these leagues, their history, and how it fits into MLB history. And the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City is crucial to that, and Thursday saw MLB and the MLBPA recognize that with a $2 million grant from their joint Youth Development Foundation towards the museum’s $30 million campaign to build …