Update

I received two outstanding Christmas presents yesterday, the Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Leagues and the Complete Book of Baseball’s Negro Leagues.

These two books, combined with the Negro League section of the NHBA, and hopefully some testimony from Negro League experts on the panel should give us a pretty solid chunk of evidence to go on. We aren’t going to be perfect of course, but when it’s said and done we should probably have about 20 or so Negro Leaguers among our 200+ inductees.

One player that I ‘discovered’ was Biz Mackey, probably the 2nd best catcher in Negro Leagues History. Cristobal Torriente is another player that hasn’t been honored by the Hall of Fame that should be . . . there are a few others.

There aren’t too many players from the 19th Century for us to worry about, maybe Bud Fowler and George Stovey (Fleet Walker wasn’t really that great of a player, his fame is more symbolic than anything else).

When I get a few minutes, I’ll set up a thread to discuss the Negro Leaguers, I’ll probably start by posting the All-Time All-Star teams from the Complete Book . . . and from from the NHBA, I should be able to get those up there tonight.

We’re also fairly close to NA Win Shares, Charlie Saeger has done a lot of work, but I’ve got to get a spreadsheet reprogrammed before we can test them out. Maybe 2-3 weeks. If you’ve read the book, you know WS is a massive spreadsheet, about 2 MB without any data. This is a massive overhaul, and will require reprogramming almost the entire thing. If this works out well, it’s possible we’ll be able to come up with revised WS for other 19th Century seasons, but much of that will depend on having the time to enter the data, to see if it’s worth the effort.

Happy Holidays!