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Not so fast Baseball overlooks one thing when saluting past stars
Updated: Tuesday October 09, 2001 3:46 PM
Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor touches on a Hot Button issue each Monday on CNNSI.com. After you read Phil's take, give us yours. The last weekend of baseball's regular season should have been filmed and sent directly to Cooperstown. Each day was a historical artifact. Barry Bonds was a latter-day Babe Ruth, and Cal Ripken Jr. brought Lou Gehrig back to mind. Rickey Henderson made us think of Ty Cobb, and Tony Gwynn took us back to Ted Williams. It all reminded us that no sport loves its past the way baseball does. It's not enough to break a record or achieve a milestone; we try to place every new achievement in its proper historical context and compare every great player to ones who came before him. The 60-homer plateau, once nearly unreachable, is shattered on a regular basis now, and we wonder about the ball being juiced and the pitching being diluted. We think of Gwynn's runs at .400 and debate whether night games and relief pitchers make that feat more difficult than it was when Williams last did it 60 years ago. We consider lowered mounds and expansion teams and training techniques as we analyze ERAs and try to hold this generation's stars up against their predecessors. But there is one factor that isn't included in our equations often enough -- that the stars of pre-1947 baseball competed in a segregated league. Ruth, Gehrig, Cobb, Williams, Joe DiMaggio and others did not compile the bulk of their Hall of Fame statistics against the very best competition because there were great players whom they never had the chance to face. It's remarkable, for instance, that writers and broadcasters can go on and on about Ruth's gaudy statistics, his hitting and pitching prowess, without ever mentioning that he did it in a league that didn't allow all of the best players to play. Would Williams have hit .406 in 1941 if he'd had to hit against the Bob Gibson or Don Newcombe or Dwight Gooden of his era? Would DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak of the same year have survived that long if there had been Kenny Loftons or Garry Maddoxes patrolling center field, running down line drives in the gap? How many fewer strikeouts would Walter Johnson have, how many fewer runs would Cobb have scored, if they hadn't been playing in a limited league? How would baseball's sacred statistics have been changed if major league stars of the past had faced Josh Gibson or Cool Papa Bell or Satchel Paige in his prime? It's impossible to look at the impact players of color have had on baseball over the last 54 years and not believe the game and its record book would look very different if those athletes had been allowed to play earlier. Sports Illustrated's examination of the most overrated and underrated things in sports this past summer left at least one entry out of the overrated category -- nearly every baseball record set before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947. This isn't to say that the stars who played before the color line was broken weren't great players; they were. It's just that we'll never really know how great they were, just as we'll never know which Negro League players would have become legends had they been able to display their talents in the majors. Baseball, to its credit, places Negro League stars in its Hall of Fame, but let's face it, those players don't get the same recognition when they're inducted as major leaguers do. Nor is it the fault of Ruth, Gehrig and their contemporaries that they played in a segregated league. They simply played with and against the players who were sent out on the diamond with them. But the great Negro League players of the past have their statistics looked at with a touch of skepticism partly because, through no fault of their own, they weren't achieved against the top competition. Players on the other side of the color line should get the same treatment. It's often said that one of the great things about baseball is that its history holds more meaning because the rules of the game have hardly changed at all over the years. Don't believe it. When you try to put Bonds, Ripken and the rest of today's stars in their proper context, remember that before 1947 the game took place on a very different playing field. Sports Illustrated senior writer Phil Taylor writes about a Hot Button issue every Monday on CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.
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