Negro league baseball

The Negro leagues were United States professional baseball leagues comprising teams of African Americans. The term may be used broadly to include professional black teams outside the leagues and it may be used narrowly for the seven relatively successful leagues beginning in 1920 that are sometimes termed "Negro Major Leagues".

In the late 19th century, the baseball color line developed, excluding African Americans from play in Major League Baseball and its affiliated minor leagues (collectively known as organized baseball).^[1] The first professional baseball league consisting of all-black teams, the National Colored Base Ball League, was organized strictly as a minor league^[2] but failed in 1887 after only two weeks owing to low attendance. After several decades of mostly independent play by a variety of teams, the first Negro National League was formed in 1920 by Rube Foster. Ultimately, seven Negro major leagues existed at various times over the next thirty years.^[3] After integration of organized baseball began in the late 1940s, the quality of the Negro leagues slowly deteriorated; the Negro American League's 1951 season is generally considered the last Negro league season, although the last professional club, the Indianapolis Clowns, operated as a humorous sideshow rather than competitively from the mid-1960s to the 1980s.

In December 2020, Major League Baseball announced that based on recent decades of historical research, it classified the seven "major Negro leagues" as additional major leagues, adding them to the six historical "major league" designations it made in 1969, thus recognizing statistics and approximately 3,400 players who played from 1920 to 1948.^[4] On May 28, 2024, Major League Baseball announced that it had integrated Negro league statistics into its records, which among other changes gives Josh Gibson the highest single-season major league batting average at .466 (1943) and the highest career batting average at .372.^[5]