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There s a handful of numbers throughout baseball history that are so important, so revered, so iconic that they require no additional explanation.
714 and
.406 or
42 is part of that club too. You immediately know what all of those mean.
For nearly 50 years,
660 has been one of those numbers, too. Willie Mays hit the 660th and final regular-season home run of his career on Aug. 17, 1973, at Shea Stadium as a member of the Mets off Cincinnati s Don Gullett. Sure, he hit one in the playoffs ( 71), and three more in All-Star Games ( 56, 60, and 65), and assuredly countless more in Spring Training and other exhibitions, but 660 is the number. It s on his Hall of Fame plaque. It s on some of his autographs. It s written on the wall at Oracle Park. When someone passes 660, it s a big deal. It s as associated with Mays as the 24 he wore on his back.
Lester said the average monthly salary of a Black player in the early 1920s was $175 a month. Rookies earned $75 and the stars $375. They received between $1 to $1.50 a day for meal money.
Major league players received from $300 to $2,000 a month and about $15 a day for meals. That s about five times more in salary than Black players.
In 1924, the first year of the Colored World Series, the share of the winners, the Kansas City Monarchs, was $307.96, says Lester. The Hilldale Club, the team that lost, took home $193.23.
The World Series winners that same year earned $5,959.64 and the losers $3,820.29. That s almost 19 times what the Black players received.
MLB: On second thought, the Negro Leagues were also major leagues
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Ed MorrisseyPosted at 7:01 pm on December 16, 2020
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A long-overdue correction to a 51-year-old bad decision. In attempting to unify and regulate the baseball record book in 1969, Major League Baseball identified and consolidated records from over a half-dozen professional circuits. The effort resulted in perhaps the most robust and studied set of statistics in professional sports but left out black players from the era when MLB clubs refused to allow them to play.
Soon, those players will finally get their historical due, at least in part:
December 17, 2020
The year 2020 has not been filled with good news as far as baseball is concerned, but on Wednesday, some arrived. After lengthy study, Major League Baseball announced that it will officially recognize seven professional Negro Leagues that operated between 1920 and 1948 as major leagues. For as overdue as the decision is, it’s first and foremost an official acknowledgement as if one was needed that the baseball played in those leagues at a time when MLB’s shameful color line was in effect was of comparable quality.
“In the minds of baseball fans worldwide, this serves as historical validation for those who had been shunned from the Major Leagues and had the foresight and courage to create their own league that helped change the game and our country too,” said Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, via MLB’s press release. “This acknowledgement is a meritorious nod to the courageous owners and players who he
MLB makes Negro Leagues a “major league,” earns praise from Willie Mays, Bob Kendrick and more I think that’s a good thing. It recognizes guys who played way back. I’m talking a lot of good ballplayers. These are just numbers now. There’s more to it. They were never part of the league.
12/16/2020
For decades, there’s been a fight to have the Negro Leagues included in Major League Baseball’s group of “major leagues,” which, as per a 1969 decision from an all-white committee included only the National League, the American League, the American Association (1882-1891), the Union Association (1884), the Players League (1890) and the Federal League (1914-15). That fight took a dramatic turn Wednesday with MLB’s announcement that they would finally recognize the Negro Leagues as “major” and add statistics earned in seven leagues there to official MLB stats, albeit only for the period from 1920-1948.