Negro Leagues DB Update: 1912 & 1913 Negro Leagues

We’ve posted two more Negro league seasons, 1912 and 1913.  The number of games between the best black professionals gets a little sparser with each year you go backward.  It’s not that they were playing fewer games overall, it’s just that their opponents were much more likely to be white semipro or amateur teams. Important [...]

Negro Leagues DB Update: 1914 & 1915 Negro Leagues

New to the DB this week are the 1914 and 1915 Negro leagues.  The 1914 season in particular marks a turning point in black baseball history, as Charles Isham Taylor, former manager of the Birmingham Giants and West Baden Sprudels, arrived in Indianapolis to take over the A.B.C.s, bringing along with him his three ballplaying [...]

Negro Leagues DB Update: Cuban Summer League

The historical Cuban League everyone knows about was played in the fall and winter months, and so is often referred to as the Cuban Winter League.  Almost nobody remembers that, in the first decade of the 20th century at least, there was a Cuban Summer League, too, the Premio de Verano, or Summer Championship.  The [...]

Negro Leagues Database Update: 1923 Negro National League

We’re pleased to announce the addition of the 1923 Negro National League, compiled by Patrick Rock, to the Negro Leagues Database.  Patrick’s work was the first statistical compilation of a Negro league season to reach the levels of thoroughness and completeness that we’re aspiring to here, and has been a key inspiration for my own [...]

NORMALIZING NEGRO LEAGUE STATISTICS

Most baseball fans are familiar with the concept of ‘normalizing’ statistics. For MLB statistics, the most basic adjustment is to normalize for park effects. The simplest park normalization calculation takes the impact of a team’s park on runs scored then divides that number, either positive or negative, in half, and then that calculation is applied [...]

Negro Leagues Database Update: American Series in Cuba, 1904-1915

In the 1900s and 1910s, with Cuba newly independent from Spain but under heavy U.S. influence (and sometimes occupation), a baseball exchange formed between the two countries.  In the summers teams of the best Cuban players toured the U.S. as the “All-Cubans” or the “Cuban Stars”; in the fall American teams traveled to Havana to [...]

Negro Leagues Database: Update

Over the weekend we made our first significant update to the Database, with some new biographical information for a number of players and RBI added for the Cuban leagues.  Plus we’ve specified players who are in the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame, players who played in MLB, and players who played in the U.S. minor [...]

Seamheads.com Launches Negro Leagues Database Powered by The Baseball Gauge

Welcome to the Seamheads.com Negro Leagues Database, powered by The Baseball Gauge. We are creating the first comprehensive statistical encyclopedia of the great black baseball teams and leagues that operated behind the color line in the days of Jim Crow segregation.  The database also collects a vast amount of biographical information about these players, much [...]