“some great Turkey Stearnes stories”

A couple of months ago Joe Posnanski wrote the following, in the course of a “manifesto” about the Hall of Fame:

Everyone here, I suspect, knows how much I love the Negro Leagues and how much I appreciate what the Baseball Hall of Fame has done to honor those great players who excelled on rock hard diamonds and little towns while America turned away. Everyone, in the end, must believe what they believe, but I have no doubt in my mind that Oscar Charleston, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Martin Dihigo, Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard and others were as great as anyone who came before or since. But the point of this exercise, again, is to get at the heart of the Hall of Fame, and realistically knowing some great Turkey Stearnes stories is fun, but doesn’t help much in the process. We just don’t have enough information about those players.

He’s not trying to claim that Negro Leaguers don’t belong in the Hall of Fame or anything like that (obviously), but rather he’s arguing that there’s no way to use them to help establish standards for the Hall—because all we have are “some great Turkey Stearnes stories.”  This pretty much presents, in a nutshell, the conventional wisdom that all our research is dedicated to overthrowing—the notion that the Negro Leagues exist in some hazy netherworld of unverifiable myth, tall tales, gut feelings, subjective judgments.  There is, in fact, a vast body of quite verifiable fact and analyzable data waiting for us, locked away in crumbling newspaper files and microfilm spools and old records.

The great task of Negro League researchers is to make it as difficult as possible for sportswriters (especially ones as sympathetic to the Negro Leagues as Poz) to say something like this.  We’ll never fully succeed in banishing such assumptions, or putting the records of Negro Leaguers on the same footing (in terms of accuracy and comprehensiveness) as those of major leaguers, but we have to try. 

And wouldn’t it be great if you could eventually say of some player, “Well, his career looks a lot like Turkey Stearnes’s—how can you keep him out of the Hall?”

Comments

[David Ball]

Nobody's right all the time, and when you express yourself this vigorously you're inevitably going to make yourself look like a fool now and then.

He's really, really wrong about Candy Cummings, too. Peter Morris' fascinating book "Game of Inches" discusses this in detail.

As for his point about Cummings winning fewer games in 1875 than Dick McBride, who Posnarski's never heard of...well, yes, I'm sure he hasn't. I've never heard of many people who are important in one walk of life or another, but I don't take my ignorance as a measure of their significance.

[Scott Simkus]

Well said, Gary. Thanks.

[Patrick Rock]

There are times that Joe Posnanski is an absolute poet. And then there are times that he is the north end of a southbound horse. Some of his comments in that article place him squarely in the latter column.

I give Poz credit for taking his own annual BBWA vote seriously, but I wish he wouldn't comment on areas of baseball that he does not know and has never taken the time to research. I'm pretty certain that he still believes that the 2006 Negro Leagues committee was empaneled for no other purpose than to enshrine Buck O'Neil, and that the 17 others were just extras.

It saddens me that someone with such a great love for the sport has never taken the time to find out that for both the 19th century and Negro Leagues, we CAN make statistical comparisons.

FYI, Turkey Stearnes was a remarkably taciturn man who talked to his bats more than his teammates. While we know he was a great player, there really AREN'T that many great Turkey Stearnes stories out there. Poz shows his ignorance of the subject simply by choosing Stearnes as his poster boy.