Plessy v. Ferguson and Sports Organizations in the 2020s

If you’re like Curmie, Gentle Reader, one of the few Supreme Court decisions that was mentioned even in passing in your high school American History class was Plessy v. Ferguson.  Today, this decision, like the Dred Scott case four decades earlier (the only other 19^th century SCOTUS ruling the Curmie could name without thinking long and hard), is a reminder of this country’s racist past.  (Yeah, yeah, yeah, racism is still with us, but it sure as hell used to be worse.) 

Plessy affirmed the constitutionality of segregation, provided the facilities, opportunities, etc., were “separate but equal.”  It’s difficult to imagine that anyone actually believed in that “equal” bit in 1896 or at any time after that, but the ruling was allowed to stand for over a half century until finally, in Brown v. Topeka, SCOTUS bothered to notice that equality wasn’t within the same universe as life on the ground for black Americans.

Blacks didn’t have the same rights as whites.  That’s a simple statement of fact, whether we’re talking about employment, educational opportunities, housing, voting rights… even water fountains. “Separate but equal” was always a canard.

Frequent readers of this blog will know that Curmie’s mind works is, shall we say, “quirky.”  So it was that he thought of that Supreme Court case from over a century and a quarter ago when he read about the second of two bone-headed decisions by two different organizations controlling two different sports at two different levels.

Josh Gibson of the Homestead Grays

The more recent example was Major League Baseball’s absurd decision to include statistics from the Negro Leagues in their official records.  This catapulted Josh Gibson to the top of the lists in batting average, slugging average, and OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging average) over Ty Cobb in the first instance and Babe Ruth in the latter two.

MLB is living in the fantasy world of the Plessy decision, because in baseball, as in so many other areas, separate was definitely not equal.  The level of competition in the Negro Leagues was not comparable to that in the major leagues.  It just wasn’t.  That doesn’t mean that Gibson or Satchel Paige wouldn’t have prospered had they been allowed to play for the Yankees or the Cubs or whoever, but the fact is that they didn’t play major league ball.

But even if we buy into the fiction that the leagues were comparable, there’s another problem, not even counting the fact that individual Negro League seasons were much shorter than major league seasons; it’s a lot easier to hit for a high average for 91 games (the longest Negro League season) than for a major league season of 154 or 162 games. 

No, Gentle Reader, it’s worse than that.  Even according to the people who did the search that led to the merging of records, the available statistics cover only about 75% of Negro League games.  That means that all of those alleged statistics have next to literally no validity.  Indeed, it’s a virtual impossibility that they’re accurate.  Perhaps those players did even better than the averages we have for them, but it’s more likely that they didn’t: statistics tend to trend toward the middle over time.

Curiously, no seems to be able to say, at this point at least, that Gibson hit x-number of home runs (over 1000, perhaps?) but we know his slugging percentage (!?!).  In other words, folks like John Labombarda of Elias Sports Bureau don’t know how many at bats he had, or how many total bases, but we can somehow accurately intuit the ratio between those arbitrary fanciful utterly fictitious numbers.  Curmie is no statistician, but he does know how numbers work, and, as the Old Vermonter in the joke would say, you cain’t get there from heah.

Nor is it a valid argument to talk about statistical anomalies accruing from changes in the game: live ball vs. dead ball, height of the pitcher’s mound, ballpark configurations, the introduction of artificial turf, etc.  Cy Young really had all those wins, and Nolan Ryan had all those strikeouts… in major leagues games.  Negro League players could have racked up those statistics had they been allowed to play, but they didn’t.  Ted Williams doesn’t get credit for the homers he would have hit had he not served in the military in both World War II and Korea, either.

It is an admirable impulse to want to honor the Buck O’Neills and the Cool Papa Bells of baseball yore.  They are, of course, in the Hall of Fame, but some additional recognition wouldn’t come amiss.  Put their stats on the website, but don’t intermingle them with those of Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth… or of Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, for that matter.  It does no one any good to pretend that segregation didn’t exist.  (Curmie would make a 1984 reference here, but he used that allusion last time.)

But this episode also got me thinking about a different decision by a different collection of idiots regarding a different sport at a different level. And here’s one where the fanciful world of “separate but equal” really is true.  Indeed, the two allegedly different worlds were separate but identical in every significant way. 

If you paid attention to the hype in early February, you’d have thought that Iowa’s Caitlin Clark was about to become the all-time scoring leader in the history of women’s college basketball as she closed in on the numbers compiled by Washington’s Kelsey Plum. Thing was, that record belonged (and still does) to Pearl Moore, who scored over 4000 points between stints at Anderson Junior College and Francis Marion College. (Clark ultimately finished with 3951 points, more than Moore scored at the senior college level, and there really is a difference in the level of the competition the two women faced.)

Lynette Woodard of the Kansas Jayhawks

In terms of Division I women’s basketball, the career points leader at the time was Lynette Woodard, who totaled 3649 points to Plum’s 3527. Woodard played at Kansas a decade and a half or so before I started grad school there. Needless to say, there were a lot of Jayhawk fans incensed about the NCAA’s snub of Woodard. You see, she played when the governing body of women’s intercollegiate sports was the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women; the NCAA at the time had no interest in women’s sports. 

Woodard played for a major university, played the same kind of schedule against the same level of competition, played according to the same rules (well, except that the 3-point line was introduced roughly concurrently with the NCAA’s takeover, so Woodard didn’t profit from it). But the NCAA seems to believe that they invented women’s college basketball, and most of the major media outlets cheerfully let them get away with it. Woodard’s name doesn’t appear, even as a footnote, on a number of lists of “Top 25 Women’s Division 1 scoring leaders.”

In this case, the competition didn’t change at all, but NCAA arrogance denied Woodard her deserved recognition. This isn’t Caitlin Clark’s fault, or Kelsey Plum’s, but the significant event should have been when Clark passed Woodard in late February, not Plum a couple weeks earlier. Clark has done wonders for fan interest in the game, and she seems to be a genuinely good person, something of a rarity among elite athletes. Nothing in my remarks is intended to take anything away from her accomplishments.

Oh, yeah, the racial element. Something of the reverse of MLB. Moore and Woodard are black, Clark and Plum are white. So all the headlines were about one white athlete passing another, when, depending on your perspective, at least one and possibly two black athletes had put up better numbers. Racism? Woodard thinks so, and whereas I’m disinclined to argue with her, I return to one of my mantras: all racism is stupid, but not all stupidity is racist.

In fact, Curmie suspects a situation akin to one I wrote about several years ago, in which I argued that the shooting of a young white woman by a black man was, contrary to the media hype, about male privilege more than race.  Looked at in this light, the similarities between this spring’s actions of the NCAA and Major League Baseball become clearer.

It’s easy to view the respective decisions as opposites: one organization decided to include statistics compiled outside their purview, and the other did not.  Of course, they both got it wrong: the stats that were legitimately separate but equal were treated as if they weren’t, and the ones that compared apples to oranges were viewed as interchangeable.

What unites the two decisions is a frantic if futile attempt to deny the past.  Black baseball players couldn’t play in the major leagues until after the Second World War, but that embarrasses MLB, so they’ll just pretend otherwise.  The NCAA had no interest in women’s sports until the 1980s, but that sorta makes them look sexist, so they’ll just pretend that anything before then didn’t happen. 

Curmie is no right-winger, but he agrees with conservative pundit Jim Pinkerton that “the truth yearns to be free.”  Denying reality, even indirectly, is never a good idea.  Getting MLB or the NCAA to understand that, however, is about likely as likely as putting the toothpaste back in the tube.