Negro Leagues Data Is Now Available on FanGraphs!

We’re excited to announce that Negro Leagues data is now available on the FanGraphs player pages and leaderboards! In addition, Negro Leagues players now have FanGraphs player pages. All data is provided by The Seamheads Negro Leagues Database powered by Agate Type Research. Special thanks are due to Gary Ashwill and Kevin Johnson for their assistance as we incorporated the data into the site.

The seven Black baseball leagues included in our data mirror those at Baseball Reference and are consistent with the recommendations of SABR’s Negro Leagues Task Force and Major League Baseball’s announcement recognizing these leagues as being major leagues.

I highly recommend the introduction to Baseball Reference’s “The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues” initiative, as well as the accompanying articles written by Negro Leagues experts, family members of players, and others, for additional context on the Negro Leagues and Black baseball in the early 20th century more broadly. The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is also a tremendous resource for fans, educators, and researchers hoping to learn more about this vital part of baseball history.

Please note that stats accumulated in Independent and non-major Negro Leagues are not included in players’ WAR calculations and are not currently displayed on player pages. Readers interested in statistics from these leagues can find them on Seamheads. Additionally, as with Baseball Reference, the newly added Negro Leagues data only includes league games, interleague games (against major Negro League competition), and games against select top-level independent Black baseball teams. Statistics for barnstorming and exhibition games aren’t included in players’ totals. Josh Gibson’s home run total is an illustrative example of the affect this can have. As Jay Jaffe explained in his post covering the Negro Leagues data launch at Baseball Reference:

When he was posthumously inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972, Gibson’s plaque credited him with hitting “almost 800 home runs,” and in the 1994 edition of the The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues, he was credited with 972. An untold number of his homers were hit in exhibitions or non-league games, which were an economic necessity for Negro Leagues teams and players; only a quarter to half of the 150 to 200 games they played per year might count as league games, as Seamheads’ Gary Ashwill wrote in his accompanying essay, “Building the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database.” Those exhibition homers aren’t included in the statistics added to Baseball Reference.

All calculations for these leagues, including WAR, are treated as if these leagues were part of our original major league historical data, with the following exceptions:

– There are some years/leagues for which pitcher home run allowed data is not available. For these years, we are only calculating RA9-WAR and have substituted that for our FIP-based WAR in the “WAR” column. Should home run allowed data become available in the future for these years/leagues, we will adjust accordingly.

– The Fielding component for all Negro Leagues data uses Michael Humphrey’s Defensive Regression Analysis (DRA) calculation as opposed to Sean Smith’s Total Zone (TZ).

– The park factors for these leagues are currently calculated as neutral. We may revise this in the future.

Here are the top players by WAR for position players among those who spent time in the major Negro Leagues:

And here are the pitchers: