Racism: The Original Performance Enhancer

The Major Leagues of Foxx, Ruth, Gehrig, and Simmons were limited by racial segregation. (via Wikimedia Commons)

One thing that continues to bother me about the historic analysis of baseball is the extent to which we take pre-integration numbers as gospel while throwing into question numbers from various other eras. One look at historic leaderboards should be enough to tell you pre-integration players are substantially over-represented at the top, given the number of players in the major leagues at the time and the fact that pre-integration baseball now accounts for slightly less than 40% of the modern era.

And yet, as I looked, it seemed like no one had addressed this. And that meant it was time for me, the lowly member of the baseball writing humanities wing, to dust off my spreadsheet knowledge and do some calculating.

Approach

The root of this article and my methodology is trying to figure out a way to account for the extent to which the statistics of pre-integration major league players were inflated by the artificial suppression of the talent pool brought on by segregation. During the decades of segregation, the African-American population averaged about 10.3% of the U.S. population. It is thus reasonable to assume at least 10.3% of the white players in the majors wouldn’t have played without integration. Instead, they would have been beaten out by better competition. There’s a good argument to be made that the number should be substantially higher given that, especially in these early decades, baseball tended to draw the majority of its players from the lower classes, and minority populations always have been disproportionately represented among the impoverished in the U.S. Still, I used 10.3% as my number.

The next problem was how to figure out the effect of diminishing the talent pool by that amount. For that, I turned to expansion. Since my interest was primarily in the extent to which all-time greats had their numbers inflated, I looked at the top 30 position players (note: I set the minimum plate appearances significantly lower than “qualified” to allow for the appearance of outstanding partial seasons in the leaderboards) in baseball using the FanGraphs version of WAR to see how it changed from the year immediately before expansion to the year immediately after expansion.

Expansion provides a unique opportunity for analysis: It quickly increases the number of spots available in the major leagues without the build-up in developmental infrastructure that allows for the existence of substantially more major-league quality players. In effect, expansion lets us know what happens when you have more spots available than you have major league players. This is very similar to what segregation accomplished by artificially creating more spots for less-talented white players.

Caveats

A few issues needed to be smoothed out in my data. The first is that the 1960 season was the last season with 154 games. To deal with this, I simply prorated the WAR total for the top 30 players to a 162-game season. Second, there were back-to-back expansion years in 1961 and 1962. For both seasons, I used 1960 as my comparison year since the major leagues hadn’t had time to adjust.

Finally, as different numbers of teams were added and the total available roster spots slowly shifted upward, the percent of the major league population who was there because of expansion changed substantially. For each year, then, I weighted the change in WAR during each expansion year to approximate the rosters being expanded by 10.3%.

Results

By the time all the math was done, I found that expansion increased the WAR generated by the top 30 players in the league by approximately 7.6%. I then applied this percentage to revise the career WAR totals of pre-integration players (using modern-era stats only). The revised top-30 career totals list for position players can be found below.

Note that Ted Williams and Stan Musial both had careers straddling the pre- and post-integration eras and that, given the slow integration of all the teams, it’s difficult to properly weight their totals for adjustment. In any case, these new weights would alter their final WAR totals but not their places on the list. Correspondingly, I have left their career totals unaltered on the chart below.

While these changes don’t substantially alter the members of the list, it does alter the order and brings many pre-integration players back to the pack in a substantial way.

Limitations and Suggestions for Further Research

Expansion hasn’t happened enough times in baseball history to provide us with a substantial sample, so it’s obvious these data are imperfect. Further, while using the top 30 players made for simpler analysis, I’m aware top 30 means something different when there are 400 major league players than it does when there are 750. My hope is that, going forward, others will take this as a beginning and do a more in-depth analysis to provide a proper weighting of pre-integration numbers.

An acknowledgement needs to be made that white players from pre-integration years were playing with a form of performance enhancement built into the game, and that their numbers thus need to be taken with more than a few grains of salt. There may even be an argument as to whether we can consider pre-integration baseball to have contained a legitimate major league, though that stance certainly is up for debate.