Cincinnati’s unheralded players in Negro League baseball

Last December, Major League Baseball bestowed major league status to the Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1948, which means the statistics will be added to the official game records. The difficulty is that many of the games were poorly covered in the media, if at all. A box score is required for a game’s statistics to be included. Still, the record books are catching up to history.

Black baseball goes back to the 1860s, when ball clubs were cropping up in towns all across the nation. Though, with few exceptions, there were white teams and Black teams. In 1887, white owners made a “gentleman’s agreement” to keep the athletes segregated. It was an unwritten rule that didn’t need to be written; it…