Baseball Rights a Wrong by Adding Negro Leagues to Official Records

From left to right, the pitchers John Stanley, Frank McAllister and Gene Smith of the Negro National League's New York Black Yankees standing on the top step of their dugout in 1942.Credit...Bettmann/Getty ImagesIf baseball somehow reflects America, as romanticists like to believe, then it also shares in its blemishes. The National and American leagues were segregated until 1947, and the decades since have been marked by a halting kind of reckoning.

On Wednesday, Major League Baseball took one of its biggest steps to redress past racial wrongs: It formally recognized several of the Negro leagues as on par with the American and National leagues, a distinction that will alter the official…