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Celebrating MLB's Black Aces: How Vida Blue's 24 wins in 1971 helped bring success back to the Oakland A's

In 2006, Jim "Mudcat" Grant wrote a book titled "The Black Aces: Baseball's Only African-American Twenty-Game Winners." Celebrated in its pages were the members of an exclusive club: The African American or Black Canadian pitchers who had won 20 or more games in one MLB season.

At the time of publication, 13 men had become Black Aces, and Grant, the first Black 20-game winner in the American League, included a chapter on each of them, as well as several Negro Leagues pitchers he believed would've accomplished the feat had they been allowed to pitch in MLB.