negro leagues as mlb -- my task ahead

I can't say that I was surprised to learn that Major League Baseball has decided to recognize the old Negro Leagues as "major" and integrate those leagues' records into its "official" history. Anyone with any sense of how the wind blows could see it coming. My purpose here is not to opine on the merits of such a move. I don't think I can really add any extra light to the discussion. 

But, from the perspective of my StoopidStats I am looking forward to this with a mix of excitement and trepidation. As anyone who regularly reads this blog knows, I like to track offbeat baseball statistics. Decades ago I got it in my head that I wanted to see a graph showing all major league franchises and their year-by-year cumulative games over .500. At the time that I first envisioned it, the limitations of data avilability and computing power meant that putting such a chart together was beyond what I could easily do. Now, it's much easier -- a big file that's conceptually pretty simple and easily updated every year. My last post about that project was here. Since then, I came up with other ideas -- the records for most home runs in N consecutive seasons (for positive integers N) is prominent among them.

When Negro League statistics are merged into MLB history, I will have the task of updating my statistical research. That'll be the fun part, but it can't commence until and unless my sources -- baseball-reference and various downloadable databases are updated. Hopefully the updates will be controlled in such a way that my various sources stay in sync.

But there will be challenges -- some that may force an end to some of what I track. I've been working with the construct that all teams have what I will call a full name -- location nickname. For example, we have the New York Yankees, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Texas Rangers. Some of the statistics that I track depend on that name structure. But the Negro Leagues included teams such as the "Cuban Giants" which doesn't indicate its location, and teams such as the Homestead Grays who split some seasons between Homestead Pennsylvania and Washington, DC. These will present new challenges for me. I'll not worry about that now. Afterall, I assume part of the work that the various Lords of the baseball world will undertake will involve determining which Negro Leagues and which teams will be accepted as "officially" major league. Instead of trying to pre-solve every issue that can arise, I'll see what issues do arise and worry about those.