When the first pitch is thrown between the San Fransisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals on Thursday, it will mark Major League Baseball’s first regular season game at the oldest professional ballpark in America, Rickwood Field in Birmingham.

The “Tribute to the Negro Leagues” event will bring some of the 157 living former members of the league to highlight their impact on the game at one of the stadiums that served as a fixture. After it opened in 1910 and hosted the Birmingham Black Barons for 36 years, 181 future Hall of Famers participated in a game at Rickwood Field either as a player, manager, umpire or executive.

That will be another step taken by MLB to further recognize top Negro League players after their stats were recently incorporated into MLB record books following months-long efforts from the Negro Leagues Statistical Review Committee. Assembled by MLB Commissioner Robert Manfred, the 17-person committee included Negro League historians, MLB representatives, database experts, writers and the Elias Sports Bureau which serves as the official statistician of MLB.

John Labombarda, the senior historian for Elias, received his invitation in November of 2023 and said the goal of announcing their first round of findings before the game at Rickwood Field about six months later felt ambitious. But after around 10 meetings with strict agendas, the committee got the job done.

“When you get an invitation from the commissioner, it's very hard to turn down,” Labombarda acknowledged in a June 17 interview. “(Manfred) put together this committee that was a diverse group of people whose areas of expertise were different, just to try to cover all the bases.”

A numbers game

The bases were so difficult to cover because Labombarda said that even as of now, researchers like Seamheads and Retrosheet who did most of the heavy lifting only have about 75% of Negro League box scores. While they can rely on newspapers, the consistency of coverage didn’t always lend itself to complete results.

“These papers were hit and miss where they might cover a game or two or three, and then some other big news story will come out and they would skip a week of games,” Labombarda said. “Some newspapers had a box score, that was great. Other newspapers had a game story they would try to create a box score from the game story.”

What stays, what goes

Another challenge presented itself in the number of exhibition games that Negro League teams played which led to the question of which games were legitimate enough to consider for the official record books.

“Negro League teams, on their way from one city to another, would stop in cities and play barnstorming games just to make money, sell tickets. They would play semi-pro teams, college teams, company teams, they would play whoever would sell tickets,” Labombarda said. “And that's where the Negro League historians would (come in). We would count every game between two Negro League teams, obviously, but there were some other clubs and semi-pro teams that they deemed major-league quality, so we would keep those games.”

New category leaders, for now

As a result, some statistical category leaders have changed but for the percentage categories, a minimum standard had to be created to even the playing field with the Major League representatives who were playing 154 games in a season compared to 60-80.

“Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Major League players in that era would also play barnstorming games. Those are not counted, so we really should not count these,” Labombarda said. “The qualifier now for Major League Baseball for batting average or the slugging or the OPS is 3.1 plate appearances per team game. So, we had to come up with some sort of formula for the Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1948 and since the schedules were so up and down, 60, 70, 80, games, we had to take each season individually and make a qualifier for each season.”

While Josh Gibson took over the lead in batting average, slugging and On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS) percentages for both a single-season and his career, those numbers could theoretically change again as more of the missing 25% of box scores surface.

“We could find a week of games where (Gibson) went six-for-fifty and it’ll knock his average down,” Labombarda said. “So, this is version one. We hope that we can get to version two, three and four, and add more information as time goes on.”

Alabama hosts Version 1 celebration

Now the first public gathering and celebration of Negro League stat incorporation gets to be celebrated in the Heart of Dixie. Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin spoke of the city’s historical impact and the honor in hosting the game at Rickwood Field during the announcement press conference on Aug. 3, 2023.

“It’s been stated but it’s worth repeating that Rickwood Field is hallowed grounds, where sports became more than entertainment, it was a source of empowerment. That’s what this game represents: progress, power, and my favorite, pride in a city that exemplified those terms,” Woodfin said. “We can’t wait to welcome the Cardinals, the Giants, as well as the entire world to Birmingham, on the same field where the victories came in two forms: both winning in games and chipping away at the barriers that block Black athletes from the recognition they deserve.”

Hard work pays off

Labombarda said the initial response to the first round of incorporation has been received well. So well that even though Gibson unseated Ty Cobb as the all-time batting average leader, Cobb’s great-grandson Tyrus was excited to see a new face atop the leaderboard.

“Baseball history is a part of U.S. history, and I think (the) Major Leagues acknowledging and incorporating the Negro Leagues is a huge step in kind of bringing all the parts of baseball history together,” Tyrus Cobb said to the Associated Press in May. “And I think it's actually pretty exciting that there's a new statistical batting average leader.”

Although it was a big undertaking, the project has already quickly risen to the top of Labombarda’s list of most memorable efforts.

“I do have to say, I’ve been working at Elias for 44 years, we cover (all the major sports and) one of the major sports, we're the official statistician for,” Labombarda said. “I've done research projects on baseball, the NFL, the NBA and the NHL, I've been involved in a lot of projects, and I have to say that this was the most interesting, the most educational, the most challenging and the most rewarding project I ever worked on.”

Now on the other side of a mountain of work, Labombarda was looking forward to enjoying his first trip to Alabama and the week’s festivities a bit more like a fan where he was quick to mention the lore of Rickwood Field and all of the legends that suited up for action.

“I have my top-five (favorite games) list. I think this would rank in terms of the coolest and the once-in-a-lifetime part of it. I've been to World Series, I've been to Super Bowls, I've been to the NBA Finals, I've been to the Stanley Cup, there were a lot of great games that I've been to,” Labombarda said. “I think this one, when all said and done, this one is going to be one I remember. Even if it's a ten-nothing game.”