It's been true and a great ballplay for you.

Oh man, but the greatest Major League ballplay I ever saw was Willie Mays, but the greatest

baseball play I ever saw was Oscar Charleston.

Oscar Charleston played with the Indianapolis ABCs and we old time to say the closest thing

to Oscar Charleston was Babe Ruth. Yeah. Just because they weren't in the same league as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb doesn't mean they weren't in the same league as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.

That's the brilliant headline from a poster that we carry here at the Negro Leagues baseball museum that was created in 1997

for the grand opening of the new museum.

And nearly 27 years later, the poignant sentiment expressed, touched home in triumphant fashion when Major League Baseball officially recognized

the statistics of more than 2,300 players who played from 1920 to 1948 in various professional Negro leagues, thanks to the tremendous work of a dream team of Negro League historians and researchers, three years of intensive work was introduced and was officially entered into pages of Major League Baseball

history. And of course, the news reverberated. The great Josh Gibson and other stars of the

Negro leagues whose names had been omitted were now finally being seen amongst the greats

of Major League past.

And not only seen amongst them in several major statistical categories, they ranked above

those stars of Major League Baseball's past.

This well-deserved reckoning, I guess you could say, has drawn mainly a positive response,

a lot of cheers from baseball fans universally.

But it also had his share of jeers from a faction of the baseball public who I believe seemingly just

cannot accept that as my friend the late Negro Le Leagues legend, Buck O'Neill, would say that we could play.

And they could play.

We stretched that single into a double, that double into a triple.

We stole home.

We wanted to prove to the world that they weren't superior because they were Major League

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