The great Babe Ruth was being interviewed by legendary sportscaster Graham McNamee when he was asked who he considered the greatest baseball player of all time.
“You mean major leagues?” Ruth asked.
McNamee shook his head. “No, the greatest player anywhere.”
Ruth responded right away. “In that case, I’d pick John Henry Lloyd.”
It wasn’t just Ruth who admired Lloyd. Folks used to call Lloyd the black Honus Wagner, and someone once asked Hall of Famer Wagner how he felt about that comparison. “I am honored to have John Lloyd called the black Wagner. It is a privilege to be compared to him.”
Legendary manager Connie Mack was asked who was the greatest shortstop ever. According to Negro leaguer and future Hall of Famer Judy Johnson, Mack told him that Lloyd and Honus Wagner were on par as shortstops.
“He said the two best shortstops he had ever seen were Honus Wagner and John Henry Lloyd. He said you could put them in a bag and shake them up and either one you’d pull out, you wouldn’t go wrong.”
Actually, if you were too look at Lloyd’s statistics, the numbers aren’t overwhelming. He’s officially listed with only 1,629 official at-bats in the 1920s. One that jumps out is a .349 career batting average. Part of the problem with that is that the Negro Leagues only played 60-game seasons, and probably 75 percent of the actual games they played every year were on barnstorming tours.
That’s what makes including Negro League statistics in with Major League records so misleading, Folks say catcher Josh Gibson hit more than 900 home runs despite dying at age 35, but the official statistics credit him with just 166 in Negro League games.
Legendary pitcher Satchel Paige had a career that spanned 1927 to 1953, although he pitched three innings for the Kansas City Royals in 1965. He reportedly won 1,200 games, although he is credited with just 124 victories,. 28 of them in the American League at the end of his career,
It’s sort of foolish to integrate all the statistics, since none of them were earned in competition against the white Hall of Famers. Baseball is a strange sport anyway when it comes to statistics. It’s the only one of the major sports where older fans argue that players from more than 100 years ago were better than today’s players.
When I was a kid in the late 1950s, my grandfather used to go on and on about how great Ty Cobb was. Cobb had a lifetime batting averge of .367 and my grandfather used to say he would hit .300 or so in modern baseball.
“Only .300?” I asked.
“Well, he is 70 years old.”