Opinion: MLB gesture to Negro League players is honorable but now it's time to pay them

Remember these four names: Rev. Bill Greason, Clyde Golden, Ron Teasley and Willie Mays.

Major League Baseball announced this week the 1920-1948 Negro Leagues was recognized as major league, meaning Black players who played during those years are officially acknowledged as the same as their white counterparts. We already knew they were equals, of course, it's just official now.

While there are roughly 130 players alive from the Negro Leagues, according to baseball historian Larry Lester, only those four players are alive from that 1920-1948 window. Mays played his rookie year in 1948 with the Birmingham Black Barons.

Those four names aren't just pieces of data, or clickable things on a site, they are human beings who excelled despite living under the thick anvil of segregation. They also represent something else. They are symbols for what should happen next.

While baseball acknowledging these Black players is important, it should only be a first step. Baseball needs to retroactively pay the newly recognized Negro League players and their surviving families.

Pay them reparations.

Use Mays, Greason, Golden and Teasley as the faces of a compensation plan, like lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit, and account for what was a wide disparity in pay between Black and white players during those 28 years.

I first saw this idea mentioned in one sentence in a Deadspin story and wondered why this wasn't something discussed much more than it has been. After contacting Lester, co-founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and chairman of SABR's Negro Leagues Research Committee, he provided data that was absolutely staggering.

'THEY TRULY DESERVE IT:' Families of Negro Leaguers rejoice in MLB's decision to recognize league

OPINION:After vowing change, Black candidates shut out again of MLB front office jobs

Lester said the average monthly salary of a Black player in the early 1920s was $175 a month. Rookies earned $75 and the stars $375. They received between $1 to $1.50 a day for meal money.

Major league players received from $300 to $2,000 a month and about $15 a day for meals. That's about five times more in salary than Black players.

In 1924, the first year of the Colored World Series, the share of the winners, the Kansas City Monarchs, was $307.96, says Lester. The Hilldale Club, the team that lost, took home $193.23.

The World Series winners that same year earned $5,959.64 and the losers $3,820.29. That's almost 19 times what the Black players received.

You knew the disparity in pay would be bad, but that gap is embarrassing for baseball.

If you think white players made more money because they were more talented that's just false. Black players earned less because they were Jim Crow'd. The leagues were full of talent and it went beyond the names you may know like Mays or Satchel Paige. There was Oscar Charleston who hit .400 multiple times. 

If baseball (rightfully) believes that recognizing those players is important (and it is) then why not fully recognize them?

America is about democracy and opportunity but it's also just as much about cash.

It wouldn't even cost baseball that much money particularly since salaries of Negro League players began to increase in the 1940s as their play became so good they were practically impossible to ignore, and as Jackie Robinson started his trek towards history.

"Going forward, in the 1930s following the Great Depression, salaries of Black players were about the same amount as the 1920s," Lester said. "Going into the late 1930s and the early 1940s, we see player salaries jump to an average of $300 to $400 each month with the stars like Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige getting about $600-$700 a month. This data is based on actual contracts I have seen."

"So take a ballplayer like Monte Irvin, in 1948, who made $5,000 with the New York Giants," Lester said, "or $833.33 a month. Paige probably took a pay cut when he joined the Cleveland Indians in 1948."

But before Paige there was baseball's serial pay disparity.

So, yes, remember those four names.

Then baseball needs to pay them.