Integration and the Splendid Splinter

This week Barry Bonds swiped second base in the bottom of the eleventh. In the little picture it meant that he was in scoring position and helped the Giants to a victory against their arch-rival, the Dodgers. In the big picture this was career steal #500 for Bonds, making him a member of the 500/500 club. He was the only member of the 400/400 club, and is joined by his father, Bobby Bonds, his godfather, Willie Mays, and Andre Dawson in the 300/300 club. Yet another milestone for the amazing Bonds. It seems like every time a big number rolls past for Bonds these days his position amongst the all-time greats is debated. In left field he's long eclipsed Stan Musial and Ricky Henderson. The big question is how Bonds stacks up against the once-great and now-Popsicle Ted Williams. There are two big fudge factors here. The first is the time Williams spent in World War II and the Korean conflict. That has been well covered elsewhere. The second is the integration factor. While the National League integrated quickly, the American League followed at a more leisurely pace. Here we look at the question "how many games did Ted Williams play against integrated competition?"

The proper way to do this would be to get a set of baseball cards covering Williams' era and then go to http://www.retrosheet.org/ and count up every last game where he did face such a player. That would be a large amount of work, so perhaps a quick-and-dirty approximation is a better method. Looking at the number of games Williams played in each year and the date of integration of each American League team we can estimate the percentage of Ted's career which was integrated.

In 19 seasons The Kid played in 2292 games. Prior to 1947 the Color Barrier covered "Organized Baseball", and Williams played 736 games against all-white competition. That covers 32% of his career. In 1947 both Cleveland and St. Louis integrated in July. Give them credit for a half-season each, so Williams faced integrated squads in one out of every seven of the 156 games he played. That leaves 134 games against whites-only. This method is carried out in the following chart:

Totaling things up, Ted played roughly 1363 games against all-white competition. That's about 60% of his career. Note that this is back-of-the-envelope calculation, and doesn't take into account the fact that while the teams that Williams faced might have had one or two black players, this was an era of "token integration", when race still played a huge role in roster management.

The Red Sox were the last team to integrate, Pumpsie Green joined the Red Sox on July 21, 1959. Ted played for a season and a half on an integrated team. Not that any of this was under Ted's control. His feelings about the Negro Leagues were made clear when he advocated for the inclusion of these forgotten players in his Hall of Fame speech.