Here are amazing stats for five Negro League stars now in Baseball Reference database

Baseball Reference this week incorporated Negro Leagues stats into its database. That came six months after Major League Baseball recognized the Negro League players as major leaguers.

“Major Negro Leagues (from 1920-1948) are now listed with the National League and American League as major leagues,” Baseball Reference wrote on its website.

“We are not bestowing a new status on these players or their accomplishments. The Negro Leagues have always been major leagues. We are changing our site’s presentation to properly recognize this fact.”

Baseball Reference said it has calculated Wins Above Replacement (WAR) and a way to see the 162-game average for the players.

If you have visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and hoped to see stats of some of the players you learned about, the Baseball Reference pages are fantastic.

Here are the pages for five of the best Negro Leagues players ever. Scratch that. Here are the pages for five of the best players ever.

Mike Petriello of MLB.com noted how Satchel Paige’s page changed:

Buck Leonard was amazing:

Josh Gibson did some incredible things:

And how much fun would it have been to see Cool Papa Bell play?

One writer compared the early careers of Oscar Charleston and Albert Pujols: