MLB Releases Negro League Stats

Baseball Nation:

And wouldn't you like to know how strong the Negro American League in 1938 really was? I sure would. And something like the comprehensive statistics from that league will, in a roundabout (and imprecise) way, help us answer that question.
Anyway, the numbers just sat around for a year, and then another and another. I like to think they were wiped from all computer machines in Cooperstown and New York City, leaving only a pile of thick, leather-bound ledgers kept inside a vault deep within Bud Selig's secret underground lair in Milwaukee.
Of course the truth wasn't nearly so prosaic. A selected group of lucky souls have been able to look at the numbers, but they were kept from the public in the vain hope that a book might be published. Or something.
The book never came, though. And seven years after the project's completion, Major League Baseball and the Hall of Fame have finally done the right thing: Today, Baseball-Reference.com announced the publication of the 1920-1948 statistics in the MLB-commissioned study. But wait! It gets even better! On another track, researchers Gary Ashwill and Scott Simkus have spearheaded an effort to collect statistics from 1903 through 1919, and B-R.com has those data, too.
So suddenly we've got this incredible resource. It shouldn't have taken so long, but that doesn't mean I'm not grateful to Major League Baseball, to the Hall of Fame, and to the many dozens of researchers who spent so many years slaving away over microfilm machines.

Baseball-Reference is an awesome site to behold.  NPR interviewed Rob Neyer about this data.  The difficulty of the research in sorting through information in old black newspapers is pretty interesting.