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The following teams played at least one partial season in one of the major Negro leagues. Some teams also played as either a barnstorming (or traveling) team, a minor league team or a team that existed after the integration of Major League Baseball (1946) when the talent level declined dramatically.
This list of Negro league baseball teams is split into two pages, one listing the major league Negro teams and one listing the minor league and traveling Negro teams. Some teams are included in both lists.
There are currently seven Negro Leagues presented as major leagues on Baseball Reference. This is consistent with the decision of SABR's Negro Leagues Task Force in February 2021 and Major League Baseball's announcement in December 2020.
In December 2020, Major League Baseball announced that based on recent decades of historical research, it classified the seven "major Negro leagues" as additional major leagues, adding them to the six historical "major league" designations it made in 1969, thus recognizing statistics and approximately 3,400 players who played from 1920 to 1948.
And at the same time, the numbers that you will find here are the work of dedicated and meticulous researchers who painstakingly went through box score after box score to log the totals these players had when playing top level Negro Leagues baseball.
The 16 featured teams below were selected after consultation with John Thorn, the Official Historian for MLB, and other Negro Leagues experts. More teams will be added regularly as we seek to preserve and honor those who helped define the Negro Leagues, and its impact on the game.
Major Negro Leagues (from 1920-1948) are now listed with the National League and American League as major leagues. We are not bestowing a new status on these players or their accomplishments. The Negro Leagues have always been major leagues.
