Evan Cerne ’28 was in the crowd five years ago when Seattle Mariners shortstop J.P. Crawford—his favorite player—hit a grand slam and later scored the winning run in an extra innings game played on Juneteenth against the Tampa Bay Rays.
In honor of the new federal holiday, Cerne’s hometown team that day celebrated Seattle’s 1946 Negro Leagues club by changing its name to the Steelheads and donning replica home jerseys.
The thriller of a game was Cerne’s introduction to Negro Leagues history.
In May 2024, the spring before Cerne’s first year at Pomona College, Major League Baseball integrated the statistics of more than 2,300 Negro Leagues players from 1920-48 into its record books, an historic change that shifted career pitching and hitting leaderboards.
A few months later, Cerne had an idea.
Every first-year student at Pomona takes a Critical Inquiry seminar, or ID1 class, their first semester to learn how to think critically and express themselves through speaking and writing.
In Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Edray Goins’ ID1 course, Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, Cerne wrote biographies on lesser-known Black mathematicians whose impact influenced generations.
That ID1 coursework inspired him to spend the summer exploring the statistical feats of baseball’s greatest Black players.
“I had this great opportunity to make something of large sets of data and see what stories I could tell about these players based on their statistics,” Cerne says.
One reason Cerne chose to attend Pomona was the opportunity to explore his interests, however diverse.
When deciding how to approach his proposed Summer Undergraduate Research Project (SURP), Cerne says Goins gave him equal parts freedom and guidance to chase his curiosities.
Using the Seamheads Negro Leagues Database—a statistical encyclopedia covering Black professional ballplayers, teams and leagues during the era of segregation—Cerne charted Negro Leagues statistics accumulated across seven leagues and 48 unique seasons between 1920 and 1948.
The rising sophomore created a model that applied modern Cy Young Award voting to Negro Leagues pitchers, generating a vote total for each pitcher in each league in each season.
“Bullet” Joe Rogan, a Hall of Fame two-way player who spent his 19 seasons with the Kansas City Monarchs, won Cerne’s mythical Cy Young Award so often in the early 1920s that Cerne changed the name of the top pitching award from the “Cy Young” to the “Bullet Rogan.”
“A lot of people have heard of Satchel Paige,” Cerne says, “and he’s probably the most famous player that played in the Negro Leagues. But Bullet Rogan is just as impressive, and I was able to showcase that through his historical data.”
Beyond his rankings, Cerne drafted league-by-league recaps for each season between 1920 and 1929.
“The write-ups give context to the statistics,” he says, “and they come together to create a narrative history of Negro Leagues pitchers.”
On top of creating a model for determining the best Negro Leagues pitcher in a particular season, Cerne calculated the results of exhibition games between Negro Leagues teams and Major League teams.
With the information available on the Seamheads website, he found Negro Leagues clubs had a 63-61-2 record in those games, with slightly better statistics in most offensive categories—hits, triples, home runs, stolen bases.
Another project Cerne took on this summer was to model the winning percentage of Negro Leagues squads.
With a dataset of 249 outfits, he demonstrated the effectiveness of two different models using the 1923 Hilldale Club, the 1935 Philadelphia Stars and the 1943 Homestead Grays as case studies.
Cerne’s summer work lives on a website he plans to update as he learns more about statistics while at Pomona.
“This is by far the most comprehensive, detailed and interesting thing I’ve spent time on,” he says. “I hope this project can propel me toward having a good foundation in working with baseball statistics, being innovative with them and using them to produce something new and exciting for people who are interested in the human stories in baseball as well as statistics.”