Baseball Made 'Whole': Rhetorical Hierarchy and Post-racial Discourse in Major League Baseball's Inclusion of the Negro Leagues.

This article analyzes Major League Baseball's (MLB) December 2020 decision to retroactively grant "Major League" status to the Negro Leagues, formally integrating their statistical records into MLB's official history. Framed within the context of the 2020 racial justice protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, the decision is interpreted as a rhetorical act of mortification—an institutional atonement for decades of racial exclusion—using the symbolic hierarchy of "Major League" status to legitimize Negro League players' contributions. The article highlights tensions in reconciling incomplete Negro League statistics with MLB's historical records and critiques the move as reinforcing a post-racial narrative that may obscure ongoing racial power dynamics. It further discusses the role of sportswriting and public memory in shaping baseball's cultural significance and calls for continued scholarly attention to the intersections of race, rhetoric, and sport history.