As Grant’s health faltered in recent years, the group drifted apart even as it added three new members: Dontrelle Willis, C. C. Sabathia and David Price.

“This group deserves to be more than just a footnote in baseball history,” said Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. “If it takes the passing of Don Newcombe to help us reflect and remember, then that’s another gift that he has given us.”

Why haven’t there been more Black Aces in recent years? There are two popular explanations: Winning 20 games is remarkably difficult in modern baseball, and there simply aren’t that many black players on major league rosters.

Last year, there was an uptick in the latter, with the number of black players from the United States and Canada on opening-day active rosters rising to 8.4 percent, according to Major League Baseball, but that was well below the sport’s high-water mark of 19 percent, in 1986. Among that 8.4 percent, black starting pitchers were a minority within another minority, a group that includes Sabathia, Price, Chris Archer and Tyson Ross.

Blue, who reached the majors in 1969, thought the explanation could be as simple as athletes who choose baseball over football or basketball wanting to play a position that had more action. But according to Kendrick, the scarcity of black pitchers goes all the way back to the early days of integration, and that, at least initially, it wasn’t the players making the decision.