New York ? Major League Baseball will create a fund to pay pensions to 27 former Negro Leaguers who played after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier.

The players will have the option of receiving $833.33 a month for four years — for a total of $40,000 — or $375 a month for life.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who has pushed baseball to create the pension fund, is scheduled to release details about the plan on Monday after meeting in Tampa with Bob Mitchell, a former Kansas City Monarchs pitcher who has been the players’ unofficial leader.

Mitchell said he had hoped the fund would extend to the players’ widows or families after the players died, but that it would not.

“I am a little disappointed,” Mitchell said. “But we had our backs up against the wall.”

A plan for Negro League players created in 1997 pays $10,000 a year to those with a combined four years or more in the Negro Leagues and major leagues before 1947.

But many teams did not have a black player on the roster until the late ’50s.

The Yankees did not add a black player until Elston Howard joined the team in 1955. Boston, the last team to integrate, added its first black player in 1959.

Mitchell and other players who met the four-year requirement but didn’t start their careers until 1948 or later asked for compensation, saying they were denied a full opportunity to play major-league ball.

Commissioner Bud Selig promised Nelson that MLB would come up with a proposal for the excluded players in March, before Selig testified before a Senate hearing on steroids.

“The older guys before Jackie, they never had a chance. Josh Gibson, myself, others. Baseball was segregated,” said Monarchs star Buck O’Neil, who was Mitchell’s manager in the 1950s.

“The guys after Jackie, they at least had the opportunity to get signed in the major leagues. Some of those guys in the Negro Leagues after Jackie, they weren’t good enough to play in the majors. But they still deserved something,” he said. “All right for them that they’re getting a pension.”