The League (2023) – Tribeca23 Short Takes #3

The new documentary feature The League had its world premiere at the 2023 Tribeca Festival.  It is an extraordinary film - a beautiful, consummately researched and constructed chronicle of the Negro Baseball Leagues and their profound effect on African American communities. It also explains how and why the integration of the league’s black athletes into the formerly segregated Major Leagues starting in the late 1940s reinvigorated professional baseball, due to the more athletic, more exciting style of play developed in the Negro Leagues. Not just for baseball fans, the film will have a short, exclusive run in theaters on July 7 to July 9. It will begin streaming on pay per view platforms beginning July 14.  (see below)

There are a lot of ways to explore the long history of racism in America and of the contributions of black and brown Americans to our culture and history. Along with jazz, sports - baseball in particular - may be the most quintessential and approachable American cultural institution to be so intertwined with and reflective of our complicated racial history. 

The League tells this fascinating story in a most engrossing way.  I highly recommend the film generally for anyone who enjoys excellent documentaries. If you are particular about subject matter, I’d say you would enjoy and particularly appreciate The League if you are a fan of or are interested in

        • Americana generally, and particularly American social and cultural history - and/or

        • Baseball (and sports) in general – and/or

        • the struggle of black and brown people in America for equality and a piece of the American pie - and/or, 

        • the rise and fall of America’s Negro Leagues and, more generally, the racial history of professional baseball.  

The League is produced and was directed by the estimable Sam Pollard. Pollard started out as a film editor, working with Spike Lee [Mo’ Better Blues (1990), Bamboozled (2000)] and many others directors, on subjects ranging from sports to politics to Black history to music [notably, HBO’s Sinatra: All or Nothing at All (2015)]. As a director, Pollard has focused on documentaries with works like the award winning Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me (2017) and MLK/FBI (2020). An executive producer ofThe League is Ahmire “Questlove” Thompson [director of the fabulous Summer of Soul (2021)]. These guys really know how to put a documentary together, and it shows. 

For most people, the story of how major league baseball became integrated pretty much starts when owner Branch Rickey signed the young Jackie Robinson in 1945 or when Robinson first walked out on Brooklyn’s Ebbet’s field wearing a Dodgers uniform in April 1947, a year which culminated with him winning the “Rookie of the Year” award. Robinson was the first to break baseball’s “color line”, and was soon followed by other African American luminaries, like Larry Doby, Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella. 

Actually, from the Civil War until the late 19th century, while there was always race discrimination which limited the number of Negro players in the upper levels, there was not a strict  or mandatory color line in organized baseball; and there were a number of “colored” ball players in the sport. By the dawn of the twentieth century however, the door was firmly shut on black players, just as a wave of segregation crashed down on most other aspects of American life. So how did athletes like Robinson, Doby, Campanella and other black luminaries, like Josh Gibson, Buck O’Neil and Satchel Paige, develop? As one commentator noted,” They didn’t want to make history; they just wanted to play ball!”

You may have heard of the Negro Leagues, but the history and importance of these all African-American (and later, Latin-American as well) teams has never been so fully and at the same time engagingly examined as in The League. How and when did these teams and leagues get started?  How did they survive for so long, and why did they disappear? (The Negro Leagues were finished by 1960.) How did they bolster the African American communities in their heyday, and what effect did the demise of those teams - the KC Monarchs, the Homestead Grays, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, etc. – have on their communities?

How did Pollard put this complex story together?  Here is a partial explanation, in his own words:

        My vision was simple. Find voices of those who played the game, surround them with historians and fans of the Negro Leagues, use as much archival footage and stills I could find and. Fortunately  . . . Byron Motley (whose dad, Bob Motley, had been a Negro League Umpire) had interviewed and recorded many former players years ago. It was a treasure trove of wonderful voices and added immensely to the telling of the story. Also, fortunately many of the die-hard Negro League historians had access or knew where to find footage that I had never seen, which added enormously to visualizing the story.  

Much of the game footage and filmed interviews with former players appearing in The League, has never before been seen publicly. As Pollard says – it IS a treasure trove. The film itself is a treasure as well.

    1 hour 43 minutes

    Grade: A-

    Limited release in select theaters on Friday July 7; Available for VOD rental on many platforms   beginning July 14, 2023.