Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1559: Forgotten Greats

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s effusive streaming recommendation, the Korean baseball drama Stove League. Then (8:51) they start the second episode of their week-long celebration of the Negro Leagues by bringing on Jeremy Beer, author of the award-winning baseball biography Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player, to […]

Well, I feel like a four-letter word. I know what few can know. How angry words can pierce the heart. How a soul can sink so low. I feel like a forgotten name. Yes, I feel like a forgotten man Hello and welcome to episode 1559 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast for Fangraphs, presented by our Patreon supporters. I'm Dunlan Birk of The Ringer, joined by Meg Rowley of Fangraphs. Hello, Meg.

Hello. This is the second episode in our week of episodes devoted to the Negro League. So on our previous episode, we talked to Bob Kendrick of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. Today we have two guests. So first we will talk to Jeremy Beer, who wrote a great biography of Oscar Charleston last year. And basically a bunch of people have made the case that Oscar Charleston is the best Negro Leagues player, maybe the best or one of the very best baseball players of all time. And he is probably not properly appreciated.

So we will talk to Jeremy about why that is and why he was so great in his life and career. And just generally the difficulty of writing a biography about a Negro Leagues player about whom less is known than one would want. less is known than one would want. And then after that, we will be talking to Dr. Emily Rudder, who is a professor who has written a lot and is an expert on representations of black baseball. We'll be talking specifically about a couple of movies about the Negro Leagues, Soul of the Game from 1996, and The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings from 1976. So we'll talk a bit about those movies specifically and then about the context and why there aren't more movies and just works in general about black baseball. Both great conversations that we enjoyed and we will get to them in just a moment. Before we do, I just want to make a recommendation, which I've already made to you offline, but we'll make in longer form here and make to all the listeners.

I'm hooked on a new baseball show, and it's called Stove League, and it is a Korean baseball drama or dramedy. And I saw JJ Cooper from Baseball America tweet about it the other day, and I thought, boy, this looks really good. And I gave it a shot, and Jesse and I have gotten totally hooked. I'll just give you the full rundown here. This show aired from last December to this February, and it's been a hit in South Korea. It's critically acclaimed. In June, it won Best Drama at the Baek Sang Arts Awards, which, as I understand it, is kind of like the Korean Oscars and Emmys rolled into one. So there's been one season so far.

There are 16 hour-long episodes. It's pretty meaty. And we are five episodes in right now, and we are just totally hooked on it. And I can't recommend it more highly to anyone who has starred for baseball content. And I think listeners of the show would really appreciate it. for baseball content, and I think listeners of the show would really appreciate it. And just the quick summary, it's about this team in the Korean Baseball League. I guess it's not explicitly the KBO, but it's the KBO. It's fictionalized teams, but that's what it is.

It's the Korean Major Leagues, and it's actually shot at the home park of the KBO's SK Wyverns. It's this perennial basement dweller, a team called the Dreams, and they're in 10th place year in and year out. And they have kind of been poorly run and suddenly they get a new general manager and they're running things in a different way. And really the protagonist is the woman who is the team leader.

She's sort of like the director of baseball operations, I guess you could say would be the MLB equivalent. She's the first woman in this position for a Korean team. And it's sort of presented from her viewpoint to an extent, although it focuses on a lot of characters too. And so it's about her. It's about this GM who comes over from Team Handball. He's won championships in a bunch of other sports, and he doesn't know that much about baseball, but he is just iconoclast, and he sees things clearly, and he doesn't care what anyone thinks, and he's going to turn this team around. And they're just great storylines about scouting. Sabermetrics plays a very prominent part in

this story, and there are all sorts of mentions of war and WPA, and they go through a round of interviews for a sabermetric analyst, and they have famous sabermetric bloggers, not real ones, but kind of like real ones on the show. people there's just a lot to like here and it just sort of fills that void that pitch left and that another show i've recommended goretzany or money pitch a japanese anime baseball show it's sort of a blend of both of those where it's this kind of heartwarming drama where you really like all these characters and it's kind of funny but it's also very inside baseball and it's kind of funny, but it's also very inside baseball, and it presents all these aspects of running a baseball team that you don't typically see, say, in a baseball movie, maybe in a way that might be almost off-putting to kind of casual mainstream fans, but for our listeners, I think they would really eat it up. So again, Stove League, go check it out. You will love it if you're looking for something to watch over this long weekend, if you have one, Stove League is what you want to check out.

I mean, this sounds like we're going to need to do an episode where we grapple with the accuracy of how sabermetrics are portrayed. But yeah, I'm so thrilled to have a baseball show. We have lamented the loss of pitch many a time on this program. I think we still feel its absence keenly, even though it is thankfully now available on Hulu for those who want to engage with it for the first time. But yes, good baseball media and representations of baseball of all kinds are kind of hard to come by.

I think it'll be a recurring theme of our episode today. So I'm excited to get to dig in on a new one and one that centers a different league than MLB, which is so often the focus. So I'm very excited for your recommendation, Ben. Yeah, it's right. It's close enough to what we know that it's not like you'll feel out of your depth or anything, but it's also different enough. Things don't work quite the same way there that you'll be kind of curious about some of the differences and also some of the parallels. And you get some screenshots of spray charts and just like internal team systems. And it's just great. And it's like it jumps around. So it'll focus on players sometimes or scouts or data

analysts or the people's lives away from the ballpark and then also how they're trying to turn around this team it's the best and for anyone who wants to know how to watch it that is an important question too so it's available on a couple of asian streaming services so one of them is called kokoa or kokawa i will link to that and you can find it there. But I am watching it on another streaming service called Viki, V-I-K-I. And the first two episodes are available for free there. So you can watch without even registering or anything. And then if you like them, which you will, you can then sign up for a free trial and potentially even watch the whole thing just for free if you binge it quickly. But there are English subtitles I will link to where you can find it.

And yeah, maybe when you watch it, I will just say when, not if. I will just presume that you will be checking this out at some point. Maybe we can have a longer conversation about it once our listeners have had some time to check it out too. But yes, I give it thus far through about a third of the season. I give it my highest recommendation for fellow baseball geeks. I'm very excited about this because I don't know if you saw this earlier this week. I don't know that you would have occasion to follow Hulu's Twitter account because why would you do that,

Ben? No, I don't. Yeah, why would you do that? I don't either. But I saw this retweeted into my timeline that they tried to get folks to watch Pitch, had a little promo that was clearly recently filmed between Kylie Bunbury as Ginny and Mark Paul Gosselaar as Mike, which was very exciting. It suggested a continuing pitch universe that is just out of view. But it was like a 20-second promo to watch a series I've already seen. And so as exciting as that brief taste was, I am in the market for a new baseball TV. So I will definitely engage with it soon.

Excellent. All right. Then we will get to our first interview. We are joined now by Jeremy Beer. He is the author of the book Oscar Charleston, The Life and Legend of Baseball's Greatest Forgotten Player, which was published last year by the great University of Nebraska Press, whose virtues I have extolled before. And it has been very well received. It won the 2019 Casey Award and the 2020 Sabre Seymour Medal.

You can take my word for it if you don't know about baseball book awards, but very prestigious. So congratulations on the success, Jeremy, and thank you for coming on. It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. So I was looking at Joe Posnanski's recent Baseball 100, his ranking of the top 100 baseball players in history, and he has Oscar Charleston at number five between Hank Aaron and Ted Williams. And he's not the first to get that aggressive with an Oscar Charleston ranking. Bill James in his new historical abstract had him at number four. But looking at the other players on Joe's list who spent all or much of their careers in the Negro Leagues, you have Cool Papa Bell, Monty Irvin, Smokey Joe Williams, Buck Leonard, Pop Lloyd,

Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige. Most of those players, I think, probably have greater name recognition with the average baseball fan than Oscar Charleston. And even though his contemporaries all seem to say that he was the best or certainly one of the best, and Buck O'Neill famously said that he was Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Trish Speaker rolled into one, and that he was the best player he'd ever seen, he was still only the seventh Negro Leaguer inducted into the Hall of Fame. And as you noted, Greatest Forgotten Player, which I assume must be exciting in a way for a biographer, because you're hoping that he won't be forgotten when people read the book and that you can bring him to greater attention. But it also must be somewhat daunting, because there must be reasons why someone has not received the recognition that he deserves. And

that is probably something you encountered as you were working on this. So what drew you to Oscar Charleston and what were the challenges of bringing his memory to light? Yeah, I did not know about him until I encountered Bill James's ranking of him as the fourth greatest player of all time. And so that was the first thing that drew me to him, just wanting to know more about, you know, I had thought of myself as a fairly serious baseball fan. And how could I not know who the fourth greatest player of all time is? I mean, that's ridiculous. You can't even imagine that. And it wouldn't seem, say, in football.

So when I started looking into him, I realized he was from Indiana. That's one of the first things I found out. And I'm from Indiana, which made me even more ticked off. Because my friends and I would sit around, I'm sure like you guys do, and say, hey, who are the greatest players of all time from Indiana? Pick a sport. You know, that was the thing we would do, and say, hey, who are the greatest players of all time from Indiana? Pick a sport. You know, that was the thing we would do. We were nerdy, nerdy kids who liked sports.

And never, his name never came up. So, you know, to know that not only the fourth greatest player of all time or somebody in that inner, inner circle had been forgotten, but also a fellow Hoosier was what drove me to want to look into his life and, yeah, see what I could find. And you're right, it's daunting, but there was more. Joe Posnanski in his great article on Charleston talks about how much we can't know ever about Charleston, but I was actually more impressed by how much I was able to find. 400 pages worth. Yes. Much to my editor's delight, I'm sure.

So can you take us through your research process and how you started to arrive at some of the many facts and anecdotes that populate those 400 words? 400 pages. Yes, excuse me. 400 words per page. Yeah, you know, I started out with, I wasn't going to trust any secondary source, if I could possibly help it. Because what was clear, if you just, you know, still today, if you Google around online, about Oscar Charleston, you can tell that a game of telephone has been played, you know, that somebody said something, and it gets a little bit distorted,

and somebody kind of repeats it. And, you know, by the time you get to the seventh person repeating it, you have something that's clearly, you know, garbled. So that was something I wanted to overcome. And I also just wanted to treat him seriously as a historical figure. It seemed, and this happens with players from the past, maybe more with Negro Leagues players, they become symbols more than they become men. And I wanted to treat him seriously as a man and as a historical figure, not accept anything that wasn't well attested or as well attested as possible. So that was sort of the guiding principle. And then it just, it was the right, in some ways it was exactly the wrong time to undertake such a project. In other ways, it was a really good time. It was a totally terrible time in the sense that everybody who knew Oscar,

at least who played with him or for him, except for six, seven, eight people, at least that I could find, is gone, right? I mean, I started the project too late. They've passed away. I was able to talk to a few people who knew him at the end of his career and played for him for the Philadelphia Stars or Indianapolis Clowns, but that was about it. So that was somewhat discouraging, but the good news is there are a lot of oral interviews that are either available in audio format or print format from people who talked a lot about Charles Zimmer, asked a lot of questions about him, so that helped there. On the other side, it was really good because everything's been digitized it's been very very hard to write a biography like this 10 15 20 years ago because you would you would have had to select like the four or five newspapers that you were

going to spend your life going through the microfiche on right and figure out what happened on a daily basis easy to search now every newspaper not quite every newspaper in the land but a really high percentage of them. And so just doing the sort of digitized searching you can do now, going through old newspapers, you're able to piece together a fairly good amount of the story. The interior life was harder to get to, but the exterior life, you could get to a pretty good chunk of it. So before we get into the specifics, can you just give us a quick summary of his life and career and sort of the elevator pitch for why he is arguably the best

Negro Leagues player ever? Not only that, I would say it's possible that he has the most impressive resume in baseball ever compiled by anyone of any race. That's my one sentence. That's the lead sentence of the elevator pitch. Yeah, he was five. I'm listening. Right. Well, so he started as a player, right? He had a very long career, super durable, was a five-tool player. As people who have read Joe Posnanski's piece in The Athletic will know, he could hit for power, he could hit for average. He was a great base runner, stole a lot of bases, and was a great defender. I mean, really transformed how center field was played, at least in the black game. So he got that part of his career. And I can get into the statistics

later that might sort of go to proving that point. Then he had a great career in Cuba. He became a legend in Cuba, the best knownknown American player in Cuban baseball in the 1920s and a legend there. He played for legendary teams. So you have that side of what he did. Pittsburgh Crawfords in particular, but earlier with the Harrisburg Giants, and wins several championships as a manager and manages that famous Pittsburgh Crawfords team with Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige. And anybody who had to manage Satchel Paige has earned his stripes. Then he goes on to be a pioneering scout, probably the first African-American to be paid to scout for a National League or American League team. Probably broke the scouting color line. He's never gotten credit for that, but he scouted for Branch Rickey in 1945. And we know he played a major role

in the signing of Roy Campanella by the Dodgers, probably among others. So that's my elevator pitch. You put all that together, player, manager, scout, player in different leagues, universally attested by both black and white observers in terms of his

greatness. That's hard to beat. I don't know who else can, you know, it's a pretty good combo. And take us through a bit of that statistical record and sort of the scouting report for him, because I think that often, like you said, Negro League players can be, you know, the specifics of their career can be forgotten sometimes because they're held up as icons, the specifics of their career can be forgotten, sometimes because they're held up as icons, sometimes because of the limitations in the statistical record that we have. So take us through some of Charleston's sort of career highlights. Yeah, this was something I didn't know until I started working on this project. But the statistics we have now on the Negro Leagues are far better than we've ever had at any moment in time,

including when the leagues were happening themselves. I mean, there's so much better. now on the Negro Leagues are far better than we've ever had at any moment in time, including when the leagues were happening themselves. I mean, there's so much better. Thanks to this army of researchers who have painstakingly gone through all these old newspapers and gotten box scores out of them and game accounts and redone all the statistics from as many games as we can find. So, you know, Larry Lester, who's sort of a dean of Negro Leagues researchers and historians. Yes, we're hoping to have him on this week. You should have Larry on. He's great. So you can ask, you can confirm this with him. But I think I've heard him say that he thinks we have about 70% of the box scores between major Negro Leagues teams during their heyday anyway. So we have a fairly robust sample size. You'll see repeated,

like Jane Levy in her wonderful biography of Babe Ruth that came out just a year or two ago, just casually says something along the way that we don't have good Negro League statistics. And you hear that repeated, but that's not true anymore. They're at seamheads.com. It's great to be talking to Fangrs. We can dive into the stats. Yes, please. You'll want to know. Yes. Go to Seamheads.com. That's where the best Negro League statistics are housed,

thanks to a man named Gary Ashwell. And they're not bad. They're actually not bad. And they're certainly not as good as we have for the white National League, American League at the time, but they're very good. So starting there, okay, do your baseball reference search, okay, on the play index. Who had a career average of 300 or more or higher? Homers of 300 or more, stolen bases of 300 or more, and a defensive war of greater than zero. So the answer is nobody. Okay, take out the defensive war requirement. The answer is still nobody. That 300, 300, 300 club, nobody has hit it. Bonds, Barry Bonds came closest. He has a.298 career batting average. 350 in Negro Leagues play, 191 home runs, and 300 stolen bases, and fewer than half the plate appearances that Willie Mays compiled in his career.

So he just crudely, I know it doesn't work this way, but double those sorts of numbers to sort of start to get some sense of where we should start, you know, in evaluating him. And you're probably looking at a guy, he's like, again, maybe he doesn't hit 350 in an integrated the in an integrated major league maybe it's 320 or 330 but he's clearly over 300 home runs and almost certainly over 500 stolen bases and so that's sort of the statistical basis of where the kind of career you're looking at he's first all-time in the negro leagues play part of the database and in all the counting stats except for home runs, basically. Runs, hits, doubles, triples, RBIs, stolen bases, and walks.

He's third in home runs. He's first in career war in Negro Leagues play. He's got the fifth highest career OPS plus, third highest career batting average. That gives you some sense. There was an 11-year span, his peak, 1918 through 1928, where he had an OPS plus of 200 or higher five times, never lower than 165. During that time, he's also universally regarded as the best defender in the league and one of its best base runners. He's Mike Trout. He's a left-handed Mike Trout from 100 years ago. That's basically who Oscar Charleston was. Yeah, that's a pretty impressive resume. And I want to give a shout out also to Dan Hirsch, friend of the show, who often helps us with our statistical requests. He's also played a big part in the SeamHeads Negro Leagues database. So he has helped present those stats too.

So it's not just the stats, obviously. If all we had was the stats, maybe you could be sort of skeptical but we also have the testimony of people who played with him and saw him play and is it a universal sentiment that he was the best or does it vary a little bit how much of a range is there in terms of what people said about him because you have memory is somewhat fallible. And of course, people's personal evaluations of players are somewhat fallible at times, especially in earlier eras. But when someone like Buck O'Neill, who saw as much baseball as he did, said that he was the best ever, who else kind of joined the list of people acclaiming him?

Right. So it's not universal. I mean, nothing's universal, right? But is that adjective all around the best all around player in Negro Leagues history? They usually got everybody saying his name. Otherwise, you might get Josh Gibson nominated by people and rightly so. I mean, I'm not sure who I would pick between those two as the greatest player in Negro Leagues history. Gibson was just so, his bat was just tremendous. But if you're really valuing the defensive and base running part of this equation, it's not universal, but he's by far the most often nominated by both black and white observers. So besides Buck O'Neill, you have people like

Honus Wagner, who said he'd been around all the great players in the game over the years. He'd never seen anyone greater than Charleston. There's a scout named Benny Borgman, who's actually in the NBA, or in the Basketball Hall of Fame, I should say. And he was a scout for the Cardinals at some point. And he said he'd seen Ruth, Cobb, Gehrig, all of them. And the greatest he'd ever seen was Oscar Charleston. Borgman was obviously white. Hollis Thurston, who was a white pitcher, said he'd seen Babe Ruth and Fox and all of them.

Charleston was the greatest hitter he'd ever seen. Happy Chandler, former commissioner of baseball, said that Cobb and Charleston were the greatest players he'd ever seen. There's one more, and I'm sure there's just name-checking here that's worth mentioning. Tom Baird, who was a co-owner of the Kansas City Monarchs, a white co-owner of the Kansas City Monarchs, and a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and didn't let that keep him from saying that Charleston was the greatest player he'd ever seen. So, you know, even from out and out, total racist, we know, you know, Charleston was able to persuade him. So it's pretty,

we know Charleston was able to persuade him. So it's pretty, I was really impressed in doing the research, just how many people volunteered that sort of statement to the press. And it's both, as I say, it's not just white players, but African American players and club owners as well. So it's pretty remarkable. So given that remarkable resume and the Sterling endorsements that he received, help us to understand how it has taken so long for his story to sort of start to gain the prominence within our understanding of black baseball history and the Negro Leagues in particular that it's starting to occupy now. Because I think one of the things I was struck by in reading the introduction to your book is that it isn't simply a matter of white baseball fans, contemporary baseball fans being unaware of him. There's sort of a contemporaneous or near contemporaneous to

his life forgetting that begins and he does not receive his due. As Ben mentioned, he was the seventh Negro Leagues player to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. So can you help us to understand sort of how that forgetting or sort of erasure from the historical record started and then what arrested it? Yeah, I'll try and then maybe you can help me understand it as well. So he dies young. He dies at an inopportune time. He dies in 1954, and he leaves no descendants, and he's estranged from his wife. So he didn't have anybody to tent his flame. That's number one. And number two, he wasn't still around when historians started getting around to telling the story of African-American baseball.

And that doesn't really happen until the 70s and really doesn't pick up steam until the 80s. And he's gone. Cool Papa Bell is still around. Buck Leonard is still around. Monty Irvin is still around. I don't think it's any accident that those guys get into the Hall of Fame before Oscar does. And maybe not for entirely bad reasons. You want to induct people while they're still alive, I think, if you can.

But he just wasn't around to tell his own story, and nobody else was around to really contend for his story. So that's part of it. But as you say, he was already starting to sort of be forgotten near the end of his life, in that sort of twilight period for the Negro Leagues that started in 1947, the moment Jackie Robinson stepped onto

the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Negro Leagues were decimated almost immediately. The fans left them in droves and teams, obviously, unlike now, really counted on fans for revenue and to keep going were decimated. So in that twilight time, he starts to lose, you know, sort of a lot of recognition. And in part because it wasn't a time, that time and for another 10, 15, 20 years after integration, if not longer, I just wasn't, no one was highly invested in talking about or thinking about the Negro Leagues. about the Negro Leagues. It was sort of too painful, I think, at least that's my interpretation for both blacks and whites. And so there just wasn't anybody doing that kind of work. And by the time you get back to it, as I said, he had some things going against him. Another thing I'll mention is Indianapolis, his home city, never claimed him. I have a hard time figuring that one out. He grew up there. He made his career there for at least the first part of it. And Indianapolis has not always been great from a racial relations perspective, to say the least.

But it hasn't kept the city from claiming like Oscar Robertson, the big O, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Charleston a generation later. So I don't know, but that's part of it. I think it's all those things together. But when you think about it, there's, yes, you mentioned Ben, the cool Papa Bell has more name recognition, maybe Monty Irvin does or Buck Leonard, but not that much more. You know, mostly it seems like we only have made room for two or three Negro Leagues players in our collective memories. And that's, we're sort of like just leaving it at that. But Oscar stands in for a lot of other guys

who've also been unjustly neglected and forgotten, who were also studs and fantastic players like Turkey Stearns and Cristobal Torriente and Willard Brown and go down the list. So he's just one of many, I think, who've been, that's one way to look at it is that he's just one of many who've been unjustly forgotten. Yeah. If I were his PR person, I'd say he needs a nickname. I know he has Hoosier Comet, I guess, sometimes called, but that's not even really that associated with him. And it's not even the best Comet nickname in baseball. You can't compete with Commerce Comet and the alliteration that you get there. So he needs like a cool papa or a double duty Radcliffe or something. I think that's what we need. You should have invented a nickname for him. I should have. I'm not a good PR guy for him.

Yeah. It tells you something about his personality that he did not. He was one of the guys who didn't have a nickname. He was taken very seriously. I mean, he was, as I talked about in the book, his personality wasn't what you might think. Yeah. You just read about him online. That's what I was going to say. Well, even just thinking about how he's sort of underappreciated, you might think, oh, well, maybe he was an unpleasant person or he wasn't well-liked or he was a recluse or something. But it sounds like he was very admired and respected and liked, which makes it even more surprising.

It does. I mean, and that's coming right out of the newspapers of the time, as well as out of some of the recollections you get from former players. Yeah, it's clear. I mean, he was the biggest skate attraction in black baseball, and he's always talked about his personality, how charismatic he was. He's a great singer, you know, a great billiards player, stuff like that. Great dresser. Very snappy dresser. So he was very charismatic

and well-liked by almost everyone. Not everyone. He was very intense. He was a super intense competitor. It's something we don't see as much anymore. I've been trying to think of somebody in contemporary baseball, maybe you guys can help with this,

who's got a really intensely competitive personality on the field, maybe isn't very well liked on the field, but off the field is well liked. Chase Utley, kind of, maybe the last guy I could think of. I mean, the sort of standard bearer for me for intensity on the field is Max Scherzer. Yeah, yeah. That's who comes immediately to mind, who I think, by all accounts, is, I think, mostly well-liked by his teammates.

I don't hear many Max Scherzer dissenters. Yeah, that's good. I like that. I'll take Scherzer. I mean, Harper, to some extent, Bryce Harper, right? Also, who set some people off in the wrong way and would get in a fight with a teammate from time to time. You know, that was, gives you some sense of what Charleston maybe was like on the field. He wasn't cuddly, right? So

maybe he wasn't the kind of guy that you gave a nickname to, but he was very, very respected. He was just military. You know, he joined the army when he was a young very respected. He was just military. He joined the Army when he was a young man. That really left its mark on him. And so I think of him as, for some reason I always think of Mike Singletary when I think of Charleston too, as somebody that's sort of intellectual, tough. I think of him as built like Mike Singletary,

like a linebacker. So maybe he's Max Scherzer meets Mike Singletary. like a linebacker. So maybe he's Max Scherzer meets Mike Singletary. So what were some of the more fruitful sources for you just in terms of the public record? And we can ask about who he was as a person, but just the newspapers that covered him the most, or that covered black baseball the most, or the writers who you found yourself relying on most often? The newspapers of record for the black game or the writers who you found yourself relying on most often? The newspapers of record for the black game or the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender preeminently. There were others, the New York Amsterdam News and a handful of others around the country. But the Courier and the Defender were hugely important. And they covered the Negro Leagues well and pretty thoroughly.

So those would be the most important sort of public sources. But then as I was kind of saying, it's really, if anybody, if you're a baseball fan and you haven't like, you know, pick up a used copy of these books by John Hallway, H-O-L-W-A-Y, or Brent Kelly is another. It's just compilations of interviews with former players, a lot of former Negro Leagues players in those men's cases. They're just a joy to read, and they're just an incredible source of historical information too. They'll tell you where people were at this time, that time, who fought with whom, who didn't like whom, and what the game was like, and what it was like to travel and to play and what America was like at the time. Those oral interviews, as well as the newspapers, were really the key sources of information. And oral interviews are easily accessible and, as I say, really fun

to read. What turned the tide for him in terms of his Hall of Fame induction? What sort of shifted between when, you know, I think Ted Williams rightly called out the absence of Negro League players in the Hall through to Charleston's induction? Yeah, I'm not sure anything turned the tide for him. Once the Hall started inducting players regularly, and they were doing this one-a-year thing for a while, which wasn't making anybody happy, and Charleston was inducted during that time i think meg he just he was always on the list from the beginning it's just that they were going to take care of of some of the guys who were still alive yeah yep so but people will it's it's kind of unfortunate in the sense that people will assume

that because he was the seventh negro leaguer inducted, maybe that's sort of what his status or stature was in the black games indicative of it. I don't think it was. So I know that you wanted to try to get at what he was like as a person, which is difficult to do long after the fact. And you succeeded in that to some extent. You were able to find some sources that shed a little light on his inner thoughts and personality so what was the the breakthrough there and what did you learn about him not just as a player but a person yeah sure there were a couple of break i mean besides the people i was able to talk to including one of the women who played for him in 1954 on the annapolis clowns

mamey johnson who said he had a beautiful personality. That was her description of him. Besides that, there were two things. One, there's a sports writer named John Shulian who wrote a great piece on Charleston for Sports Illustrated in, I think it was 2000, around that time. And John's the creator of Xena Warrior Princess. So, by the way, you should know that. He's the creator of Xena Warrior Princess. So, by the way, you should know that.

He's the creator of Xena Warrior Princess and a great sports writer. And he had all his notes from interviews he had done with people like Double Duty Radcliffe and Buck O'Neill and others less well-known who knew Oscar. And he generously, I don't know how he still had them in a box he could find, but generously found them and shipped them to me. how he still had them in a box he could find, but generously found them and shipped them to me. So it was like I was able to go back in time 18 years and interview people who are still alive. Now, that was great in terms of getting to the man and the personality of Charleston because 90% of those fellows were dead. And the other thing was, and this is an index, it's not promoted online, you just have to know about it but from John I think it was I found out that Charleston's personal scrapbook and photo album

were housed at the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City and that's like my heart has never leapt more for joy than it did on the day that I found that out from John because I was just gold for a biographer. So I was able to spend a day at the museum going through those materials, taking pictures of every precious page. And they tell you a lot about what Charleston thought was important. For instance, every fight he was in, pretty much every fight he was in on the field, he had clippings of it in his scrapbook. I mean, it was like he just, as if he sort of found it was comical, you know? He had no embarrassment about it. But also, a lot of clippings about Lou Gehrig, a lot of clippings about Ty Cobb, a lot of clippings about Jimmy Foxx and Dizzy Dean

kind of indicate maybe who he respected in the white game or who maybe was friends with him. I think he was friends with Jimmy Fox, actually. They both were in Philadelphia for a number of years. And then you could see that a lot of clippings in Spanish from Cuban newspapers that he had translated in English on the margins or in a different piece of paper pasted right next to it. So you know that very early on, he had taught himself Spanishanish not only well enough to speak it in cuba but to to write it to translate which says something about obviously his intelligence and intellectual capabilities and then there were clippings about civil rights and especially later

on as you get into the 40s and 50s uh and these paper clippings have to do with black history black high society so all that together you were able to get a sense of what stuff meant something to him. And it turns out he was a very ambitious man. He was very socially ambitious. I don't mean that in a negative sense at all. He really wanted to sort of rise on the ladder, so to speak. Married very intelligent and well-educated wives. He cultivated those sorts of friendships. All of that you would never have known, you know, just from the,

maybe from the newspaper clippings, right? Or from the game accounts. So that is all this texture and interest to his life to know that he was somebody who really was doing his damnedest to rise out of poverty and to become, you know, to flourish, to become the sort of man he knew he could be. You've provided a good segue. We had the opportunity to talk to Bob Kendrick earlier this week, and it's clear that the, you know, the work that is being done, the scholarship that is being done around the Negro Leagues has, you know, really taken off, not just this year, but has been a growing body of historical scholarship. And I'm curious, who else you might think is sort of ripe for rediscovery from contemporary audiences who perhaps have, and obviously do have an overly narrow understanding of some of the best black baseball players from the last century? That's a great question. Yeah. I mentioned a few, you know, we have biographies,

often multiple biographies of, at least it seems to me, I haven't done an actual study of this, but if you were to take like the top in terms of just wins above replacement, top 30 or 40 or 50, you know, in the white, the pre-integration game, I would bet we'd have biographies, if not multiple biographies, of a majority of those players. And we'd have nothing like that when it comes to Negro Leagues players. So the answer to your question is almost everybody, except for Satchel and except for Josh.

Like, there's no biography of Buck Leonard, I don't think. There's an autobiography that's co-written with someone whose name is escaping me, but there's no biography of him or whose name is escaping me. But there's no biography of him or of Pop Lloyd, who Ben mentioned earlier. And certainly not of the great Cuban players Cristobal Torriente and Martin Dehigo. Dehigo is the Shohei Otani of the Negro Leagues, along with Bullet Rogan, great two-way player. Bullet Rogan's another one, maybe the greatest two-way player of all time. Actually, almost certainly the greatest two-way player of all time. And there's no biography of him. So it's actually a long list. That's a few. And I think you can do this work now because we have the stats,

because you can search the newspapers, because we do have archives of interviews everywhere. It's work that can be done. And then I would say there's like team histories. A great book on the Pittsburgh Crawfords needs to be written. A great book on the Grays. There is a book on the Grays, but there's work, there's room for another one. You know, those sorts of legendary teams, maybe even the not so legendary teams. There's Chicago American Giants. There's not a great book on the Chicago American Giants, I don't think. And that's not to denigrate any of the work other people have done. It's just that it's like all the, a lot of the spade work has been done, the research, bringing together game accounts and that sort of thing, compiling things. But the historical narrative stuff that's so common, you know, outside the Negro Leagues in terms of baseball writing just hasn't been done. Did Charleston speak much publicly about how he felt about being in the Negro Leagues and being barred from the majors? Did he talk about being resentful of that or was he sort of resigned to it?

Because I would imagine that if you're constantly seeing yourself compared to the best players, that must really rankle even more than for others, you know, because you're reading about, oh, this guy's as good as Triss Speaker, this guy's as good as Ty Cobb. And well, then why am I not playing with them? So was that something that was just a constant source of irritation for him? Or how did he handle that as far as we know? as we know. Yeah, as far as we know is the key phrase there, right? He didn't voice too much resentment. There's sort of a change in the mentality of Negro Leagues players. You can see it happening as you read through the newspapers of the time and sort of memoirs and stuff. The players of Oscar's generation and earlier obviously felt the injustice of being segregated into their own league. But the prospect of desegregation was so distant that they weren't as angry about it as later players were, if that makes sense. At least not visibly angry about it. Like Jackie Robinson and Henry Aaron, for instance, had very negative reactions to the Negro Leagues and their brief sojourns through them. It just seems so second rate and just obviously so unjust.

This is especially after World War II when you've just fought another war side by side. Charles was in World War I, right? Exactly. Yeah. So a different time. So that's a little bit of answer to your question. One thing that stood out to me, I just wondered, was how how little resentment uh you know that you expect that you find so that's sort of just an interesting finding but yeah he did but to answer your question yeah he did he he said things from time to time not

so much publicly but there's one story where he's at a game it's like it's in the early 30s and there's a yankee scout in the stands and he calls him over and tells him how great he is, how much, you know, he loved how badly he loved to sign him. And Oscar says, why don't you? And he's like, well, we both know why. You know, there's a story about him sitting with Jimmy Fox one time after a game in Mexico where Fox is actually issues an apology for the black team that had gotten jobbed in the game against the white team. And Oscar thanks him for being so fair to Negro Leaguers, unlike some other white players. He gets involved, or he's at least name-checked. I don't know how highly involved he was with a push toward integration that was really being advanced by the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper out of New York in the late 30s. So he didn't protest against his name being associated with that,

although I don't know how communist-friendly he would have been. He was a Republican, like his friend Branch Rickey, and quite proud about it. But later, after immigration, he talks about how much every player he sends up makes up in some part for him and he and he starts giving interviews to the papers about what's he think about satchel and his chances of making it what's he think about jackie and his chances of making it and he you know he praises those guys you know highly and says they're going to be they're going to do great they're wonderful and there's a lot more still here in the Negro Leagues who, if given a chance, could really cut it. So yeah, there are some. He wasn't probably a crusader, you know,

but it wasn't that time yet, maybe. He was out there publicly from time to time saying his piece. So lastly, there are still things that we don't know and maybe can't know despite your great work. I wonder if there's anything in particular that you wish you knew or could know. You know, I know that on baseball reference, he's still listed as six feet tall in the book that he's probably more like 5'8 or 5'9. So maybe that's, you know, emblematic of how little we know about certain aspects of things. But as you were going through this, did you have like a most wanted list or areas where you were stymied?

I'm just going to say this about the height. Contra Joe, Poznanski and baseball reference. We actually do know he's between five, eight and five, nine because we have of him standing next to josh gibson and other people whose heights we know so unless they're standing on something weird on the ground and you can't see yeah he's not six feet tall he's between five eight five nine yeah i wish i knew more about his relationship with branch ricky and that's the thing that stands out to me most i would love to know more about exactly the role he played in this highly dramatic, highly consequential, highly overdue attempt to integrate Major League Baseball, the white Major Leagues, in 1945 and 46. I would love to know that.

Now, other stuff, I wish we had any audio or any video. As far as I know, there's none. It's amazing to me. He lived until 1954. any video as far as i know there's none it's amazing to me you know he lived to be 1954 and lived till 1954. he did one audio i know he did one radio interview i'm sure there are others but with wgn right before the first negro league's all-star game the east west game in chicago he was on and willie foster another hall of famer was on and that was destroyed that audio I understand from Larry Tye was destroyed in a fire or something

so somewhere people keep telling me oh somewhere in some attic some archive there's audio or video well please come forward if you have it if you want to see it alright well you can find Jeremy on Twitter at Jeremy Beer and we will link to where you can find

the book Oscar Charleston the life and legend of link to where you can find the book, Oscar Charleston, The Life and Legend of Baseball's Greatest Forgotten Player. Support the University of Nebraska Press and get yourself a great biography. Jeremy, thank you for writing it, and thank you for talking to us about it. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. All right, we will be back in just a moment to talk to Dr. Emily Rudder about the bingo long-traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, Soul of the Game, and other cinematic and literary representations of black baseball. All right, we are joined now by Emily Ruth Rutter. She is an associate professor of English and the assistant director of African American Studies at Ball State University. She is also the author of a couple of books, including Invisible Ball of Dreams, Literary Representations of Baseball Behind the Color

Line. She is working on a third book now called Black Celebrity, Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists. Emily, thank you very much for coming on. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I wanted to ask before we get into specific movies and works, what drew you to baseball when you were looking at literary representations? I know you've also written about blues and other areas and celebrity too, but why did you want to explore the history of representations of baseball in particular? Well, that's a good question. I guess I grew up in kind of a baseball family. My dad was a player just on like a local league, and he took us to a lot of minor league games.

Grew up in North Carolina, so we didn't have a major league team, but he grew up in Chicago, so he was a Cubs fan. So we'd go see this single A team, the Winston-Salem Spirits. They no longer exist. But we also saw many Durham Bulls games. That might be a team people are more familiar with. But in any case, so I kind of grew up with baseball. And then I'd say that when I was getting my PhD and writing my dissertation, actually, you know, working on these representations of blues musicians, I was also going to a lot of baseball games, a lot of Pirates games. And I was thinking about kind of representations of under-documented or even sometimes undocumented black cultural history. And so that applies to the blues blues but it also made me start thinking about black baseball and Pittsburgh is a city that actually really celebrates its black baseball history

you know Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays and so I yeah I guess I got really interested in the topic then and this book kind of grew out of the blues book in that way because they're both kind of about again that sort of like how does literature intervene in or grapple with these histories that weren't represented well at the time and their kind of legacies today when we wanted to do this week of episodes on the negro leagues one of the things i wanted to talk about was the history of movies or representations of the Negro Leagues, and it is not a very long list of non-documentary movies, which is sort of striking and I guess perhaps not surprising. I know I hear often that it's difficult to get any kind of baseball movie made, although many baseball movies have been made, and one would imagine that making a movie about black baseball, that was probably a harder sell for much of cinematic history. And so there's just not a lot to go on there, and people know 42, of course, because it's fairly recent, but there's not all that much Negro Leagues baseball in that movie because it's about Jackie Robinson and it's about integration. And so when you start looking for earlier examples,

there are really only a couple there. There is a 1950 movie called The Jackie Robinson Story. Again, that is very Jackie Robinson centric, as the title suggests. And so really that just leaves a couple, which are The Bingle Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings from 1976. All-Stars and Motor Kings from 1976. And that was a feature film released in theaters and Soul of the Game, a 1996 cable movie, an HBO movie. And that's kind of it, I guess. So we have just watched those two films Meg and I have for the first time. And we have both seen many baseball movies, and there's sort of a baseball movie pantheon, and we've talked about many of those movies on the show, whether it's Field of Dreams or Bull Durham or A League of Their Own, et cetera. But you don't usually see these two movies included on that pantheon, and I don't know

whether on their own merits they necessarily measure up to the very best of the baseball movies, but they certainly compare, I think to me at least, with some movies of sort of similar quality that are more famous. I guess we can all just kind of talk about what we think about them and their flaws and where they succeed. But do you have any context to add about kind of the making of these movies and particularly for a movie about the Negro Leagues and and barnstorming to come around in the 70s that's somewhat notable I would think and just to set these up a little bit Bingle Long which stars Billy Dee Williams and James Earl Jones in pre-Star Wars roles as well as Richard Pryor in a smaller role. And it sort of features fictionalized versions of real Negro Leagues characters.

So there is sort of a Satchel Paige equivalent and a Josh Gibson equivalent and a Jackie Robinson equivalent, but not the real people. And they're on a barnstorming tour and it's a comedy. And we can talk about whether it really succeeds as a comedy,

but it's sort of lighthearted and fictionalized, whereas Soul of the Game features those same characters, but the real versions of them. Or, well, certainly fictionalized versions of them in some ways, but they are meant to be the real historical figures of Robinson and Gibson and Page and Branch Rickey, etc. It's about who's going to get chosen, which one of them is going to be the first player to break the color barrier. And it's more of a biopic style movie. So do you have any kind of context to offer about how these movies were made or what influences they had or what influence they had on others? Well, I guess I would put Bingo Long in the context of, well, first of all, it was a filmic adaptation. So it's based on a novel by William Brashler, which was published in 1973. And that's actually really the first novel that's about the Negro Leagues, which is also kind of surprising. And William Brashler is a white guy

who, you know, it talks about in the preface to the book that he really didn't know that much about the Negro Leagues before he started doing research for the book. sort of Black power tradition, which like it's sort of, you know, the movie itself is, or the novel, and then later the film does sort of, you could argue it sort of comes out of an era of civil rights and Black power. But the book and the narrative is written by somebody who, you know, admits that he wasn't really that engaged with those movements. So I think that's helpful context. And I also think, you know, some other things to consider there are that, you know, it's produced by executive producers at Barry Gordy. So it's sort of, and also, you know, it comes out during the era of Blaxploitation. So, and Billy Dee Williams had just been in Lady Sings the Blues, I believe. So so there's there's also a sort of like what kind of audience is this film for?

And I actually think the film itself is a little bit confused about that. And I should also note that while Barry Gordy is the executive producer, you know, the director is also John Badham is white. the director is also, John Badham is white. So you have, you know, a white writer, white director, but you have a film that's sort of trying to situate itself and, as you said, a comedy, but also in this sort of like recuperation of black cultural history and capitalizing on the success of some black exploitation films. So yeah, so there's, it's very much of a moment, I think, and not to go on too long, but it also might be helpful to note that the players, that Negro League players were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in the 70s. Their response to this film was, I think, on the whole negative.

They were fairly critical. I know Satchel Paige took issue with it. And a friend of mine who I interviewed in Indianapolis, Ira McKnight, who played on the Kansas City Monarchs, he passed away a couple of years ago. But in our conversations, he was also very critical of the film. So I don't think that Negro League's players actually appreciated this film very much. So I'll just put that out there as like potentially helpful context. Yeah, I think I was going to ask you, one of the things that I found frustrating about the decision to sort of situate this within the realm of comedy was, well, there are like a lot of issues that arose from that. But I think that one of them was that it does not appear to be, because it has not sort of staked a particular and decisive viewpoint on the goings on of this era, it doesn't seem like a film that is sort of the audience is supposed to be laughing along at

some of the moments that seem to try to take the tension out of the very real risk and racism that black players of the time faced or if we're supposed to be cringing along and so i'm curious how i think probably the most relevant perspective here is that of actual Negro Leagues players. But I'm also curious how, if you know how that comedy was sort of received at the time, was this thought to be successful, both as I guess, as a film and then as a film about the Negro Leagues? I think it had mixed reviews. I mean, like I said, I think the black baseball world was fairly critical and it hasn't aged well. I should also say that the people who, Negro League's historians, you know, and people just in that world are still very critical of it. So I think it wasn't well received by them at the time and it hasn't been received well since.

You know, I think sort of film critics, there were mixed reviews. I mean, I think it did receive some positive reviews. I think Roger Ebert was critical of it, you know, so I think it was kind of a mixed bag. You know, I don't think, I actually think it's a film that seems almost worse now than it probably did then. I mean, there's, you know, Richard Pryor and his, the kind of anti-Native American, you know, the kind of stereotypes and caricatures of Native Americans, or even Latinos, you know, so there's all kinds of, you know, the portrait, the portraits of women are terrible. So there's all kinds of things that might have even been more tolerated in the late 60s that, you know, just wouldn't be now. So in addition to its kind of drawbacks in terms of recuperating a story of the Negro Leagues, it also just has a number of other flaws in terms of its kind of perpetuation of stereotypes.

Right. And yeah, there are times in the movie like, you know, there's a character who is supposed to be, I guess, an equivalent of Effa Manley, the female owner of the Negro Leagues team. And she is in this movie, except that she does occasionally make some good points and she seems to be kind of more clear eyed than some of the male owners in the league. clear-eyed than some of the the male owners in the league but also she is just constantly the butt of jokes about her figure and she's sleeping with the players and it's just you know constant demeaning comments about her appearance and behavior so that just totally undercuts the portrayal of her and there's a lot like that but there there's also, you know, the movie itself, the story essentially is that these players are being exploited by owners and black owners who they compare to like masters and a plantation, which is kind of interesting that they're seen as the oppressors in this movie. actually not so far afield from what's going on in baseball right now because it's that the the owners are kind of asking the players to accept the risk of playing so someone gets hurt and the owner docks everyone's pay to pay for this player's medical treatment losing him don't affect our chances for the pennant months now seeing as how his family live all the way down in Raleigh, North Carolina,

I'm docking each of your days paid a coverage fare. Five dollars each? Sally, uh, I mean, you know, we ain't the owner of the team. You are. I mean, it ain't right for you to be coming to the players to take care of something you're supposed to be taking care of. Docking you double long. What? Five dollars coverage fare.

Five dollars for fermenting dissension on my team. I ain't fermenting nothing. I'm just voicing my opinion. Around me, you ain't got no opinion. So they set off on their own and they form this barnstorming team. And there's almost like this revolutionary aspect to it, right? And W.E.P. Du Bois is cited.

It's like, let's take back the means of production. Yeah, seize the means of production. Yeah, seize the means of production. Right. It's sort of empowering in a way. Although if this is supposed to be Satchel Paige, I don't know that it is actually true to what his character was really like, that he was so selfless in the way that Billy Dee Williams' character is but they do encounter prejudice and racism but it's often just kind of played for like a madcap sort of screwball comedy so you know they'll steal a car and and these white people are chasing them and you start to fear for them but then it's just like this funny music is playing and it's just a montage and it's like oh okay, okay, there's no real danger here, it seems to be saying, even though, of course, there was and would have been at the time. So you mentioned Roger Ebert's review and he wrote about how it was supposed to be this crossover film and appeal to everyone.

But he said, as I sat through it, I almost began to feel like a member of one of the All-Stars' first white audiences laughing at the cut-up antics of the players but never seeing the hurt underneath. is laughing at the cut-up antics of the players but never seeing the hurt underneath. It's sort of what you were saying about, you know, I guess it's difficult to make a comedy about this in that it's not that funny a situation, but they do kind of go back and forth between trying to acknowledge what was happening but then also sort of minimizing it and playing it for laughs. or sort of minimizing it and playing it for laughs? Yeah, I think, yeah, I mean, the white characters are so flat and cartoonish, really, right? And their supremacist views and that it's hard to actually see white supremacy as,

I mean, there are moments when it's sort of represented as structural, you know, like at the beginning of the film, they make this parallel between, you know, Nazi Germany, the I mean, the film is supposed to be taking place and 39, I think, right. And so, you know, it begins with this sort of montage of like, you know, Hitler's march across Europe. And then there's that moment in which the players are picking potatoes. And it's, you know, it could be this moment to really think about sharecropping in the 1930s. And to think about fascism at home, you know, there's this sort of broadside that says, like, you know, America, like the, you know,

the highest standard of living in the world or something. And then you see this, like, you know, row of African Americans waiting in this line to be paid like $2 a day. So that there's like these sort of attempts, these gestures towards structural inequities. But as you're saying, like when those are introduced, they're sort of that opportunity is like almost immediately forfeited in the service of comedy. So like something really like even when they're like picking those potatoes, like then it becomes this kind of song and dance routine. And it's just so, so they're, you know, and that's where the question of like, what is this film really, what is the aim of the film? That question really comes up because, you know, it doesn't want to

really address the ways in which those inequities were structuring American society, then it doesn't want to really address the emotional and psychological dimensions of that. And I think in part, because it doesn't want to make the parallels to the late 70s. Like, you know, that it because, you know, I think this film, and you know, when we get to Soul of the Game, we can think about this too, that like, there, there's a kind of teleological narrative, right? And where, you know, when we get to Soul of the Game, we can think about this, too, that like there there's a kind of teleological narrative. Right. And where, you know, the film like also wants to end on a positive note. And so you kind of you know, the film doesn't allow you to linger too long, not only about the injustices of the past, but also the ways in which they, you know, might be impinging on or structuring the present. I think another thing that I didn't like about this movie, I just really did not, I did not care for it.

It's going to continue to be clear. Completely fair. In my questions. I think another aspect of it, and I'm curious how we might situate this in other portrayals of not only the Negro Leagues, but also black baseball more generally. And I can't tell if part of this is a function of the decision to make this sort of a broad comedy or to portray these players as clear fictionalizations. They are based in some part on real people, but they are not actual people who played in the Negro Leagues, is that it does not seem to do much service to the great quality of play that was actually present in those

leagues. Because it has them barnstorming against white squads that are often quite poor, and then the central conflict is around the players that have sort of remained on the black baseball squads versus the all-stars we don't really get an appreciation for how skilled actual negro league players were and how the level of competition might have compared to the majors or anything like that so i'm curious not just with respect to this film but is is there are there better examples i guess i should say, of films that actually celebrated the achievements of those players? And how did that sort of deficit when

it comes to this film perhaps play into the reaction of actual Negro League players who saw it and thought, this is clearly not for us? Yeah, if I could piggyback on that, there's a quote in the movie by Leon Carter, the James Earl Jones, Josh Gibson-esque character who says, we're a ball club, not a circus. But then there are a lot of circus-like atmospheres to their games, which, you know, I guess was true with Barnstorming at times, but also true that you don't get really a complete picture of how great they were. Yeah. And I mean, like, just to add a little more context to that, I mean, the movie is actually fairly faithful to the book, you know, and so the book is also like all of the criticisms we're making of the film, we could also make of the book. So like the book is also pretty comedic and does sort of it does do more in terms of celebrating the athleticism of the players but it definitely sort of has a lot of questionable and sort of minstrel-esque kinds of representations so so just as sort of further context for that I mean so part of the problem

with this film I think is that the book that it's based on also is highly problematic. But I think the film that I look to, even though it doesn't have any actual, like, playing of baseball in it, besides some swinging, is Fences. You know, I think Denzel Washington's adaptation of Fences is, and Fences, arguably, play by August Wilson is, you know, arguably the, in my mind, you know, I don't know if I want to say best, but one of the best, right, representations of kind of the emotional archive of black baseball. And I think that the filmic adaptation, I think also is incredible in terms of what it really gets into in terms of the stories that the protagonist Troy Maxson is telling about the Negro Leagues you know so you really get a sense of you know how meaningful it would have been to hit a home run off a satchel page right or what it was like

to play alongside Josh Gibson and so I do think that even though, again, you don't see people playing the game of baseball in Fences, I think that film does a much better job of really digging into kind of excavating all of the complexities of black baseball, which was, you know, I think in a lot of ways, just this paradoxical institution, right? It was a source of great cultural pride and also great you know social pain so you know an individual pain so i think i think that that film captures all of those complexities including the kind of heroicism of the players much better than bingo long or soul of the game for that matter yeah and we were talking about how this hasn't aged very well and that's true of a lot of baseball movies. If you actually go back and watch, say, Bad News Bears, which came out the same year,

there are a lot of kind of cringey or uncomfortable moments in that or even something like The Sandlot in some ways. And much as I love it, Major League is a little like that too. I think we remember those movies fondly, maybe because of nostalgia or because they were part of people's childhoods and it just seems like bingo long is not really a movie that gets cited as often and so maybe like i hadn't seen it meg hadn't seen it and so we don't remember it

through some sort of lens of oh we saw it when we were 10 and we thought it was a lot of fun at that time and so we're only watching it now. I don't know why it is that it didn't really make the leap to that list of, you know, if you look up a list of baseball movies, sometimes you'll see it, but it's definitely not a given. And you'll certainly see things like Bad News Bears or The Sandlot or Eight Men Out, let's say, which takes a lot of historical liberties too. And I don't say that anyone has to go see it or you definitely should go see it because of all the problems we've been talking about.

But just in terms of historical significance and the fact that it was groundbreaking in a way in that there weren't really a lot of precedents for a movie like this, even though it wasn't perhaps the best version of this movie that they could have made. But between that and just between the peak Billy Dee Williams, that's enough for me to kind of recommend it, even just as sort of a historical relic, I guess. And James Earl Jones, who I think was about 45 at the time, looks it. I believe that James Earl Jones said somewhere that he doesn't even like baseball, which is hilarious because of course he's in this and he's also in Field of Dreams. But yeah, I mean, I think that another reason that potentially, I mean, just pure speculation that the film hasn't aged well or that it's not on those lists of kind of the greatest baseball films, is because it kind of goes back to what Meg was saying about audience, like, who is this for?

And in a lot of ways, it's because, you know, again, in my experience, talking to historians and the former players, or the kind of sons and daughters or grandchildren of former players, the kind of sons and daughters or grandchildren of former players. It wasn't received well among them, right? So like, let's say like Black Americans who knew something about the world of Black baseball wasn't received well among that group. So I'm not sure like what group would have that kind of like nostalgia for it. And it doesn't explain, it doesn't work pedagogically. So it doesn't explain why we should care about black baseball. And that, you know, and I think

that part of that goes back to that sort of the, it's progressive reading of history because it ends, you know, with Esquire Joe, who's this ridiculous, you know, embodying, supposedly the embodiment of Jackie Robinson, the Jackie Robinson persona. And, you know, supposedly the embodiment of Jackie Robinson, this Jackie Robinson persona. And, you know, that character is, you know, alongside the Effa Manley persona is highly offensive because it doesn't resemble Robinson at all. But at the end of the film, you know, he's the chosen one.

So he's chosen to go into the majors. And so it kind of, and again, it ends on this happy note. So it kind of leaves the viewer with the idea that like black baseball wasn't really that important after all, or that it's sort of natural progression. Like, you know, this was segregation. It kind of, it, you know, it was terrible, but it kind of had to happen in order to lead to this, you know, more progressive future. And so it doesn't leave us with enough kind of knowledge about why black baseball is important and what the lingering kind of problematic issues are in the way that baseball integration happened to get us to care about seeing it for the first time or seeing it again. I just, you know, I'm just not sure which audience is supposed to kind of hang on to it.

Yeah, when your Jackie Robinson stand-in is like a, you know, a country bumpkin sort of plucked from obscurity, you're just, it feels like they've lost the thread pretty decisively. Yeah. I think that, you know, the other movie that we wanted to discuss,

Soul of the Game does a better job of sort of making obvious both the the baseball skill and the stakes that players playing in the negro leagues were facing and and the skill that they possessed it is i think perhaps unsurprisingly when contrasted with bingo long a film directed by a black director um and has a more sort of clear right understanding of or at least acknowledgement of racism within this era and sort of does not strike quite as optimistic a note going forward but i'm curious you know what your take on soul the game is in terms of how successful it is at navigating that balance between acknowledging the skill that these players had and also

the historical moment in which they found themselves and were embarking on. Yeah, I think this film, it didn't reach as wide of an audience, which is kind of unfortunate. I mean, because it was, you know, made for HBO. But I think this film does a better job just sort of speaking to what you were just suggesting, like it is more pedagogically valuable, right? Like it, it begins and ends with historical information. I think it does give us a kind of counter narrative to whitewash baseball lore. You know, it really does impress upon the viewer, you know, that Gibson and Page were stellar athletes, for example. And I mean, it also raises

some really interesting questions about the kind of respectability politics that went into, you know, Branch Rickey kind of selecting Robinson over other players, for example. That's a central source of tension within the film. And I think those are really important questions. So I appreciate that it goes there. I think maybe some of the drawbacks of Solo the Game, I think actually the character Gibson is really interesting because, and I don't know if this was something that y'all were picking up on,

but I mean, it's like whenever he's not playing baseball, he's like either enraged or just completely inebriated seeming. And I realize that they're trying to portray him as having, you know, suffering from a brain tumor and all those things. But I feel like he ends up sort of looking like buffoonish or something when he's not on the field. And so it's sort of hard to reconcile this character on and off the field. So that would be one of my criticisms of the film. Again, I think this has a lot of items kind of in the merits column. But one of the drawbacks, I think, would be the portrayal of Gibson. And I also think that you know it does it

again is it interestingly fabricates this kind of mentorship right where Satchel Paige mentors Robinson and they have this like really like close relationship and it's sort of again this holy trinity you know it's it's Satch and and Josh and and. And it's sort of like, but that wasn't real. And so it's interesting that both films replicate that, but Soul of the Game really leans into that. And so that would be just in terms of like accuracy, I guess, that would be a drawback. Because I think if you didn't do further reading or, you know, you didn't sort of do any of your own investigation that you would walk away with that narrative, which might be, it would be misleading in terms of how those players and

again, the kind of questions that integration raises. Yeah. I found a contemporary article when this movie came out and a biographer of some of these players was weighing in about all the inaccuracies and just counting the number of factual mistakes or liberties that this movie took. And even just the fact that they're all teammates in this movie, which they weren't at that time. Gibson wasn't even on the team with the other two. And it does sort of exaggerate their relationship and their friendship and all of that. And that's not unusual for any Hollywood movie, really. But do you find that that is often the case in these literary representations or film versions of the

Negro Leagues and black baseball? Is there just sort of a simplification? Like, I think I read an HBO spokesperson quoted in that same critical article who said it's a metaphor, you know, and that it was just a way for them to sort of show the impact that this had on these players and kind of tie all of these characters together in a neat little TV movie, I guess, that sort of simplifies it for the audience and has all of these major figures in it, even if it's not in the actual context that they were? Is that very common? Or are there adaptations or books or stories that are quite accurate, even though they're fictionalized? Yeah, that's a good question. There are not, as we were talking about, there aren't a lot of fictional dramatizations of Black Baseball or the Negro Leagues, but there are a fair number of

novels, you know, a few plays, lots of poetry, a ton of children's books. And I'd say that, especially since kind of the era of Soul of the Game, actually, since the 90s, with, again, so much more research done about the Negro Leagues, right? There's also been a proliferation of nonfiction books. And so with more evidence available, I would say that they're mostly pretty accurate. And I think also more contemporary works, when they're taking that kind of poetic license, they foreground that they're doing it. So, you know, even in something like Fences, they foreground that they're doing it. So, you know, even in something like Fences, I don't think we're led to believe that all of Troy Maxson's kind of tall tales about his feats within black baseball are true. But, you know, so it's part of the narrative, but it's like the mythology, you know, that he's the kind of fables that he's spinning or weaving are that's,

we're in on the know, right? And I would say that that's generally true kind of in the postmodern black baseball fiction and poetry era, we'll call it. When authors are kind of taking those liberties, they usually do foreground that they're doing so. And I'd say when authors are sort of aiming for realism, they've done their research. So generally speaking, I'd say black baseball literature, you know, over the last few decades is actually quite accurate, you know, so so I don't think it actually falls into these traps nearly as much as these films. Are you aware of any new appetite for film representations of black baseball and Negro

leagues baseball? Because I think that part of, you know, if we're still, and I don't say this as if it is an unimportant story, but if Hollywood's preoccupation seems to be telling Jackie Robinson's story very frequently, I guess it's not surprising that there is some flattening of the historical record because those films are meant to have sort of broad appeal and they are focused they are focused on a story that has been so heavily mythologized that audiences sort of fill in uh gaps and they do

so with knowledge that they already have or they they think they have and think is accurate is their appetite for for new stories and new sort of representations on film so that there might be a broadening of our understanding um or the general public and general baseball fans understanding of this era of American sport? Yeah, I mean, I think that there might be. I mean, I haven't read or heard anything about a particular film and the works or a series or anything, but I definitely think the appetite is there. I mean, I think that even something like 42 falls into the same kind of trap. And I think viewers recognized at the time, which is sort of like, you know, that, I mean, it's remarkable how these films will end with this kind of affirmation of a, you know, progressive future, full stop, you know, and I think,

and, you know, and it's very complicated, but I think a lot of the literature raises questions, you know, like Amiri Baraka writes really movingly about this, you know, Gloria Naylor, the novelist, and again, August Wilson, they write about, like, what are the costs of, what were the costs of integration, like on whose terms did integrate, right? And so those are really live questions, I think, and ones that haven't been adequately addressed by Hollywood film, which is like no big surprise. Yeah. But I do think there is an appetite.

I mean, I don't even know that I would have said that, you know, a few years ago, but I just look at the ways in which athletes themselves right now are, you know, are recognizing the kind of cultural capital that they have. And I think that that athletes and their fans, you know, are going to kind of demand that these stories get told. And I think the thing about the Negro Leagues is that a lot of people just don't know about it, right? And I mean, I think like this 100-year anniversary, lots of people are talking about it. And some people are probably learning about the Negro Leagues for the first time. And it is one of those things. It's why there are so many children's books about the Negro Leagues, because it's a cultural phenomenon. It's an era that

needs to continuously be told to each, you know, subsequent generation. So I do think that there's an appetite for it. And we'll see, you know, who decides to propose something that's worthy of the cause. I, you know, I know that even with Denzel's adaptation of Wilson's play, like that took almost 30 years to be adapted into a film, right? So like, and it's so beautiful. I mean, again, like I really, I would highly recommend that film. And I think it was like worth the wait, even though it was, it was decades, but it's, it's like, it's a very complicated topic and it needs somebody who can be really sensitive

to all of these concerns. And, you know, there are so many great researchers out there doing work on the Negro Leagues. A lot of, I mean, there are very few living players at this point. So, you know, it would also be great to, like, do this now when the appetite is there. Some of the players are still living. And, you know, I think the audiences are ready for the kind of complicated story that needs to be told i did appreciate some of the somewhat complex portrayals of some of these characters in soul of the game so you have page who is not just a purely heroic figure and of course he's portrayed by delray lindo who's always great and then Branch Rickey in this movie it's not him just acting selflessly

because he believes in breaking the color line it's not really clear in the movie why he's doing this or it's it's not necessarily totally clear in real life either but in the movie he clearly has multiple motivations for doing this and also there's a scene that shows him talking to the owner of the Kansas City Monarchs who's accusing him of stealing his players. And that's something that happened, too. So it doesn't make him look like this saintly person. And what baseball action there is in the movie is not bad. I think Ernie Banks' son worked as a consultant on the baseball scenes. good acting from Lindo and Blair Underwood as Robinson and Michael T. Williamson, who's also in Fences, actually. And I like that, but it does sort of have that kind of biopic, like overly symbolic images. And it ends, actually, both of these movies kind of culminate in The Big Game, which is just a staple of almost every baseball movie. There has to be a big game at the end, although in Soul of the Game, it doesn't't really take place but there's this framing device of like a young willie mays who

meets gibson and page and as a kid and then he shakes their hand and it's this passing of the torch and then at the beginning and end of the movie they show willie mays as a major leaguer and he's being asked about the story of these players and their significance and it's just a little hokey I guess but it certainly does a more respectful job of just about everything than bingo long and there is one really affecting scene where Paige's mistress is talking to this young white woman and they're really bonding and they're talking about hairstyles and she's giving the woman advice on oh you should put should put your hair up. And they just seem very friendly and it's kind of a casual conversation. And then she says, by the way, can I use your bathroom? And the woman says, oh no, my daddy wouldn't let you in the house. Except she doesn't say you, she uses the N-word

and Paige's companion's face falls and suddenly the barriers are up again. Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to find. It's not really streaming anywhere, and Bingalong I don't think is streaming for free anywhere, but fortunately someone has uploaded both of these movies to YouTube, so you can go watch them there. Not in the highest quality, but they're there at least. So are there any other formative, foundational, influential works that you would want to mention? I guess not really so much in movies, but writing and books and stories, particularly fiction, but not necessarily fiction. And have there been any works produced by the players or the people who were involved

in the Negro Leagues? Because I know that there were a lot of very highly educated, I think there were more Negro Leagues players with college degrees as a percentage at least than in the majors at the time, just because Major League players would get plucked out early and young. And so I wonder whether there are any first person accounts that are sort of literary or whether that work has all been done by others well yeah i have a i have a number of recommendations also just to circle back for a second i mean and i don't know if i haven't answered this question exactly but i mean what both of the films that we've been

talking about are are really focused on male camaraderie right and that is and and so one of the things that i think gets somewhat lost is that this was a professional job right and and so like the films sort of get at that but they don't quite they they it's sort of the the men seem to be driven by their sort of affection for one another and again that sense of camaraderie and community rather than that this was a better job than, you know, a lot of other jobs available to black men in a Jim Crow America. And so I do think that that is another kind of drawback of the films that, you know, it is important to point out. But in terms of other representations, I mean, there aren't a lot of stellar novels about black baseball. But I would say that, again, Fences,

I would recommend Fences, August Wilson's play Fences. Even if you don't love reading plays, I think you will love this play. And a lot of these children's books that have just been published in the last decade or so are fantastic. Kadir Nelson, who is also a famous painter and does beautiful portraits of Negro League players and all kinds of other contemporary black figures. He has a book called We Are the Ship that has his illustrations and text. And that's very well researched and just a lovely book and I think for all ages. Carol Boston Weatherford also has a great book. She's a poet. It's a children's book but again I think it's also for adults and it's called A Negro League Scrapbook. Again very well researched and each page has a little poem you know about various aspects of the Negro Leagues and one of the really great things about that book is that she celebrates the three women

who played on the Indianapolis Clowns. And so, you know, a lot of people don't realize that the gender line, right, was broken in Negro Leagues, in the Negro Leagues, and still obviously has not been broken in the major leagues. still obviously has not been broken in the major leagues. And I guess one other recommendation is my dear friend E. Ethelbert Miller's If God Invented Baseball, which is just a fantastic poetry collection, came out just a couple years ago in 2018. And I think even if you, you know, are not a poetry aficionado, that book will sort of take you through the arc of his life in a way and also sort of the arc of his life via baseball. And it's really beautiful. There's

moments of black baseball, you know, sort of before the color line and after and up into the present. So I would definitely recommend that. And I know I shared this with you all already, but I have a kind of an online bibliography of works about black baseball. So if you just Google black baseball lit, you will find a ton of resources about black baseball. And there's also a Twitter at like black baseball lit. So you can tweet at me with anything that you want to, if you want recommendations or whatnot. Yeah, I will link to all of that. And there was a play off Broadway, Tony Stone. Absolutely. Right. And thanks for that reminder. Yeah, I will. I'll link to that too. I haven't gotten to see it, unfortunately, but I think it's maybe traveling or it's been

in other areas too. Yeah. And then for a while there, there, for like a week, you were able to stream it. Like they were, you know, it was that sort of liminal time when things were still being staged, but you could stream them anyway. So I'm sure it will come back to us. I've heard wonderful things and I haven't been able to see it yet. All right. Well, we really appreciate your work on the subject and we will link to all of it. And thank you very much for your time. Oh, thanks so much. It was a real pleasure to talk to you all. Okay, that will do it for today.

Thank you for listening and thank you to our guests. You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectively wild and signing up to pledge some small monthly amount and get yourself access to some perks. Johnny Winjo, Dan Osterhout, Grantham Lee, John Armstrong, and Alex Naser. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash effectively wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg and Sam coming via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter.

Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance, despite finding out that he needs a root canal. And we will be back with one more episode on the Negro Leagues a little later this week. Talk to you then. I asked to meet the director to see who would play me and he said He talked about actors but thought instead that playing yourself might lend some credit Today we have two guests, so first we will talk to Seth Beer, or first, wrong beer. Okay, he's also a baseball beer person, but wrong one. or first wrong beer okay he's also a baseball beer person but wrong one

alright