‘The League’ Review: A Crucial Baseball Legacy

If you thought that Jackie Robinson was the primary Black participant in skilled baseball, “The League” wish to supply a correction. Moses Fleetwood Walker grew to become a catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884, earlier than organized baseball was segregated and greater than 60 years earlier than Robinson broke the foremost leagues’ coloration line.

This documentary from Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”) traces the historical past of the Negro leagues that fashioned within the intervening years. And whereas the game’s post-World War II integration was lengthy overdue — one commentator cites the absurdity of Black and white males preventing collectively at Guadalcanal however being banned from competing on a diamond — “The League” notes that, because the majors grabbed star gamers with out shopping for out their contracts, the Negro leagues and the financial communities constructed round them by no means obtained sufficient compensation.

Pollard presents the subject material straightforwardly, sometimes dryly, with authors, historians and — in archival materials — the gamers themselves sharing tales of workforce rivalries and of visionary homeowners. Among the (typically tragic) figures singled out are Rube Foster, credited right here with rising the tempo of the sport and persuading different workforce homeowners to type a league; Josh Gibson, who nonetheless has the most effective season batting averages ever recorded; and Effa Manley, an proprietor of the Newark Eagles, a workforce raided for expertise after the colour barrier fell. The movie even complicates the image on some baseball legends. Larry Lester, a founding father of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, notes that when Babe Ruth set the house run file — later damaged by Hank Aaron — he did it at a time when racism had stored out most of the greatest pitchers.

This historical past has absolutely been well-covered elsewhere, however “The League” recounts it movingly.

The League
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters.