It’s hard to go to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and not want more. Sure, the stories offered up on the info cards give you a good overview, and the mementos behind glass show a rich history of the likes of the late and great Kansas City icons, Satchel Paige and Buck O’Neil. But it’s hard to walk out of there not wanting to know more about the lesser-known stars who toiled and even retired before Jackie Robinson.
A new book called Heroes of the Negro Leagues, by Mark Chiarello and Jack Morelli, is a fine follow-up to a visit to the museum. The book reproduces trading cards that were printed in 1990 to commemorate Negro Leagues stars, along with quick synopses of 60 players.
The book includes a short introduction from Hall of Famer Monte Irvin. Coincidentally, Irvin will be in town this Saturday for a lecture at the Negro Leagues museum. It’ll be held at 11 a.m., and the subject is on the Negro Leagues teams that played in Mexico, where many of the players found a respite from racism.
The artwork isn’t what you’d expect from a baseball book; the watercolors are gentle and colorful portraits of players typically shown in gritty, dusty footage. They also help show just how big an impact Kansas City had on the Negro Leagues, with many of the profiled players wearing the red-and-white (and sometimes blue and white) uniform of the Monarchs.
The stories aren’t quite as strong as the artwork, however. Many of them seem pulled directly from the stat books. Recapping how many home runs a player hit just doesn’t tell the tale of the Negro Leagues. But there are exceptions, with stories that are a bit heartwarming and, occasionally, heartbreaking. Take, for instance, the very first entry in the book, for Josh Gibson.
According to the book, Gibson was a power hitter who blasted a home run every 12th time at bat. In 1943, Gibson was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He refused a risky operation and continued playing, leading the league in 1945 with a .393 batting average. The book concludes his story with this graph: “On the night of January 20, 1947, two months before Jackie Robinson made it to the Majors, Josh Gibson, possibly the greatest hitter in baseball history, lay down to sleep and never awoke.”Luckily, his story is alive again. – Eric Barton
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