The League Review | Knocks the Mustard Off the Hot Dog

The League, from director Sam Pollard, is a documentary that should be mandatory viewing for all diehard baseball fans. A sprawling overview of all black baseball teams from the early to mid twentieth century, The League gives proper credit to the often unsung players, managers, and entrepreneurs who forever changed the game, despite many of them never being embraced by the white, “professional” establishment. Although it certainly covers the boom and bust of the Negro Leagues, Pollard’s film is built squarely around a united sense of black community and pride. The League makes an unflappable case that without these teams and players that have been somewhat unremarked upon with the passing of time, the game of baseball wouldn’t be what it is today.

Although it was still a rarity, in the years immediately following the American Civil War, black baseball players could be found on several professional teams. But around the end of the nineteenth century and with the arrival of the Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling in 1896, segregation laws began to tighten up in the country, forcing black players out of the game. Although the refrains of “separate but equal” set equality measures back for decades to follow, a select group of businesspeople and players formed their own successful league for people of colour. Aided by a mass movement of black people heading north and east from the deep south, a healthy black press, and a rabid fan base, these leagues and teams would be tremendously successful, introducing the world to new styles of play, concepts that endure to this day as traditions across the sport, and superstars that would become household names.

Brisk and snappily paced, The League does an exemplary job of boiling down a topic that could’ve easily filled a Ken Burns length miniseries into a single indispensable volume. Pollard (MLK/FBI) knows there’s a lot of ground to cover, and plenty of stories worth telling in and around the leagues, but not much feels overlooked or like too much time is being spent in one place. The League is a deep dive into a subject that doesn’t feel overwhelming and also pleasingly comes across like an invitation for the viewer to do more reading and research after the film has concluded. The League is packed with big personalities and inspirational stories that could sustain feature length documentaries of their own, but their inclusion as part of this smaller package are positively tantalizing. Even the moments that are calling out to be afforded just a little extra time from Pollard are still recounted in vivid, lovingly rich detail.

The League goes beyond the obvious profiling of greats who started out in the Negro Leagues like Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays, although Pollard never overlooks their accomplishments, either. Pollard is more interested in the people behind the scenes, their ideas, and the everlasting team rivalries that lasted across the league’s history. There’s the story of Andrew “Rube” Foster, a masterful pitcher and shrewd businessman who was almost a century ahead of his time and is credited as the inventor of the screwball. There’s the story of Effa Manley, the first female co-owner of a major sports franchise, and one of the best to ever do it. There’s the inter-county rivalry between Cumberland Posey’s Homestead Grays (featuring ace catcher Josh Gibson) and Gus Greenlee’s Pittsburgh Crawfords (home to legendary pitcher Satchel Paige). A lot of the film is told through the words and recollections of former umpire Bob Motley (voiced by Pollard), whose legendary memoir is one of the best volumes ever written about this era in black culture and history.

The League doesn’t rest on big name value to illustrate why these teams mattered in the first place. Cities with teams in the Negro Leagues often had economically thriving black communities as a result. Pollard carefully deconstructs how the league kept changing through the challenges presented by World War I, The Great Depression, and World War II, not to mention the ongoing civil rights challenges faced by black players who were forced to tour relentlessly just to make a living. The business dealings between these teams – which were sometimes less than amicable and symbiotic – are just as juicy and dramatic as anything their white counterparts engaged in around the same time. Pollard and his interview subjects – both contemporary scholars and those heard or seen in archival materials – are able to eloquently and distinctly place these leagues into a proper historical, cultural, and economic context.

The League works not only as a film dedicated to preserving history, but also as a junction point that branches off in many different directions and towards other topics worthy of equal consideration and contemplation. It’s so much more than a simple sports or civil rights documentary because of its focus on the building and maintaining of communities and the contributions made by the individuals who sought to strengthen them via a unifying sport. Sure, viewers and fans will learn about how the Negro Leagues literally changed the game of baseball by way of stolen bases, all star games, and more athletic styles of play, but they’ll more importantly learn why these things mattered in a larger context; the very foundations of what makes a sport so captivating in the first place: emotional investment.

The League opens at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto on Friday, July 14, 2023.