Sharing the voices of Negro Leagues’ past

The more the world is educated on the Negro Leagues, the better.

It’s a reason Mill Valley’s Ron Barr and Alameda’s Steve Taddei are producing separate podcasts on legendary ballplayers of the Negro Leagues, their lives and the challenges they faced when Major League Baseball excluded them from its whites-only fraternity.

Barr’s “Behind the Barrier, Voices from the Negro Leagues” is an eight-part series that, as of Friday afternoon, was scheduled to debut soon. Taddei’s “Leadership Lessons from the Negro Leagues” has been streaming for 13 months.

“It’s exciting to have so many people championing the effort to get this history out,” said Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., who has been interviewed by both Barr and Taddei. “These voices are vitally important. I subscribe to the belief that if you know the history of baseball, you essentially know the history of this country. The Negro Leagues are a major part of the history of baseball and the history of this country.”

Barr began his nationally syndicated show “Sports Byline USA” in 1988, and contributed more than 50 of his interviews with former players from the Negro Leagues to his podcast. The theme of Barr’s first podcast is the correlation between church and baseball and how church grounds were a safe haven for Blacks to play ball, form leagues and help top players advance to the pros.

“The Methodists against the Baptists,” quipped Hall of Famer Buck O’Neil on the podcast, pointing out that Sunday churchgoers often went straight from services to Negro League games.

“It was quite a sight, and you should’ve seen them. Everybody looked good. It was people getting together. It was a social affair. There weren’t too many places the Black folk could go to enjoy themselves other than church and jazz. They just flocked to the baseball park.”

Barr’s podcast draws from his extensive library of interviews including with Larry Doby, Minnie Miñoso, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe and many others who didn’t get an opportunity in the majors. Those include O’Neil and Mamie “Peanut” Johnson, the only woman to pitch in the Negro Leagues, going 33-8 in three seasons with the Indianapolis Clowns in the early 1950s.

“You can’t talk baseball without telling the stories of the Negro Leagues,” Barr said.

Taddei isn’t a career broadcaster and doesn’t have a platform as large as Barr’s, who’s partnering with the agency Octagon. But Taddei has posted Negro Leagues podcasts virtually every week from February 2022 as a hobby, 55 in all.

“I grew up following Willie Mays and hearing the stories about him with the Birmingham Black Barons,” said Taddei, 65. “I started calling up people I didn’t know and found a lot of people knew somebody who knew somebody. Next thing I knew, I’m speaking with Josh Gibson’s great grandson, Sean Gibson, and the families of Buck Leonard and Turkey Stearnes.

“I started finding out all these unique stories, not all necessarily about the stars, that I’ve been able to share.”

At the museum, Kendrick had a busy Black History Month getting the word out on the Negro Leagues by giving talks around the country and collaborating with MLB on several initiatives, including a three-part series of animated short stories narrated by Kendrick called “Undeniable — Stories from the Negro Leagues.”

The three segments, released throughout February, feature women in the Negro Leagues (including Johnson), the Negro Leagues’ international impact and a Jackie Robinson/Monte Irvin perspective.

Also in February came word that eight Negro Leaguers will be part of the video game “MLB The Show 23,” to be released March 28. Next year, eight more Negro Leaguers will be incorporated in the game.

“What makes it cooler is that you’ll get to see documentaries that are part of the video game,” said Kendrick, also the narrator for these stories. “The gamer has the opportunity to learn more in- depth information about these first eight players.”

The eight: O’Neil, Robinson, Satchel Paige, Hilton Smith, Rube Foster, Martin Dihigo, John Donaldson and Hank Thompson. Thompson integrated both the St. Louis Browns (who later became the Baltimore Orioles) in 1947 and New York Giants (before they relocated to San Francisco) in 1949. Thompson and Irvin debuted with the Giants in the same game, the first African Americans in franchise history. In 1951, Thompson, Irvin and Mays formed MLB’s first allBlack outfield, all alums of the Negro Leagues.

Also, independent of MLB and the museum, the launch of the Negro Leagues Family Alliance was announced Thursday, a group of descendants determined to preserve the “legacies, history and intellectual properties of the Negro Leagues while contributing to the education and uplift of baseball and sports.”

The Alliance is pursuing a National Negro Leagues Day across baseball every May 2 and for MLB to outfit its teams in Negro Leagues uniforms and caps. May 2, 1920, marked the first game, the Indianapolis ABCs versus the American Giants.

The group consists of family members of 10 Negro Leaguers including Gibson, Stearnes, Rube and Bill Foster, Buck Leonard, Double Duty Ratcliffe, Ron Teasley, Pete Hill, Fran Matthews and Dennis Biddle.