Hall of Fame Celebrates the Stories of Black Baseball with Publication of ‘Play Harder’

COOPERSTOWN—No sport has been more associated with America’s sense of itself, with its identity, than baseball. No sport has been so inextricably bound with America’s traditions—with its notions of democracy and fair play—than baseball. And no professional sport in America has been as dramatically connected to social change as Major League Baseball when it became racially integrated the moment Jackie Robinson took the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.

“Play Harder: The Triumph of Black Baseball in America,” by Gerald Early, comes at a time when the history of Black baseball has become especially relevant—following MLB's recent recognition of the Negro Leagues as major leagues and the effort to incorporate statistics from the Negro Leagues into those for all players. Before Robinson, as “Play Harder” shows, Black athletes played baseball as far back as the mid-1800s even before the establishment of the Negro Leagues. But in 1920, when the Negro National League was founded, Black Americans gained an inroad to baseball that would be enduring and profound. The leagues were an instrument of community building during a time when discrimination separated Black people from all-white enterprises, including baseball, and they paved the way for racial integration that Black players hoped would come.