How Bob Kendrick and Negro Leagues Baseball Museum triumphed over a year of tears
Not since the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum opened in 1990 had it more anticipated a flip of the calendar than it had to 2020, a year bubbling with ambitious plans for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro National League at the Paseo YMCA.
But symptomatic of a nation gripped by deprivation amid the pandemic, much had to be canceled, postponed or repurposed. The COVID-19 coronavirus was like that “big, nasty righthander who just threw one high and tight and knocked you down,” as NLBM president Bob Kendrick put it recently.
The knockdowns were made all the more poignant by such a constant stream of loss of former Negro Leagues players and friends of the museum as to evoke the “In Memoriam” montage annually at the Academy Awards.
“That’s exactly what it’s like,” Kendrick said the other day in his office.
He was thinking of a group including Joe Morgan, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Chadwick Boseman and, more recently, Dick Allen and country music legend Charley Pride, a former Negro Leagues pitcher who was dedicated to the museum.
And other less-known former Negro Leagues players, like Jim Robinson, who appeared in a Kansas City Monarchs jersey in a national Toyota commercial for the museum earlier this year.
“I know it comes with the territory. But this year seemed to be magnified with the amount of great loss … That part takes a little bit out of you every single time that it happens,” Kendrick said, later adding, “It seems like every time we would get to some milestone celebration, we would have a milestone loss, you know? Almost at the same time. So you almost felt guilty celebrating to a certain extent.”
That’s the amazing thing, though:
Somehow, in the very spirit of those it commemorates, this became a year of resilient triumphs for the NLBM — punctuated last week by Major League Baseball’s long overdue recognition of the Negro Leagues as, in fact, major leagues.
There’s a lot to process on that front, and we’ll come back to that.
But it was just the latest element in a year of wild pendulum swings for the NLBM, from what Kendrick called “euphoria one day and tears the next day and back to euphoria.”
When I joked that it seems a bit like one of those games where the last team with the ball wins as the year comes to an end, Kendrick laughed and said, “Hopefully, (the MLB recognition) will leave us in a euphoric state. I hope we’ve got the ball last.”
To get here, it kept dusting itself off and stepping back in the batter’s box.
“We’re finding ways to win in the vein of (founder) Rube Foster, manufacturing these things when we need to,” Kendrick said, referring to Foster’s penchant for so-called small-ball. “This story (of the Negro Leagues) is about triumph over adversity, and that’s what you have to do: You dig down deep within yourself to find ways when there is seemingly not a way.”
That unbreakable tone is set by Kendrick, a disciple of Buck O’Neil’s who embodies O’Neil’s exuberance and wit, radiates his own distinct wisdom and warmth and has few peers in pure storytelling.
On Wednesday, he was named the Kansas City Call’s inaugural “Person of the Year,” a distinction I’d echo given all the museum resolved to achieve this year and the inspiring example he set in the worst of times.
With the museum once shuttered for three months. With social upheaval casting more spotlight and responsibility upon it. With such heaviness.
Out of all that, all this prevailed and somehow made 2020 a year of growth and promise:
A joint $1 million donation from MLB and the MLB Players Association and an unprecedented level of individual giving that Kendrick estimated was three-to-four fold that of an ordinary year and amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Not only did it make Kendrick and what he called his stellar staff “feel good” about how people treasure the cause but the windfall also enabled the NLBM to continue operating without layoffs or any notable reductions in operations, he said.
Then there was the “Tipping Your Cap” salute to the Negro Leagues campaign that initially was planned for within stadiums but went viral online. Between that and a national day of recognition in mid-August, Kendrick figured the Negro Leagues achieved visibility and appreciation in ways even Buck never could have dreamed.
The museum’s profile was further enhanced by the Negro Leagues Baseball Centennial Commemorative Coin Act (enabled by bipartisan political support) with minting expected in 2022 and the potential to reap up to $12 million for the museum.
There was more, of course, including what Kendrick on social media called A STREETCAR NAMED BUCK!”
And now the broader recognition that Kendrick called “almost the perfect way to cap off” the year and create momentum into 2021 and the deftly adaptive plan to launch “Negro Leagues 101” to make up for disrupted aspects of the 100th anniversary celebration.
Not that Kendrick didn’t have initial questions of his own about the implications of the recognition or doesn’t understand concerns about its long-term ramifications.
“When I first caught wind about this notion, I’ll be honest, I was kind of in a little bit of a defiant, militant role. … First thing that I (thought) was, ‘I don’t need you to validate me,’ ” he said, noting both the quality of Negro Leagues players and their pride. “But then I kind of had to look outside of myself (and realize) what you’re doing is looking at it from the inside-out. You’re so close to this. Look at it from the outside-in. And when you do that, that’s when you start to accept the historical significance of what this represents.”
Even if Kendrick is right when he says “you could never reduce the Negro Leagues to stats.”
Even with the specifics remaining unclear about how statistics will be woven together … or not.
Even with it worrisome that some of the rich history will get diluted or diminished in any effort to merge the worlds.
Moreover, with Negro Leagues statistics more difficult to gather with comprehensive precision because of how the mainstream news media tended to devalue their relevance, there are some sheer conversion issues to be solved.
So it’s no simple task to both properly continue commemorating the Negro Leagues players without blurring history … while striving to correct history that was inherently false.
“There are gaps in the pages of American history books,” Kendrick said. “There are so many who have contributed to the greatness of this country whose stories have never been told. History has essentially been presented to us from one point of view.”
The semantics are all a column in itself, all thought-provoking, and all to be addressed in time — even if ultimately unsatisfactorily.
But let’s remember that bit about perfection being the enemy of good and think about it this way for now:
When someone would tell Buck what a shame it was that Negro Leagues players never got to play against “the best,” Kendrick recalled, “Buck would always say, ‘How do you know that I didn’t play against the best?’ … The mindset is if it didn’t happen in the major leagues, then it didn’t happen.”
That was specifically reinforced in 1969, something Kendrick himself only learned earlier this year.
According to The New York Times, a committee of five white men representing the MLB commissioner’s office, the National League, the American League, the Hall of Fame and the Baseball Writers’ Association conferred “major league” status on four long-defunct organizations: the American Association (1882-91), the Union Association (1884), the Players’ League (1890) and the Federal League (1914-15).
The Negro Leagues, which along with legends of its own produced a remarkable influx of dominant future MLB players, were omitted. “Racism in its purest form,” Kendrick called it.
“So you know that this dismissal had nothing to do with whether this was ‘major,’” Kendrick said. “This was about the fact that somebody just said ‘we ain’t recognizing them brothers.’ They didn’t exist.”
So for baseball now to call that “clearly an error” and take this step might be considered what Kendrick calls “the cleansing of sins.”
With a laugh, he added, “It ain’t easy to step out there and let everybody know ‘we were wrong.’ Even when everybody knew you were wrong!”
And to Kendrick, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred’s role is reminiscent in some ways of then-commissioner Happy Chandler standing with Branch Rickey as he integrated MLB with former Monarch Jackie Robinson in 1947.
The bittersweetness of that monumental change, of course, was that it marked the beginning of the end for the Negro Leagues.
That also led to the museum’s very purpose, defined succinctly by O’Neil as “so that we would be remembered.”
And so they are all the more now — after a year of dashed dreams converted into fresh hope.