‘A story that didn’t used to be told’: the rise and fall of baseball’s Negro Leagues

The Newark Eagles in Dugout in 1936. Photograph: Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Sam Pollard inherited his love for baseball from his father, a fan of the St Louis Cardinals – Black America’s team in the 1960s. Growing up in New York just made it a long-distance affair. “They had some phenomenal players,” Pollard recalls to the Guardian. “Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Bob Gibson, Bill White. And then when I got to be 14, 15 years old, I really wanted to understand their lineage. Where did they come from?”

Decades later, the director retraces that Black baseball genealogy in The League – a new Questlove-produced documentary on the rise, fall and last impact of the Negro Leagues, the professional baseball association that sprang up in the long shadow of Jim Crow. It’s a history famously touched on in Ken Burns’s seminal docuseries Baseball. But in The League, the B-story becomes the main thread.