Black baseball managers receive recognition in new Negro Leagues Museum exhibit — Andscape

Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick decided to do something this month that Major League Baseball didn’t do when it wove Negro Leagues statistics into its record book: give Black managers their due.

Kendrick unveiled an exhibit on May 24 at the baseball museum in Kansas City, Missouri, that shined a spotlight on the men who managed in “Black baseball.”

He’s correcting a slight to them and their legacies.

“In the Negro Leagues, we used to run an entire baseball enterprise,” Kendrick said. “You had these brilliant tacticians who just never got an opportunity in the majors.”

The Negro Leagues, professional baseball teams formed for African American players, existed in the 1920s through the 1950s. While the majors integrated the playing field April 15, 1947, the league didn’t put its first Black manager on the field until April 8, 1975. Jackie Robinson integrated the former with the Brooklyn Dodgers; another Robinson — Frank — integrated the latter when he was hired by the Cleveland Indians.

“Everybody knew guys like Frank Robinson could play,” said Phil Dixon, an author and respected authority on the history of Black baseball. “They’d been playing successfully for a long time. But could they lead? They managed in the Negro Leagues, but they just couldn’t get that manager’s job in the majors.”

Dixon’s thoughts echoed what Larry Lester, the foremost authority on black baseball, said about the absence of Black managers and administrators from the era before integration.

“Baseball is statistically driven,” Lester said. “When I try to promote their cases, I hear: ‘What was his won/loss record?’ People want to look at numbers, but numbers don’t tell you everything.”

Despite Lester’s efforts, managerial minds from the Negro Leagues have been mostly forgotten, their brilliance now hidden in dog-eared newspaper clippings that have turned yellow over the decades, he said. Who knows Rube Foster, Vic Harris, Oscar Charleston, C.I. Taylor or even Buck O’Neil, star of the Ken Burns documentary “Baseball,” were excellent managers?

Charleston is in the Baseball Hall of Fame as a player, and Rube Foster is in Cooperstown as an owner or as the “father of Black baseball” for organizing the Negro National League from 1920-1931.

“The focus has always been on the players,” Kendrick said. “But those managerial minds, those executives in the Negro Leagues, they didn’t get an opportunity to move into Major League Baseball.”

That’s the reason he put together the exhibit, which opened Memorial Day weekend inside the museum’s changing gallery. In it, Kendrick and his staff highlighted the managerial and administrative minds from the Negro Leagues – the masterminds of baseball strategies who were denied opportunities to display these gifts in the majors, not because of their baseball acumen but because of their skin color.

Even after breaking that plate-glass ceiling in 1975, not many Black men have followed in Frank Robinson’s footsteps. Counting Robinson, only 15 Black men have managed in Major League Baseball.

On Opening Day this season, two Black men managed in the big leagues: Dave Roberts of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Ron Washington of the Los Angeles Angels.

Of the 15 Black managers, three — Roberts, Dusty Baker and Cito Gaston — have won World Series titles. Yet even with successes like theirs, the barriers to entry for others have remained high. Black candidates are often overlooked for even bench coach positions, Dixon said. They have had even less success landing jobs in front offices.

None of that, however, surprised Kendrick. He still remembered what former Dodgers general manager Al Campanis said on ABC’s “Nightline” in April 1987 about Blacks not having the “necessities” to lead.

Kendrick called such thinking nonsense, as the success of Black managers in Black baseball proved. Although their accomplishments in the dugout have been woven into the narrative of the majors, Kendrick used the word “travesty” to point out that no one from Black baseball has been enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame as a manager.

“Buck and Rube went in as contributors,” he said. “They didn’t go in as managers, but both were outstanding managers.”

The exhibit aims to challenge long-held prejudices that have shaped baseball’s hierarchy.

Kendrick referenced the infamous “McPhail memorandum,” a document now in the museum’s collection. It belonged to longtime MLB executive Larry McPhail, who used the same language in the 1940s as Campanis did four decades later in describing why Blacks didn’t make good candidates to manage or run a front office. In McPhail’s world, they weren’t smart enough, yet the reality told a different story, Kendrick said.

More than 40% of Negro Leagues players had some college education, compared to less than 5% of their white contemporaries in the majors, he said. They often went from high school into minor-league farm systems without a stop on a college campus.

“The Negro Leagues didn’t have that kind of farm system,” Kendrick said. “We trained on the campuses of HBCUs, and so we had a disproportionate number of college-educated athletes in comparison to the major leagues.”

But what about today?

There are two Black managers and no Black general managers, numbers that highlight how durable the game’s inglorious past of segregation tends to be.

In an interview with Global Sports Matters, Curtis Granderson, 44, who played 15 seasons in the big leagues, found the lack of hiring Black coaches for those jobs puzzling. He put it best from his front-row seat in the game.

“There are a lot of Black coaches I’ve been around in the game that had coaching experience — had managerial experience [at other levels], not just coaching experience — and aren’t interviewed, aren’t even in the final three, but you just keep scratching your head,” he said.

The hiring — or lack of hiring — of Black managers is a head-scratcher indeed, which is why Kendrick wanted to showcase what men who look like Granderson have done historically when given the chance to manage.

Kendrick’s tribute to them runs through the end of the year. He said he’s considering a touring version or digital exhibition afterward. His ultimate hope, though, is that by illuminating this overlooked aspect of baseball history, the game’s future might finally reflect the full spectrum of its past.