If your only knowledge of the Negro League in baseball is that it’s where Jackie Robinson hailed from before integrating the sport, you’re missing a lot of the story. Let documentary great Sam Pollard will you in with his latest work, The League (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video). Like much of Black history, it is shamefully underknown but holds rich insights about resilience in the face of obstacles – and deserves more recognition.
The Gist: The League takes viewers through a comprehensive history of the Negro Leagues from roughly 1920 through to their rapid disintegration following the integration of the Major Leagues. Pollard locates their formation’s roots with a sociological insight – the Leagues grew with the Great Migration out of the South and needed urban centers with transportation as a condition to develop. Like the rest of the country, they absorbed the shocks of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II.
But the way it refracted through the style of play favored a more exciting technique with an emphasis on base-running over home-run balls à la Babe Ruth. By all accounts, a Negro League game was more “exciting” to watch than a Major League game in the 1930s. The Majors attempted to adapt, but they were ultimately more successful at just stealing the style through integration. While we might think this is the right move morally, it was a tough one monetarily for the Negro Leagues – early examples of successful Black entrepreneurship that found themselves pinched and pushed out of business by a more hegemonic white-led business.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This won’t feel any different than watching a standard Ken Burns documentary or even a 30 for 30 episode on ESPN. The story might be different, but the style is familiar.
Performance Worth Watching: The League has countless great characters, even if they aren’t truly “performances.” None holds the screen quite as compellingly as Effa Manley, though. The ultimate woman in a man’s world has a lot to teach today’s would-be girl-bosses about how to thrive in a world that is not built for her success.
Memorable Dialogue: “I think there’s always been a real African-American appreciation of improvisation,” says one of the talking heads at the start of the film. “You figure out another way to succeed, and a perfect example of that is what they did with baseball.”
Sex and Skin: The only people reaching base in The League do so on the baseball diamond.
Our Take: Pollard ably compresses a vast history that probably could sustain a multi-part miniseries into a feature film without feeling like we’re getting the SparkNotes version, and for that, we should be thankful. The League does feel a bit cut-and-paste with talking head anecdotes and archival footage, so much so that it’s a bit too easy to fall into a bit of a lull with it. Luckily, there are enough fascinating characters both on and off the field who help personalize a story that feels a lot like a microcosmic representation of the era’s race relations.
Our Call: STREAM IT! The League isn’t going to burn up the record books, but if you like the cinematic equivalent of a sturdy and watchable nine innings, this is very much a documentary for you. Sam Pollard vividly recounts the world as it was … and leaves the door open to contemplate a different world that fairly rewarded Black talent for all they built.
Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.