Take Me Out To The Museum

MLB and the Player's Union seemed committed to their mutual suicide pact.  For the third consecutive year, it looks like spring training will be messed up and perhaps the regular season.  More disturbing is that the issues over which the owners and players are squabbling have little to do with problems most critical to the future of the game - the ever increasing length and slow pace and the non-stop growth of strikeouts and home runs, making for a less interesting game whether watching in person or on TV, or listening on the radio, and a firm deterrent to creating a new generation of fans, leaving just us old guys to talk about the old days.  For those of us who love the game and wish to see it have a continued future as well as a treasured history, the short-term view of those who run the sport is distressing.

All that was prompted by reading a post from one of my favorite bloggers, Assistant Village Idiot, in which he linked to a 2020 post on his visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City.  AVP was troubled to find himself the only visitor to this outstanding museum:

Along about the Rube Foster exhibit I teared up over it all. One can't make people like things, and desert is not a measure of personality, and it is sad that this is always going to be an enterprise held afloat by outside help for symbolic reasons, rather than for its considerable intrinsic merit.

It's worth it on it's own merit. One could teach the history of race relations 1860-1960 with this as the framework. And it's got both stories and statistics, as baseball always does.

As it turns out AVP's visit was in 2014, the same year I and my friend visited it while on one of our annual ballpark tour jaunts.  While the museum was not devoid of visitors there were few, apart from us.  In my report on the trip I wrote this about the museum:

Best Non-Ballpark Attraction:  The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City.  Go.  Kansas City was home of the Monarchs, one of the most successful Negro League teams and also where, in 1920, the first independent Negro Baseball League was organized.  The museum is small (you can see the whole thing in 90 minutes) but extremely well done taking you through the entire history of African-Americans in baseball from the Civil War through the first decade after Jackie Robinson integrated the sport in 1947 (for more see 42 and, by the way, did anyone else notice Jackie's widow, Rachel, who turns 92 next week, sitting with Bud Selig at Tuesday night's All-Star Game?) which means it tells the larger story of African-Americans in American society during those years.  It honors the accomplishment of those who played in the Negro Leagues and leaves you wondering how Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Cool Papa Bell, Judy Johnson, Martin Dihigo, Satchel Paige (of whom you can read more in Don't Look Back and The 1935 Bismarck All Stars) and others would have fared if given the opportunity to play in the Major Leagues during their prime.  It was an odd period when black players couldn't play in the Majors but at the same time Paige was barnstorming with white pitchers Dizzy Dean (who vocally supported integrating baseball) and Bob Feller throughout the 1930s and 1940s on tours to which they drew black and white fans in numbers that exceeded the attendance of most major league games.

 I purchased a Kansas City Monarchs jersey at the museum which became my favorite T-shirt.  I finally wore it out and discovered that the museum no longer sold it.  Thankfully, Mrs THC came to my rescue and was able to find and purchase two shirts which she recently gave to me!

So, owners and players, get your act together and address the real problems of the game.  And readers, if you are in the Kansas City area, make sure to visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.