“Play Harder,” an illustrated history of Black baseball in the United States, arrives at a complicated time for Black Americans and baseball.
On one hand, Black players made up just 6 percent of Opening Day rosters in 2024, down significantly from a high of 18.7 percent in 1981. On the other, Major League Baseball has gone from recognizing the Negro Leagues as the majors in 2020 to fully incorporating their statistics, forever changing the record books of a sport that so strongly embraces its past that the past gasps.
At this precarious moment, “Play Harder” offers a vital and gripping tale about the national pastime and the Black experience.
The book chronicles the nearly 160-year journey of Black baseball in America: from its beginnings as a means for newly freed enslaved people to find purpose and an expression of prowess after the Civil War, to its breaking down the barriers of Jim Crow with the emergence of Jackie Robinson, to the subsequent triumph of heroes like Willie Mays and Henry Aaron, to a decades-long vanishing act from the game as prominent Black athletes and their fans have moved on to greater representation in football and basketball.
“For a certain period, Black baseball was a world, a cosmos unto itself. For its adherents, it had the power of a religion,” Gerald Early writes in the introduction.
Led by author, professor and American cultural critic Early, in conjunction with the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, “Play Harder” is an ambitious project with colorful, vibrant art and seldom-seen photos and documents. It serves as an extension and companion piece to “The Souls of the Game: Voices of Black Baseball,” an exhibit that debuted at the Hall of Fame in May 2024.
The book’s title echoes the long-held concept within the Black community of having to work twice as hard to get half as much as white people. In this instance, playing hard was a requirement to express a love for and a determination to participate in a sport that intentionally blocked people of color from the field for nearly 50 years, forcing generations to display their talents in the shadows.
In documenting the bell curve movement of the game’s hold on the Black community, “Play Harder” captures the moments, people and events (Bud Fowler, the Negro Leagues and stars like Cool Papa Bell and Satchel Paige, the rise and fall of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry in New York, second-generation stars like Ken Griffey Jr. and Barry Bonds) who helped shape the game and the course of this country. Robinson breaking the color barrier serves as an appropriate halfway mark after the struggle that preceded it, and before the ascendancy that followed and the fight for relevance — on the field, in the dugout, in the front office and everywhere else — that continues today.
The downside of trying to condense almost 160 years into fewer than 300 pages is that there are too many stories and themes to cover. The period from when the Negro Leagues were founded to when Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm team in Montreal, spanning 25 years — filled with a plethora of colorful personalities and breakthroughs — is limited to just one chapter. But “Play Harder” tries to satiate readers with a thirst for more by sprinkling spotlight pieces from contributing writers about the overarching themes.
Where the book excels is in the history lessons, making connections that hit harder than Negro League legend and recently christened all-time MLB batting average leader Josh Gibson. These lessons reverberate even more at this moment when some act like how America got here doesn’t matter, whitewashing the uglier parts of our past and promoting ignorance.
Early’s book can’t tell the whole story, but it tells one that needs to be shared. The story of Black baseball must be understood within the context of the Black struggle for freedom and equality in America, in the same way that the centuries-old Black struggle is an inescapable part of American history writ large.
This is an excerpt from a
Washington Post story.