The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues is an interesting concept. The title came on the heels of Major League Baseball’s decision to declare the Negro Leagues were major leagues. I’m not going to use this review to litigate that announcement, I’ve done that plenty on this site already. Regardless, a collection of essays discussing the Negro Leagues and their major league status is an instant draw for someone who is my particular type of baseball fan. I scooped up Baseball Reference (technically Sports Reference, but this was put out by the Baseball REeference side of their house) and the Society for American Baseball Research’s book as soon as it was made available and then in true book reader fashion let it sit on my shelf for a long time before I finally cracked it open and started reading.
Let’s start with the good stuff, namely that outside of a few essays this book is a breeze to get through. Typically I read a chapter or section of a book a day. I have a very busy schedule and it’s hard for me to read much more than that. A few days into The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues I wanted to read more than one essay a day and found myself squiring away time to read one more essay and then another, and so on. This collection of essays is a page-turner the majority of the time.
In terms of a gateway drug to the Negro Leagues, and the Negro major leagues, this is a great book. It runs the gamut from titans of Negro Leagues research like Jerry Malloy and Gary Ashwill to lesser renowned writers (at least lesser known in terms of their writing) such as Vanessa Ivy Rose and Sean Gibson. By bringing forth an eclectic group of essayists, The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues tackles the Nego Leagues in a lot of different ways. It’s both interesting and barely scratches the surface of these leagues and players. That’s not a bad thing with a book like this, it’s meant to engage but also to spur baseball fans into digging deeper into the Negro Leagues. In that regard, The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues is a great success.
The format of Baseball Reference’s offering does have its drawbacks. Mainly in that, the quality of the essays varies greatly. Malloy’s profiling of Rube Foster is the sort of stuff that makes one yearn to know more about the legendary Chicago pitcher, manager, owner, and pioneer. Jules Tygiel is well, Jules Tygiel and his work is astounding like usual. Todd Peterson inundates his reader with statistics and doesn’t present much of an argument worth reading (I am biased against the “let’s compare the Negro Leagues to the white leagues” style of Negro League research that I feel makes an erroneous presumption that the white major leagues were the standard instead of the other way around). Roberta J. Newman takes her readers on a journey into advertising in the Negro Leagues that is buried beneath impenetrable prose. As should be expected from a collection of essays, they are a mixed bag. Some are amazing, others quite ordinary, and a few don’t hold much value or interest.
The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues isn’t a great book, but it is a good collection of essays that contains some fabulous entries. It’s a quick read and an engaging one. There’s no reason to rush out and get The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues (the target audience for this specific type of book likely owns it already anyway) but if you’re a baseball fan who is looking for a decent primer to get your Negro League journey started, I’d give this one a go.
Lead artwork courtesy of Gary Cieradkowski – Society for American Baseball Research
