Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, celebrating 100 years, goes national for Sunday’s games
Bob Kendrick was in the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum after-hours earlier this week on video duty. He was taped throwing out the first pitch for a Chicago Cubs game.
Wrigley Field is just one of the places Kendrick’s presence will be seen and heard around baseball Sunday, a day poised to be like no other in the history of the museum.
The ongoing celebration of 100 years of the Negro Leagues will be part of every Major League Baseball game on Sunday’s schedule. Players, coaches and umpires will each wear an anniversary logo patch, and the museum will be emblazoned on the side of all bases and lineup cards.
“This is the first time ever Major League Baseball, all 30 teams, have honored the Negro Leagues in this national show of solidarity,” said Kendrick, the museum’s president.
The celebration will be a part of all of the day’s MLB broadcasts, including the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball showcase between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. Kendrick plans to spend the day at the museum, telling the Negro Leagues’ story during on-air cutaways from several games.
The baseball-wide salute is one of many occasions marking the 100th anniversary. This year, the Negro Leagues and the museum have been celebrated in a Toyota commercial, a clothing line created by former pitching great C.C. Sabathia, and a tipping-your-cap awareness campaign that became wildly popular this spring and summer.
Four former U.S. Presidents had photos taken tipping their caps: Barack Obama in a White Sox cap, George W. Bush tipping a Rangers cap, Bill Clinton in a Cubs cap, and Jimmy Carter in a Braves cap.
Among others who got involved in the cap-tip salute were sports figures like Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Henry Aaron and Billie Jean King; entertainers that included The Temptations and Tony Bennett; and astronaut Chris Cassidy, who tipped his helmet aboard the International Space Station.
The Toyota ad features former Kansas City Monarchs infielder Jim Robinson, who appeared in three East-West Negro League All-Star Games in the 1950s. The spot was shot last November.
“I’m so happy because it made Jim Robinson an overnight star at age 90,” Kendrick said. “I’m so thrilled he now gets to see himself as a TV star. It’s so beautifully shot you almost forget it’s a car commercial.”
Sabathia, who won 251 games in a 19-year career that ended last season, collaborated with the apparel company Root of Fight and the Major League Baseball Players Association to create a Negro Leagues clothing line. The museum receives part of the proceeds from sales of the merchandise.
Kendrick said Sabathia is a longtime friend of the museum.
“Once he was introduced to the Negro Leagues, it grabbed ahold of him,” Kendrick said. “And it’s something that is in his heart. And he’s helping introduce the Negro Leagues to an audience that maybe hadn’t thought about the Negro Leagues.”
Such business relationships are helping the museum power through a summer that was expected to be one of the busiest in its 30-year history — before the COVID-19 pandemic struck.
The museum closed its doors for three months before reopening in mid-June. But it has succeeded in other ways. The museum has been open during this time of heightened social awareness and the Black Lives Matter movement, and Kendrick says that has expanded its audience.
“If I’m going to take any solace out of what has come out of a tumultuous set of circumstances in our country, it is the fact that people started to recognize and embrace the notion that this museum is a social-justice museum,” Kendrick said. “It is a civil rights museum. It’s just seen through the lens of baseball.”
The baseball-wide celebration idea was hatched last year, and the original date of June 27 was announced in February at the Paseo YMCA, where the Negro League was established in 1920. Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and new Royals owner John Sherman were on hand for the ceremony, and Major League Baseball donated $1 million to the museum that day.
At one point, early in the shutdown, Kendrick thought seriously about shifting this year’s anniversary events to 2021.
“When it became so evident what the coronavirus had done, I was disheartened,” Kendrick said
Then Kendrick remembered his old friend and museum founder Buck O’Neil.
“My first thought went back to Buck O’Neil,” Kendrick said. “When he started this project, he told me he wanted to do this because he wanted us to be remembered.
“Sunday, they’ll be remembered.”
This story was originally published August 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, celebrating 100 years, goes national for Sunday’s games."