Negro Leagues Museum
Our house out of danger, a bit of sleep secured, and a large free buffet breakfast in our bellies, we checked out of our hotel and embarked on another ambitious vacation day. The plan entailed a morning visit to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in KC, followed by a roughly 230-mile drive to St. Louis, and a book tour event in the evening.
We arrived at the museum shortly after its 10 am opening and right as a group on a baseball tour disembarked from a bus and made their way in. The museum shares a building with the American Jazz Museum, which would have been worthwhile if we’d had time. I couldn’t take too big a chance on the drive east being fast and easy, though, so we stuck with just one.
I could go on and on about the Negro Leagues museum, and I just might. A few weeks before the trip, I watched our meetup host Molly Knight and former player/ESPN broadcaster Doug Glanville (who, side note, was in my class at Penn though I never met him – it’s a big school!) interview museum president Bob Kendrick on a Substack live for Jackie Robinson Day. (Fun fact: Kendrick shares my birthday. And a shared birthday came up later in the trip, too.)
I knew I couldn’t go to KC without seeing the museum or having some authentic BBQ, and the interview with Kendrick solidified it. He even mentioned that Jackie Robinson’s favorite BBQ in town was a place called Gates, and that was on my initial itinerary for a meal before a local told us Arthur Bryant’s was better. Had we not eaten so much at the hotel, we might have stopped by Gates BBQ after the museum, but we had to miss it this trip. For those who don’t know, Jackie played for the famous Kansas City Monarchs before signing with Brooklyn to make his way to the major leagues.
In the past year, I had read Joe Posnanski’s book The Soul of Baseball, where he spent months hitting the road with legendary Negro Leagues player and coach Buck O’Neil (made famous in Ken Burns’ PBS Baseball documentary). Buck’s stories illuminated the Negro Leagues experience, and Joe’s long tenure writing for the Kansas City Star ensured that KC was very much central in my notions about the segregated game. So, yeah, I had to make a pilgrimage to the museum. It did not disappoint.
I think it’s very much possible to feel somewhat melancholy when reviewing the history of legendary players who never had the chance to showcase their talents in the “white” major leagues. MLB has designated the Negro Leagues as major leagues now, so I want to be careful with terminology, but the reality of segregation was that the best in the game didn’t take the same fields for far too many decades. It’s sad on one level to know that Josh Gibson didn’t get to compete for home run titles with Babe Ruth, and Oscar Charleston wasn’t fighting for batting titles against Rogers Hornsby. What should have been and what was … they rarely come within a mile of each other, alas.
The museum celebrates the history, however, and doesn’t much lament the system that made the Negro Leagues necessary at all. You feel the joy and style that characterized the leagues throughout the museum. The exhibits cover every aspect of Black baseball across several decades, including ownership and league formation, touring teams, the pioneering role of women, the fan experience, and so much more. I’d go back again to spend more time poring over every exhibit thoroughly sometime, and to check out the jazz museum, too.
As foreshadowed, the self-guided museum tour exits into …of course … the gift shop. I’ll acknowledge that I spent a bit of time perusing the museum’s online catalog in advance to get a flavor for what they sold and definitely anticipated making a significant purchase there. We both bought jerseys, and I definitely wanted one that didn’t just have a city name on it that could easily be mistaken for something else. So I went with Satchel Paige’s Kansas City Monarchs jersey, and I couldn’t be happier with the choice. It’s a cream-colored shirt with red sleeves and Monarchs in red across the front and Paige’s number 25 on the back. I’ll be looking for many good excuses to wear it now. Daniel went with the Indianapolis Clowns jersey and matching hat, red with blue sleeves and trim. It looks really great, too.
There were other barnstorming teams besides those made up of Negro Leaguers, including this House of David team with long hair and beards.
An exhibit at the Negro Leagues museum shows players from a 1927 barnstorming trip to Japan. The height disparities from the two teams are hard to miss.
A Negro Leagues museum exhibit on the Latin influence.
One of the Negro Leagues museum exhibits
Our hotel was right next door to this Rawlings building in St. Louis, complete with a giant gold glove on top. So appropriate! (Check the Day 1 post for a Rawlings exhibit in Kansas City celebrating Frank White’s Gold Gloves)
Michael Schur (left) and Joe Posnanski smile one more time near the end of the autograph line, and we appreciate them for it.
My new signed copy of Big Fan
Michael Schur, Joe Posnanski and Gerald Early on stage at the book tour event in St. Louis
A sign outside the site in Kansas City that houses the Negro Leagues and American Jazz museums
Me with a statue of Satchel Paige, whose jersey I would soon purchase in the gift shop
Part of the exhibit on Satchel Paige at the Negro Leagues museum
Crossing Missouri
It was time to depart KC after a fulfilling 24 hours, into which we’d packed quite a good bit of activity. We weren’t hungry yet, so we started the drive east to St. Louis figuring we’d find somewhere to stop along the way. Joe Posnanski called it “what I honestly believe to be the most boring four-hour drive in America.” Well, he wrote that the next day, because as it happened he was on a book tour with Michael Schur for their new book Big Fan and happened to be in St. Louis the night we were arriving. Then they were driving west to Kansas City the next day for another tour stop. So our mission was to arrive in St. Louis on time for the book event, and anything else we got to do would be gravy.
Joe wrote in his blog: “I’ve probably made this drive, I don’t know, 40 or 50 times, I would guess. That means I’ve spent roughly 200 hours of my life on I-70, driving by adult store and personal injury lawyer billboards and, so often, telling passengers (especially kids), “We’ll stop for food in Columbia!”
I will dispute Joe’s characterization as to how boring it is, however. I had, just a couple days before, made the drive yet again from Southern California to Las Vegas. It is the very definition of boring, with very little but empty desert and the occasional rising hill for the vast majority of the 200+ miles. I’m used to it and don’t think much about it, but I cannot say there’s anything the least bit inspiring or exciting about it.
On the other hand, Missouri is a beautiful state to cross, sparklingly green with trees all along the route. Yes, the billboards and fireworks stores and the apparently never-ending construction wear you down a bit, but at least there’s something to look at. And we did in fact stop for food in Columbia, home of the University of Missouri and a couple other colleges.
I should squeeze in somewhere that part of what made the ride along I-70 go by fast (aside from my slightly lead foot on the Jeep) was Daniel’s role as trip navigator and musicologist. Since he’s under 25, I had to do all the driving (a silly rental car rule, but I’m not in charge) and he did all the music selecting. We don’t always share the same tastes, but he acquiesced if I found a playlist less than appealing here and there. For a good chunk of this drive in particular, he shared Afroman’s Freedom of Speech album in its entirety. If you aren’t familiar with the background to this album, the short version is that the rapper used the album to get revenge on members of the Ohio sheriff’s department who conducted a raid on his house when he wasn’t home (and found nothing they claimed would be there). One of the officers even took some homemade lemon pound cake (which he recorded a song about, part of a series of events that ended with Afroman winning a civil lawsuit filed by the deputies for defamation). After winning in court, Afroman upped the ante with a full album of funny, often obscene, but quite entertaining songs mocking the department that had made it their mission to ruin him. He had the last laugh, and we had a great time listening to him sing about it all. Not for all audiences, to be sure, so be warned.
Once in Columbia, we had a healthy and delicious lunch at a little artisanal cafe where the menu varies with whatever is fresh and they feel like making. We heard some live music coming from around the neighboring building and wandered over to find an open space with some people milling about and the band blasting out solid cover tunes of 70s and 80s rock. After a few minutes, though, someone came over and told us it was a private event. Apparently, you’re just supposed to know these things? There were no signs or people at the gate, and it was all outside. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
With no further time to dilly-dally in Columbia, we headed the rest of the way to St. Louis and checked into our hotel. Coincidentally, it was right next door to a large business complex with the Rawlings logo on top. As in, one of the major baseball gear manufacturers. I guess they knew we were coming and wanted to ensure the trip theme received ample representation everywhere.
Meeting Great Writers, Vol. I
So you probably caught on by now that I listen to the Poscast, aka the podcast Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur do together, though I am something of a late comer to it in the past couple years. I also have read several of Joe’s books, including the last few – The Baseball 100, Why We Love Baseball and Why We Love Football and now Big Fan.
I remember during my many years working on sports copy desks enjoying Joe’s columns that would come across the sports wire, and then he went to work for The Athletic (where so many great writers I’d both read and worked with wound up) so I got to read him regularly there. His initial versions of the essays that turned into The Baseball 100 came out, I believe, during the Covid year and he was churning one out every day. It was appointment reading for me. Ever since then, I’m firmly in the “big fan” camp and have pre-ordered signed versions of the books (not to mention given them as gifts).
Bringing us to the most recent book, the aforementioned Big Fan, I did indeed pre-order it the day they announced it, which was like 7 months before it actually shipped. Then, while we were planning this trip, the guys unveiled their first week of a book tour … and they just happened to be coming to St. Louis on the same day we’d be arriving. Plus, we didn’t have a game that night either. So, of course I bought two tickets to the book event, which came with … another signed copy of the book! (Don’t tell my dad, but he’s getting it for Father’s Day. In fact, I had them sign his name in it at the tour event.) My copy arrived while I was out of town, and as of this writing I’m about a third of the way through it now and thoroughly enjoying it. I hear the book in their voices even though it’s not an audiobook version, and it’s just delightful.
The tour event was also delightful, with baseball historian and academic Gerald Early (also featured in Ken Burns’ Baseball) leading the conversation and Joe and Mike riffing off each other and telling stories for well over an hour. It was, in many ways, like a live Poscast episode. But it works because both are such funny natural story-tellers. Daniel isn’t a Poscast listener, but he definitely enjoyed the conversation.
(I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but I didn’t know Mike’s work outside of the podcast until more recently. I don’t watch a lot of sitcoms, or much network TV at all for that matter. So even though he’s been associated with some of the biggest hits on TV over the past couple decades, I’ve only seen an episode or two of most of them. There’s only so much entertainment a person can consume, right? Anyway, I didn’t even realize until this year that Mike was a co-founder of the sports blog Fire Joe Morgan, which I am absolutely certain I would have enjoyed if I’d known anything about it in its heyday. And I realized even more recently that I had followed Mike on social media through his nom de plume Ken Tremendous and didn’t connect that he was also the guy I liked on the podcast. Thank you for listening to my shameful confessions. Since Da Pope has a tangential link to this trip – we would be going to see the White Sox, his favorite team – we will claim to be a little bit Catholic now.)
At the end of the evening, we were in the final group to make our way through the autograph and photo line. You could really tell how wiped out the guys were from the combination of travel and having to be “on” through so many signatures and quick greetings. I wore my new Monarchs jersey specifically to impress Joe, but I can’t rightly say whether or not he noticed. I did tell him that I’d be meeting up with Molly and the Long Game community in a couple days, and he perked up as he connected the dots (footnote: Joe made a guest appearance on one of Molly’s Saturday Zoom sessions a few weeks earlier and I had mentioned to him that I would be seeing him in St. Louis. I would be taking a big leap to think he remembered that or me, however.) Then the next morning, I got to read Joe’s blog post about the tour event I’d just been to, and it was all surreal and amusing in the best ways.
I couldn’t be more pleased that this worked out and I got to meet these two writers who have given me so much enjoyment over the years. I really think I get more excited to meet writers than athletes. I don’t know what this says about me. I just know that first it was these two, and then Molly a couple days later, and it’s like meeting my heroes and they don’t let you down.
