Play Harder: The Triumph of Black Baseball in America

An authoritative exploration of how Black Americans have shaped baseball from its emergence after the Civil War to the Negro Leagues and Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier, up to today’s game--by award-winning author Gerald Early in collaboration with the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

No sport has been more associated with America’s sense of itself, with its identity, than baseball. No sport has been so inextricably bound with America’s traditions--with its notions of democracy and fair play--than baseball. And no professional sport in America has been as dramatically connected to social change as Major League Baseball when it became racially integrated the moment Jackie Robinson took the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.

Play Harder comes at a time when the history of Black baseball has become especially relevant--following MLB’s recent recognition of the Negro Leagues as major leagues and the effort to incorporate statistics from the Negro Leagues into those for all players. Before Robinson, as Play Harder shows, Black athletes played baseball as far back as the 1800s even before the establishment of the Negro Leagues. But once founded in 1920, the Negro Leagues gave Black Americans an inroad to baseball that would be enduring and profound. The leagues were an instrument of community building during a time when discrimination separated Black people from all white enterprises, including baseball, and they paved the way for racial integration that Black players hoped would come.

Play Harder showcases the Black stars of the game--those from baseball’s early years such as Moses Fleetwood Walker and Rube Foster; Negro Leagues stars like Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell; Jackie Robinson and those who crossed the color line after him, like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, followed by Frank Robinson and Curt Flood; and the stars who ushered in today’s game, such as Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Barry Bonds, and Ken Griffey, Jr. Playing out against the cultural and political events of 150 years, the story bears witness to the richness of this country’s diversity while remaining clear-eyed about the racial injustice endured by Black Americans. In the end, Play Harder celebrates the triumph of some of baseball’s greatest players and their remarkable contributions to the game we know and love today.

Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis. An award-winning essayist and culture critic, Early has published extensively, winning a National Book Critics Circle Award. He has been a consultant on the Ken Burns documentaries Baseball, Jazz, The Tenth Inning, Unforgivable Blackness, The War, The Roosevelts, and Jackie Robinson. In 2013, President Obama appointed Early to a five-year term at the National Council on the Humanities.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is an independent nonprofit educational institution dedicated to fostering an appreciation of the history of baseball and its impact on our culture by collecting, preserving, exhibiting, and interpreting its collections for a global audience as well as honoring those who have made outstanding contributions to our National Pastime. Opening its doors for the first time on June 12, 1939, the Hall of Fame has stood as the definitive repository of the game’s treasures and as a symbol of the most profound individual honor bestowed on an athlete.