Let one of baseball’s best storytellers and historians educate the masses every week
Bob Kendrick is one of baseball’s best storytellers bar none.
In a sport as romanticized as baseball, with as many gifted writers and broadcasters who’ve helped elevate it’s mythos, Kendrick stands as one of the undeniable pillars.
On Thursday night, during MLB’s tribute game to the Negro Leagues at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, fans who’ve never even heard Kendrick’s name before learned what makes him so compelling.
From the bottom of the sixth inning between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals to the bottom of the eighth, there was hardly any play-by-play on the Fox broadcast. Just Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, holding court, as cool as ever, talking about the history of Negro Leagues, the importance of Black baseball players to America and the harsh realities behind some of the most memorable names in the sport.
It was arguably the best 30 minutes of baseball we’ll get all year and an absolute treat for fans of the game or Americana, in general. You cannot tell the history of this country without baseball. You cannot tell the history of baseball without the Negro Leagues. You cannot find anyone better to educate today’s audience about both than Kendrick.
In a sport where one of the best ways to enjoy it is to simply remember some guys, Kendrick is a holy grail of entertainment.
You may not have the ability to listen to all 30 minutes of his stay in the booth on Thursday — though I implore you to make the time — but take this story about Satchel Paige and Willie Mays as a small excerpt of what it was like to listen to Kendrick wax poetic over the natural sounds of the game:
Baseball lore like this is best digested audibly and when Kendrick is the one orating you feel like you’re in the stands watching the game with him.
Most baseball fans know about Cool Papa Bell from Satchel Paige’s apocryphal tale of the time Bell knocked a line drive off him that hit Bell as he slid into second. When Kendrick talks about Bell, he goes much further, introducing you to the man behind the myth — then making him seem even larger than before:
Stories like these are no longer relegated to Negro Leagues history. They are Major League Baseball history.
Less than a month ago, MLB integrated Negro Leagues statistics into the official record books, which is how Josh Gibson ended up as the sport’s all-time leader in batting average (.372) and OPS (1.177) seven decades after his death.
But shame on us if we take these stats and leave behind the stories that accompany them—as Reggie Jackson painfully and vitally extolled the necessity of sharing on Fox’s pregame show.
At the beginning of his 30 minutes in the booth, Kendrick explained that Negro Leagues Baseball Museum co-founder Buck O’Neil — a former Negro Leagues player and manager himself before becoming the first Black coach in MLB history — committed to developing the museum in no uncertain terms.
“So that we would be remembered,” Kendrick said. “[Buck] did not want them to be forgotten, not for what they just gave the game of baseball, but more importantly what they gave this country.”
If Major League Baseball wants to continue to honor the Negro Leagues the way its story deserves to be told, then let Kendrick do it. Give him a platform on Sunday Night Baseball or other national broadcasts.
It shouldn’t be Kendrick’s job to explain to every baseball fan the pain and suffering this game helped perpetuate long before Jackie Robinson bulldozed those barriers. But Kendrick is also among the best we’ve got to do so.
Let Americans everywhere feel the time-warping sensation of learning about the game from its most knowledgeable storytellers. Play-by-play can wait when the history lessons are this gripping.
As more and more fans tuned into the game during Kendrick’s segment, it became abundantly clear how much of an appetite there is for his trove of tales.
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