The American obsession with baseball, our national pastime, involves more than home runs and World Series winners. It is an obsession with narrative as well as statistics, all in the pursuit of defining exceptionalism. Many diehard baseball fans can tell you who led RBIs in the American League in a given year, while also possessing a sense of doom or inevitability about their favorite team. That kind of obsession is also present in The League, Sam Pollard’s documentary about the Negro Leagues that existed before the Major League Baseball widely accepted integration. Despite all the good intentions, or maybe because of them, Pollard’s film has a rote, borderline slovenly approach to the subject it cannot overcome. It is less documentary feature and more aggrandized book report.
Pollard should be a natural fit for the material. He previously worked as editor with Spike Lee, cutting vital films like Bamboozled and Clockers. His last film was MLK/FBI, a documentary that expertly weaves archival footage and talking heads to create a churning, palpable sense of anger. By comparison, The League abandons any sense of momentum and urgency for something more meandering. There is no denying the film is impeccably researched, covering several iterations of the Negro Leagues and how they dovetail with major events in American History, like the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision and America’s involvement in the two World Wars. The desire to cover a lot of material, to go over a lot of history, ultimately puts the film in a strange place. A better version would either be much more detailed and longer, or breezy and half the runtime.
A great example of this dynamic is when the talking heads, a mix of academics and journalists, discuss Rube Foster, an influential player who would go on to manage and own the Chicago American Giants. Foster was instrumental in changing how the game was played: unlike the white league that focused more on home runs and “respectable” play, Foster developed a fast playstyle that relied on dynamic fielding and stolen bases. All the talking heads repeat these essential points, as if Pollard prioritizes giving his interviewees an equal say, rather than pushing the narrative forward. If the film had an opportunity to drill deeper into Foster’s life, maybe an additional story that better connects him to the Negro League’s legacy, it would merit a long section devoted to him. In his edit, however, Pollard mostly opts for summary-level snippets, a Wikipedia-style approach to history that should be anathema to this kind of project.
In formal terms, The League was heavily influenced by Ken Burns, and his lengthy documentary miniseries Baseball in particular. Pollard pulls music from the period, mostly tasteful jazz, and overlays it with pans over still photographs – all in a hope to suggest some kind of motion. There is also some archival video footage and animation, although they do not add much liveliness to the how The League plods along. Now the Ken Burns approach is easily imitable, and not just because many of his classic PBS docs are mammoth undertakings, which is to say The League confirms the Burns approach is hard to imitate well. Like the aforementioned Baseball and The Civil War, Burns benefits from an exhaustive approach.
Pollard does not have Burns’ access to a luxurious runtime – The League is under two hours – and seemingly has little access to intriguing primary documents as well. In an indictive example, he returns to a diary from a Negro League Umpire, who in effect serves as a firsthand observer of this story. Not only does the voice actor give a flat performance as the umpire, but the diary entries themselves do little to stir the imagination. The talking heads ultimately prove to be more engaging, although only up to a point because they regularly sacrifice context for detail.
There are several intriguing moments in the The League that deserve more scrutiny. Many Negro League owners were screwed by integration, insofar that white owners signing black players offered them no compensation. Would that create any kind of resentment in the community? Of course not, says The League, which is tasteful to a fault. One consistent throughline is how the League, especially in comparison to its white counterparts, had a bigger overall interest in elevating the Black community. That is certainly true, and yet that kind overall arc – virtuous, athletic, resourceful – leaves little room for the kind of forceful personalities and flamboyant anecdotes that can make history feel alive. Many documentaries leave their audiences yearning to learn more about their subject. The League certainly does that, just not in the way Pollard may have intended.
photo credit: African American baseball players from Morris Brown College Atlanta © Library of Congress. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
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