June 2, 2025
‘Leaders & Innovators’ spotlights Black managers who led teams in the Negro Leagues.
Bob Kendrick, president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and a key figure behind MLB The Show video game’s Storylines mode, has unveiled a new exhibit, “Leaders & Innovators,” spotlighting the Black managers who led teams in the Negro Leagues.
In a February press release announcing the exhibit, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum noted that while legendary figures like Rube Foster — the architect of the Negro Leagues — and Buck O’Neil — a mentor to Kendrick and key figure in the museum’s founding — were remarkable managers, both were inducted into Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame as contributors rather than for their managerial achievements. The exhibit runs from April 25 through the end of the World Series.
According to Andscape, Kendrick’s new exhibit, unveiled on May 24, is an effort to address what Kendrick believes was an oversight when Major League Baseball integrated the statistics of the Negro Leagues in a long overdue but anticipated move, which led to the enshrining of Bob Gibson, Oscar Charleston, and others among baseball’s all-time stat kings.
“In the Negro Leagues, we used to run an entire baseball enterprise,” Kendrick told the outlet. “You had these brilliant tacticians who just never got an opportunity in the majors. The focus has always been on the players. But those managerial minds, those executives in the Negro Leagues, they didn’t get an opportunity to move into Major League Baseball.”
Kendrick’s point is underscored by the fact that Major League Baseball didn’t see its first Black manager until April 8, 1975, when Frank Robinson took the helm. Fittingly, it was the same franchise — then known as the Cleveland Indians — that had broken the American League’s color barrier nearly three decades earlier by signing Larry Doby in 1947.
According to two of the foremost experts in Black baseball, Phil Dixon and Larry Lester, by that time, it was clear that Black players could play, but some of the old stereotypes that still surface in today’s discussions about Black quarterbacks for example, were still present. There were, incredibly, still questions about whether or not Black players would make good managers, despite Negro Leagues players doing it, sometimes while also playing, for decades.
“Everybody knew guys like Frank Robinson could play,” Dixon told the outlet. “They’d been playing successfully for a long time. But could they lead? They managed in the Negro Leagues, but they just couldn’t get that manager’s job in the majors.”
Lester appeared to concur with Dixon’s estimation of events, remarking how often he is met with questions of wins and losses where it concerns Black managers or administrators pre-integration.
“Baseball is statistically driven,” Lester told Andscape. “When I try to promote their cases, I hear: ‘What was his won/loss record?’ People want to look at numbers, but numbers don’t tell you everything.”
It is this landscape that Kendrick and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum’s exhibit is placing into relief with the exhibit honoring Black baseball managers, who still find themselves underrepresented and disadvantaged some 50 years after Robinson’s historic debut.
According to former MLB player Curtis Granderson, the decision not to hire Black coaches or managers by front office brass is puzzling.
“There are a lot of Black coaches I’ve been around in the game that had coaching experience — had managerial experience [at other levels], not just coaching experience — and aren’t interviewed, aren’t even in the final three, but you just keep scratching your head,” Granderson told Global Sports Matters in 2022.
Granderson continued, “You’ll see it’s not record-wise, because you’ll see other managers with bad records get another managerial job. It’s not experience, because you’ll see someone that had a similar amount of experience get another managerial job. To echo the point, it’s not off-field issues, [because] you’ll see managers who have had scandals and issues get another managerial job that are not Black.”
As Kendrick stated in the press release, “It was 28 years after Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier before Frank Robinson broke through as the major’s first Black manager when there were a plethora of great baseball strategists, tacticians and superb leaders who were never given a chance to assume those roles. This is our opportunity to shine a brighter light on them with hopes that this heightened awareness will eventually lead to Negro League managers being inducted into the Hall of Fame and that it will serve as a tool of inspiration for more people of color to pursue managerial roles in our game.”
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