Sam Pollard Considers ‘The League’ More than a Baseball Doc: ‘All of My Films Are About America and Race’

variety.com:

Addie Morfoot Contributor Sam Pollard’s “The League” Is Not Your Typical Baseball Doc. The documentary filmmaker grew up in the 1960s watching the St.

Louis Cardinals, whose roster of players included Black or Latino players including Bill White, Curt Flood, Orlando Cepeda and Lou Brock, but did not know much about the Negro Leagues that existed when the sport was still segregated. “I knew who Jackie Robinson was and that it was because of him Blacks had integrated the Major Leagues in 1947,” says Pollard. “But what I did not know much about in 1964 at the age of 14 was that he had come out of the Negro Leagues and that the Negro Leagues had been home to Black and Latino ballplayers who had to play segregated baseball during the height of the Jim Crow era.” While some segregation in the sport always existed, the color line in baseball was not rigidly enforced until the end of the 19th century.

What Pollard also did not know back in 1964 was that close to 60 years later he would direct “The League,” a documentary about the rich legacy of the Negro Leagues.

Executive produced by Oscar winning doc director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson (“Summer of Soul”), Tariq Trotter (“Descendant”), and produced by RadicalMedia, “The League” recounts the rise and fall of the Negro Leagues and the impact that African American baseball had not only on Major League Baseball as we now know it, but also its impact on the social advancement of America.