A century later, baseball’s Negro Leagues are getting their due in a video game
Marvin Gaye’s 1971 masterpiece, What’s Going On, closes on a somber note with “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).” For a song with the word “holler” in its title, the feel is subdued; it’s a lament about America’s impoverished urban cores and about socioeconomic issues affecting communities of color. The lyrics are spare, with Gaye singing in terse phrases, but the language is plain and the message impossible to miss: Crime is / increasing / Trigger-happy / policing.
It’s perhaps fitting that a song about the consequences of segregation helped the developers of MLB The Show 23, which launches March 28, figure out how to tell the story of the Negro Leagues. This year’s new mode, Storylines, brings the extraordinary but little-known history of pre-integration Black baseball into the video game for the first time.
The makers of MLB The Show could’ve, say, taken some Negro League stars and just thrown them into the game’s Diamond Dynasty mode. But at a time when the Negro Leagues are finally getting their due, a century after the founding of the first professional league for Black ballplayers, that kind of offering wouldn’t have done justice to their legacy.
“We needed to figure out: How do we, for a participatory medium, educate our player base on the Negro Leagues, and who these players were, in an appropriate manner for an [all-ages] game?” Ramone Russell, the public face of MLB The Show developer SIE San Diego Studio, told Polygon during a presentation of Storylines last week.
Teaming up with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, the developers settled on a hybrid approach. The Storylines mode comprises sequences of playable “moments” for eight Negro League greats, and those segments are
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