MLB The Show 23 Spotlights the history of the Negro Leagues for a new generation

gamedeveloper.com:

For years, Sony’s MLB The Show franchise has been a benchmark not only for baseball video games, but sports games in general. This year’s MLB The Show 23 is doing something it’s never done before, telling the story of Negro Leagues in a new mode called “Storylines.”

The Negro Leagues are an important piece of baseball history and American history. Coming into being around 1920, the Negro Leagues were created to give Black baseball players a space to play ball professionally when they were disallowed from playing in the MLB due to segregation. 

While the work of the Black and Latino players in the Negro Leagues is paramount to the success of baseball as a sport, their histories have seldom been celebrated and acknowledged in a major way until recently .

Game Developer sat down with Ramone Russell, the product development communications brand strategist for MLB The Show  to learn more about how they went about recreating this important moment in American history in this year’s entry in the franchise.

“ The Negro Leagues Storylines is a mode that we've wanted to do for a long time, but could never figure out the right way to do it,” Russell explains. “It was very important to me as a Black man, and for San Diego Studios that we didn’t just throw the athletes from the Negro Leagues into the games.” 

Russell firmly believed in the importance of showcasing the history of the Negro Leagues, but he also knew that he and the team would have to educate players on why this time period in American history was vital to understanding baseball today. 

“The vast majority of our player base wouldn’t know who Satchel Page or Buck O’Neil are, and they're definitely not going to know Martin Taheebo and John Wesley