KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A chicken-wire fence provides an introduction to a tour through the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, and the facility’s president and guide, Bob Kendrick, uses it both literally and metaphorically.
It symbolically separates visitors from the bronze statues comprising the Field of Legends, and Kendrick twists his fingers into the fence as his opening monologue begins maybe five feet from a statue of catcher Josh Gibson.
“The truth,” Kendrick refers to him.
Five years ago, he allowed me to tag along for more than a half-dozen of these jaunts through the museum, with present-day major-league players the intended audience. That’s where his tours always begin, and thus too where my story began.
His description of Gibson felt fitting then.
Fitting now, too.
Major League Baseball announced plans to blend Negro Leagues statistics into its record book, and no player’s proverbial on-paper resume will benefit more than Gibson, who now owns a handful of them, most notably career and single-season average.
“It gives me a little fuel,” Kendrick says, “in some of these stories that I get to share.”
It’s a pretty cool development — and, man, bless those who spent more than three years (and counting) digging through newspapers and other relics in search of the box scores to make it happen. Truly commendable work.
For the rest of us: Debating how those statistics will now fit or, worse, how they should fit, into baseball’s history is missing the point.
The story of Negro Leagues has never been about the numbers.
Not then.
Still not today.
It’s about the story. Or stories, I should say, because Kendrick never seems to run out of them. And this is yet another step to offering them a wider audience.
A man better suited for his place of employment than anyone you will meet, Kendrick rekindles the history of the Negro Leagues to anyone willing to listen — to players past and present, to civil rights leaders or to John and Jane from down the block. In a tour setting, he is a one-man show who entertains as he educates, the inspiration of Buck O’Neil who brings to life a century-old tale.
