SCOREBOARD.

Negro Baseball Leagues

The Negro Baseball Leagues, with its quantity of magnificent athletes, colorful characters, and its own brand of history, produced legends that are still being honored nearly forty years after its official demise. "Blackball," as the Negro Baseball Leagues were often called, was a unique experiment in American history. The Negro Leagues emphasized speed, with famous pitching battles, and dramatic showdowns with top teams, but most importantly, it was about skill, quality and athleticism. There are hundreds of books on The Negro Baseball Leagues. Here are some recent greats that the sportsperson you love will love you for this Black History month:

A Game For All Races: An Illustrated History of the Negro Leagues by Henry Metcalfe Metro Books, April 2000, $29.95, ISBN 1-567-99419-9

A sports journalist and a historian, Metcalfe illustrates how baseball became a battlefield in the struggle for equal rights in the United States. Complete with extraordinary photographs of former Negro baseball players, this just may become required reading for all sport fans.

The Negro Leagues Revisited: Conversations with 66 More Baseball Heroes by Brent Kelly McFarland & Company, May 2000, $45.00, ISBN 0-786-40975-8

This is a follow-up to Kelly's previous title, Voices From the Negro Leagues: 52 Standouts of the Period--1924-1960 (McFarland & Company, 1998). Here he gives readers another opportunity to focus on the Negro baseball leagues, with personal photographs and complete player statistics.

Catching Dreams: My Life in the Negro Baseball Leagues by Frazier "Slow" Robinson Syracuse University Press, 1999, $15.75, ISBN 081-560-6583

Robinson, whom we lost in 1997, played professional baseball for nearly four decades beginning in the 1920s. Robinson's book offers an inspiring view into Blackball through the eyes of a catcher. A natural storyteller, Robinson recounts his long career with remarkable detail and gives a personal account of the teams and the Negro League subculture.

A Complete History of The Negro Leagues: 1884 to 1955 by Mark Ribowsky Replica Books, August 2000, $34.95, ISBN 0-735-10095-0

Anything and everything you ever wanted to know about the Negro Leagues can probably be found in this compilation. This book is full of facts and figures for nearly seventy years of black baseball.

AND FOR KIDS:

The Journal of Biddy Owens--The Negro Leagues, Birmingham Alabama, 1948 by Walter Dean Myers Scholastic, April 2001, $10.95, ISBN 0-439-09503-4 (Ages 9-14)

This wonderful addition to the My Name is America series follows the journal of a young bat boy for one of the best teams in the Negro Leagues, the Birmingham Black Barons, and takes young readers on a historical journey through his daily life during one of the most pivotal periods in American history.