Alexander, Kwame. Black Star. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. 2024. 

"She dreamed of the color purple / and diamond fields / spicy groves and apple trees" 

Set during the Jim Crow/Great Migration era, Alexander's novel-in-verse (the second in his Door of No Return series) recasts how we know what we know about baseball behind the color line from the perspective of Charlene (Charley), who dreams of becoming "the first girl pitcher to play professional." 

Abdurraqib, Hanif. "This Is a Completely True Story about Ken Griffey, Jr." Twelfth House.

"I never learned to swing anything other than fists & only so I never came home stained and swollen from the lessons another boy learned. Ken Griffy, Jr. leans over the plate & I wonder what the ball looks like as it gets close. If it slowly turns into a face."

This poem weaves in and out of the speaker's personal memories of being taught by his father how to defend oneself in a country riven by anti-black racism and the memory of seeing Ken Griffy, Jr. The speaker imagines that Griffy has experienced something similar, and at the plate sees not a baseball hurtling toward him but instead a signifier of white supremacy.  

Allen, Samuel (Paul Vesey). "To Satch." 

"I’m gonna reach up and grab me a handfulla stars / Swing out my long lean leg / And whip three hot strikes burnin' down the heavens" 

Allen's 1962 poem celebrates the larger-than-life pitcher Satchel Paige and his trademark wind-up and delivery.

Beckham, Berry. Runner Mack. 1972. Howard University Press, 1983.

“…yes! He dropped his bat and began run around the bases. He had cracked the top of the dome.”

The first baseball novel by an African American and nominated for a 1972 National Book Award, Runner Mack is a surrealist tale about the prodigiously talented Henry Adams, who hits a dome-shattering home run at his Major League tryout for the Stars. However, Adams does not make the team, and he spends the remainder of the novel hoping in vain that he will one day play professional baseball, and achieve the American dream for which the game purportedly stands. Henry is not a prophetic guide to America’s racial inequities and hypocrisies. Rather, he is an avatar for exposing the gaps and fissures in the rhetoric of a broad spectrum of myths and ideologies.

Begnal, Michael S. The Muddy Banks. 2016. Ghost City Press. 

"holding a giant bat and two suitcases: / he's there / in your skull, / bashing things"--"At the Grave of Josh Gibson" 

This rich and innovative chapbook--a sort of extended homage to the city of Pittsburgh--includes two tributes to Josh Gibson: "At the Grave of Josh Gibson" and "For Josh Gibson."  

Brashler, William. The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings. 1973. University of Illinois Press, 1993.

“With all this shit we been through, only thing makes any difference is that I was born too quick.”

Brashler’s novel tells the story of a black barnstorming ball club in 1939, several years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. James Earl Jones, Billy Dee Williams, and Richard Prior star in the 1976 filmic adaptation directed by John Badham.

Butler, Andrew. "Bob Gibson Strikes Out 17." Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, vol. 32, no. 2, 2015, pp. 32-35 

"his stadium-lit body / casts a timeless night" 

This poem captures each of Bob Gibson's astounding seventeen strike outs in Game 1 of the 1968 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers. Gibson still holds a World Series record for his performance. 

Charyn, Jerome.  The Seventh Babe. Arbor House, 1979. 

“Ragland, Ragland

Our orphan’s the best

No one can beat us

No one at all,

With our seventh Babe.” 

Charyn’s The Seventh Babe tells the story of surprise baseball prodigy Cedric Tannehill, who forsakes a profitable life of business and leisure for his only true love: baseball. Though he is  a walk-on success for the Boston Red Sox, Rags is kicked off the team for false allegations of gambling.  He then joins the Cincinnati Colored Giants, beginning a decades-long barnstorming adventure. By the end of the novel, Rags is in his seventies and integration and the subsequent demise of the Negro Leagues have meant that the Colored Giants have “gone half white” (342).

Clifton, Lucille. "Jackie Robinson." American Sports Poems. Eds. R.R. Kundson and May Swenson. New York: Orchard Books, 1988. 7.

"ran against walls

without breaking.

in night games

was not foul

but, brave as a hit

over whitestone fences,

entered the conquering dark" 

This seven-line poem honors Robinson's steadfast resilience, as well as his refusal to allow white supremacists to stymie the progress that his entry into the Major Leagues portended.

Craig, John. Chappie and Me: An Autobiographical Novel. Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1979.

“In essence, this is a true story.”

Chappie and Me: An Autobiographical Novel is Canadian author John Craig’s fictionalized account of his brainstorming trek through southern Canada and the Midwestern U.S. with (George) Chappie Johnson.  Joe Griffin (Craig’s persona) wears a blackface disguise in order to play for Johnson and his Colored All Stars. Craig attempts to take his then-contemporary readers (presumably white) behind what W. E. B. DuBois famously described as “the veil” of African American life. 

Dawes, Kwame. City of Bones: A Testament. Triquarterly Books, 2017. 

"when the soft sweet spot finds the ball / rotating before me, as if charmed, / and when it lifts and is carried / beyond us all, there is a leap of the heart, / the reassurance we all must feel / to see a man's body working as it ought." 

--"Hitter"

Kwame Dawes's City of Bones is not strictly a collection of baseball poems. Instead it is a deeply moving lyrical engagement with the plays of August Wilson and perhaps especially his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Fences. The ex-Negro League slugger Troy Maxson's feats at the plate and trials and tribulations at home are recast in lyrical vignettes with testimony from his family members and his beloved friend, Jim Bono. As with the play, Dawes's poems are often tragicomic, capturing the immense struggles endured and overcome by men like Troy and the moments of levity that tempered them. As Dawes writes in "Plot: for Troy Maxson," "This is the way a story is told.  All we have / are the quick sparks of laughter along the way." 

Dent, Tom. “For Cool Papa Bell.” Blue Lights and River Songs. Lotus Press, 1982. 

“you must have been a streak of black gold” 

Dent's ode to Cool Papa Bell expresses both admiration and frustration with the lack of recognition this phenomenal player received during the height of his career. 

Diamond, Lydia. Toni Stone (off-Broadway play), opened in 2019. 

Diamond's play dramatizes Stone's life from her childhood love of baseball, which was strongly discouraged by her parents but spurred on by her priest, to her eventual breaking of the gender line in professional Black baseball when she started for the Indianapolis Clowns. The play also dramatizes the gender discrimination that dogged Stone's career and, importantly, draws renewed attention to this under-represented but critically important athlete. 

Everett, Percival. Suder. Louisiana University Press, 1983.

“Now, about this slump of yours. You know, it wasn’t but a few years ago that you blacks was allowed in this league. The way you been playing lately, they might kick you all out.”

Percival Everett’s Suder tells the story of struggling third baseman Craig Suder, who is constantly reminded that only his exemplary performance will justify his and other African Americans’ presence on the big league stage. When he is ordered to take a mid-season rest, the novel follows Suder on a series of semi-comic adventures, flashing back at key moments to his memories of his complicated childhood.

Fried, Gabriel, editor. Heart of the Order: Baseball Poems. Persea Books, 2014. 

This anthology offers a rich and varied selection, including several black baseball poetry gems. 

Holiday, Harmony. Negro League Baseball. Fence Books, 2011. 

“Overcome with testimony is one way   home (run), is another way to blame   only / another name for one type of company   creaking porches   kool-aid pitchers, / typical laughter applied over a lack and through a metal bat hitting a hollow ball.” 

In perhaps the most innovative riff on Negro Leagues history to date, Holiday uses black baseball as a touchstone to ruminate on a wide range of personal, archival, and sociocultural memories. 

Hovrath, Brooke, and Tim Wiles, editors. Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems. Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

A contemporary anthology of baseball poetry, Line Drives includes exceptionally rich black baseball poems such as Yusef Kommunyaka’s “Glory," Michael S. Harper's "Archives," and Quincy Troupe's "Poem for My Father." 

Jackson-Brown, Angela. When Stars Rain Down. HarperCollins, 2021. 

"There ain't a white player who can outpitch Satchel Paige or outhit Josh Gibson, or any of our local boys for that matter. Naw, they come here to see what real baseball looks like." 

In this stunning historical novel, Jackson-Brown tells the coming-of-age story of Opal Pruitt, who falls in love with a Cedric Perkins, a pitching prospect for Satchel Paige's all-star team. Paige and his first wife, Janet, make two key appearances in the novel. When Cedric's arm is permanently injured in a tragic act of anti-Black violence, Paige offers Cedric a job as a pitching coach.  

James, C. L. R. 1963. Beyond a Boundary. Duke University Press, 2013.

“West Indians crowding to Tests [national matches] bring with them the whole past history and future hopes of the islands.”

Trinidiadian cricketer C. L. R. James’s influential memoir Beyond a Boundary explores the role of a British national sport—cricket— in helping black and brown subjects of British colonialism to establish self-government and challenge British colonial ideologies. Beyond a Boundary provides a useful comparison to black baseball literature.

Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. Alfred A. Knopf, 1930. 

"The Negro player could not front the forces against him in organized baseball; so he was compelled to organize for himself."

Not only was Johnson an iconic architect of the New Negro Renaissance, he was a former pitcher famous for his curve ball, a pitch he learned from the Cuban Giants ("the crack Negro professional team of New York), as he reports in his autobiography Along the Way. In Johnson's classic history of New York, Black Manhattan, which is designed to "give a cut-back in projecting a picture of Negro Harlem" (vii), he describes black attempts to gain a foothold in the sporting arena, placing more hope "in racing and pugilism" (62) than in baseball. 

Jones, Michael A. Josh: The Black Babe Ruth. 2017.

Set in the 1940s, Jones's play centralizes the Negro League icon Josh Gibson, particularly his Major League dreams deferred and his friendship with the similarly iconic pitcher Satchel Paige.  

King, Kevin. All the Stars Came Out That Night. Plume, 2005.

“Ain’t nothin’ fair about life…You want fairness, you go to Russia. But if you want to play baseball, you stay here in Pittsburgh. Ain’t nothin’ fair here, and nothin’ free.”

All The Stars Came Out That Night pivots around the planning and execution of “the greatest game ever played”—a fictionalized match-up between Babe Ruth, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Dizzie Dean, as well as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, and Cool Papa Bell. The novel sheds light on the microhistories of baseball behind the color line, especially the interracial rivalries not widely reported when the national pastime was segregated. 

Keene, John. "Jackie Robinson in Sportsmen's Park, 1949." Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers. Ed. Kevin Young. Perennial, 2000. 116-117. 

"Here comes / a bullet: / I dare you / to catch it"

Keene's persona poem draws attention to the racism that Robinson continued to endure two years after his watershed debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Keene's poignant images of Robinson at the plate likewise demonstrate the high stakes of every at-bat, which the poet, riffing on the player's number 42, likens to battles over racial discrimination that Robinson fought within the WWII-era U.S. Army. 

Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Glory." Magic City. Wesleyan UP, 1992, pp. 15.  

“A stolen base or homerun / Would help another man / Survive the week”

This beautiful poem describes the significance of baseball for the working-class men and women who played Sunday pick-up games behind the color line. 

Mansbach, Adam. Angry Black White Boy or, The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay. Broadway Books, 2005.

“Sometimes a man just has to run.”

Mansbach interweaves the tale of the first and last nineteenth-century Major League player of African descent, Moses Fleetwood (“Fleet”) Walker, and Macon Detornay’s late-twentieth-century crusade to end white supremacy. Moving between Walker’s autobiographical reminiscences about being violently chased off professional baseball fields by white supremacists such as Hall-of-Famer Adrian Constantine (“Cap”) Anson and Macon’s own misguided efforts to atone for the sins of white America, Mansbach suggests that racial wounds festering during the late nineteenth century were never properly sutured or healed. 

McBride, James. Deacon King Kong. Riverhead Books, 2020.

"Cool Papa Bell, Golly Honey Gibson, Smooth Rube Foster, Bullet Rogan, guys who knocked the ball five hundred feet high into the hot August air at some ballpark far away down south someplace, the stories soaring high over their heads..."  

Deacon King Kong is one of the greatest contemporary baseball novels. While singing the praises of the Negro Leagues (1920-1940) and sipping on the titular moonshine King Kong, Sportcoat attempts to instill the love of baseball in the neighborhood children in the housing projects where he resides. When the most talented of his players--Deems--chooses to give up baseball for slinging drugs, an inebriated Sportcoat shoots him. This vividly comic novel calls attention to current tensions between collectivism and individualism with baseball as the metaphorical field on which they foment. 

Miller, E. Ethelbert. When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery. City Point Press, 2021. 

"Control your love like Satchel Paige / If you have to resuscitate then hesitate." 

Miller begins this collection with two epigraphs by the iconic pitchers Satchel Paige and Tommy John (who is also referenced in the collection’s title). The coupling of these players and especially Paige’s storied wit sets both the tone and the links between past and present that characterize the collection as a whole. Moreover, this collection works as a sequel of sorts to Miller’s 2018 collection, If God Invented Baseball, which entangles the arc of the poet’s lifetime with developments in baseball across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Similarly, in When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery, baseball is an evocative vehicle for documenting personal and sociocultural memories, including about the tumultuous present characterized by the COVID-19 pandemic, protests against anti-Black violence, and a watershed U.S. Presidential election.

---. If God Invented Baseball. City Point Press, 2018. 

"Those who of us who heard Frederick Douglass

learned to step off first base and get a lead. 

He taught us how to avoid the pickoff and rundown. 

His hair was filled with beautiful things."

--"Fly Balls and Other Beautiful Things" 

If God Invented Baseball a particularly moving collection that lyrically documents both baseball history and the game as a metaphor for a range of emotional experiences. There are poetic homages to Bob Gibson, Vida Blue, Dusty Baker, Barry Bonds, Sandy Koufax, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pumpsie Green, among several others. In the Preface, Miller extols the virtues of the game we love: "There is no future without baseball. There is no past either. . . . Here are poems that celebrate and interpret the game. They are for everyone who has experienced the magic released when three holy things come together: bat, ball and glove."

Morrison, Toni. Jazz. Plume, 1992. 

"He's as argumentative as ever, but happier because riding trains he gets to see Negroes play baseball 'in the flesh and on the lot, goddamnit.' It tickles him that whitepeople are scared to compete with Negroes fair and square."

Although black baseball is only referenced a few times in this extraordinary novel (pgs. 204, 206, 216), Morrison captures the pride and solidarity that the Negro Leagues fostered. 

Mosby, George, Jr. “To Josh Gibson (Legendary Slugger of the Old Negro Baseball League).” In Search of Color Everywhere: A Collection of African-American Poetry, editor E. Ethelbert Miller. Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1993, pp. 235.

“i’ve heard how you blasted the hell out of bullets”

Mosby's tribute to Gibson lauds his prowess at the plate and suggests that he, rather than Babe Ruth, was the greatest slugger of all time. 

Mosby, George, Jr. “Tribute to a Giant: Willie Mays." Phoebe vol. 8, no. 1 (1978). 

“there was no misunderstanding his giantness”

Mosby’s homage to Mays is a beautiful poem that captures a child’s wonder at the miracles Mays performed on the field. 

Naylor, Gloria. Bailey’s Café. Vintage, 1992.  

"It leaves me confused, why these newspapermen look back at Pop’s [Lloyd] career and call him the Black Honus Wagner; all things being equal—or in this case unequal—the highest compliment to pay the Flying Dutchman [Honus Wagner] is to call him the White Pop Lloyd."

Set in 1948, Bailey’s Café troubles standard readings of Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers as a celebratory mark of racial progress. Instead, Naylor advances a counternarrative that celebrates the glory of black baseball and questions the costs of integration for black players and the community at large. 

Neugeboren, Jay. Sam's Legacy. Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974.

“I would have only cast greater doubt on who I was; I would have succeeded, that is, not for those things which made me one of my brothers, but for those things that set me apart from them.”

At the outset of Sam’s Legacy, Sam is a professional gambler down on his luck and struggling to reconcile with his father, Ben, before he leaves for California. Sam then encounters his father’s childhood friend, Negro League Star pitcher, Mason Tidewater, whose autobiographical My Life and Death in the Negro American Baseball League: A Slave Narrative provides Sam, and by extension, readers, access to the lived experience of the Negro Leagues. Tidewater’s narrative (which dramatizes his affair with Babe Ruth) interpolates the story of Sam’s own racial and emotional awakening. Ultimately, this novel questions how we know what we know about baseball and its abiding myths. 

Rutkoff, Peter M. Shadow Ball: A Novel of Baseball and Chicago. McFarland, 2001.

“Rube Foster finds Pop [Lloyd] where he knew he would—back at their old park, taking off his uniform. Pop tells Foster, ‘Hey. It don’ matter, not at all. They like this, these white folks. Promise you stuff. Don’t deliver. Happen all the time.”  

Rutkoff’s Shadow Ball tells the story of three men who, in 1919, decide that the Chicago White Sox will be the first team in the Major Leagues to sign a black player. Those three men are Rube Foster, the African American owner of the Chicago American Giants, Charles Comiskey, the owner of the White Sox, and their silent liaison, Sam Weiss. Their plans are suddenly complicated when race riots erupt in Chicago—riots witnessed by a blues singer from Mississippi, Kid Douglas.

Schmidt, Edward. Mr. Rickey Calls a Meeting. S. French, 1989.

“I’m the only one who knows this particular story. People mostly just sit and talk.”

Narrated by a retired African American bellhop reminiscing about his career, Edward Schmidt’s 1989 play tells the story of a fictionalized meeting between four major black athletes to break the color barrier (Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, Paul Robeson, and Bill Robinson) with Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey has decided to offer Robinson a position with the Dodgers, and he has gathered all four figures together in the hopes that they will help him negotiating the inevitable controversies the move will generate. Robeson is especially skeptical about Rickey’s motives, and worries about the fate about the Negro Leagues once key black players are moved to the Major Leagues.

Sonenberg, Daniel and Daniel Nester, Libretto to The Summer King. 2017.

The first opera to revivify black baseball, The Summer King centralizes the Negro League slugger Josh Gibson, thematizing his playing days in the Negro Leagues as well as in Mexico playing for the Veracruz Azules. The robust supporting characters include his wife Helen, who dies in childbirth, his girlfriend Grace, and teammates such as Sam Bankhead and Cool Papa Bell. 

Soos, Troy. Hanging Curve. Kensington Books, 1999.

“Another player from that April game in East St. Louis dominated the action: Cool Papa Bell, the Stars starting pitcher. He tripled and scored in the first inning, while holding our team hitless.”

The sixth book of Troy Soos’s mystery series finds utility pitcher and amateur sleuth Mickey Rawlings investigating the brutal lynching of the Negro East St. Louis Cubs’ pitcher following a big win. Rawlings attempts to track down the killer in hopes of preventing a repeat of the 1971 race riots. Throughout his investigation, Rawlings comes in contact with several black baseball players, fictional and historical, including James “Cool Papa” Bell. 

Troupe, Quincy. "Poem for My Father." Avalanche. Coffee House Press, 1996, pg. 80-82. 

“father, it was an honor to be there, in the dugout with you / the glory of great black men swinging their lives as bats / at tiny white balls burning in at unbelievable speeds” 

This is a poignant ode to Troupe's father, the great Negro Leagues catcher, Quincy T. Trouppe, Sr. 

Webb, Charles Harper. "Shadow Ball." Shadow Ball: New and Selected Poems. U of Pittsburgh P, 2009. 

"Those Negro League All-Stars—Oscar Charleston, Willie Wells, / Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bell—who couldn't stay in white hotels, eat in white restaurants, or play in the so-called / Major Leagues, but who apparently enjoyed life anyway, / can be forgiven if they laugh in their all-black graveyards/ to see shadows reach out black gloves and grab us all"

Webb's poem invokes the Negro League warm-up antic of "shadow ball," whereby players whirled an invisible ball around the field with such vigor and panache that the crowds thought it was real, to elucidate the stark realities of racial discrimination. 

Wilson, August. Fences. 1985. Three Plays: August Wilson. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991, pp.95-196.

“What you talking about Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson wasn’t nobody. I’m talking about if you could play ball then they ought to have let you play.”

Wilson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning play Fences is perhaps the most famous work about black baseball published to date. Setting the play in the post-Jackie Robinson era—beginning in 1957, the year Robinson retired, and concluding in 1965, the year the landmark Voting Rights Act was passed—Fences chronicles the pains and pleasures of back baseball through the fictionalized ex-Negro League slugger Troy Maxson who, by his own and other’s accounts, was enormously talented but unable (like all black players of his era) to play on a Major League stage.

 Winegardner, Mark. The Veracruz Blues. Penguin, 1996.

“Us guys who jumped to Mexico, we should have got medals…We should have been called to White House for improving international relations. As for showing the bloodsuckers who run baseball that it wouldn’t kill ’em to have the best baseball players—black, white, brown, or green—out there on the field.”

The Veracruz Blues tells the story of the so-called Mexican League raids during the 1946 baseball season, when Mexican businessman Jorge Pasquel attended to create a professional baseball enterprise to rival the Major Leagues by persuading American players (black and white) to join him south of the border. Winegardner shows the freedom that black players experienced in a country in which they were not only treated equally but as heroes. In the process, Winegardner unravels romanticized notions of baseball as an athletic manifestation of American meritocracy.

Young, Kevin. Brown. Knopf, 2018.

"Your folded jersey said it

best: Brave. A bounty

on your head, last name a prophet's,

first a king, you kept swinging

that hammer, Bad Henry, even after

the threats fell like hail."

"Open Letter to Hank Aaron"

This gem of a collection has much to offer the baseball poetry fan (not to mention aficionados of boxing, tennis, basketball, and even dodgeball literature).  

Young, Kevin. "Monarchs." To Repel Ghosts: The Remix. Knopf, 2005. 

"Before Baird sold the franchise in 1955, he sold

8 Monarchs to the majors & 4 to the minors. 

The details of the transactions not reported." 

Included in his epic-length riff on the life and art of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, Young's "Monarchs" primarily consists of Kansas City Monarchs rosters from 1920 through 1945.