A new game experience featuring the legends of baseball’s Negro Leagues is coming to MLB The Show 23, in partnership with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.
The Show made the announcement in a Twitter video this morning, starring Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick, highlighting the stories of the individual stars who comprised the Negro Leagues for decades before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947.
“The story of the Negro Leagues is not an African American story, it is an All-American story,” Kendrick said. “You see, it’s the kind of story that we as Americans have typically embraced. Because it’s a story about pride, passion, perseverance, determination, the refusal to accept the notion that you’re unfit to do anything.”
Due to segregation laws in the United States at the time, black athletes were not allowed to play in Major League Baseball. So the Negro Leagues were founded, featuring some of the best players to ever step on a baseball diamond.
Kendrick says that the Negro Leagues were “a wonderful story of triumph and conquest” that rose out of the “sorrowful” circumstances of segregation, “a horrible chapter in this country’s history.”
The video teased the inclusion of Negro Leagues legends such as Jackie Robinson, Buck O’Neil, Hank Thompson, Hilton Smith, John Donaldson, Satchel Paige, Rube Foster, and Martin Dihigo. They will likely be featured as playable cards in Diamond Dynasty on top of playable content in “Storylines: The Negro Leagues – Season One.”
MLB The Show 23 launches on March 28.
