The Yankees should follow Somerset’s example in honoring the Negro Leagues

On Friday, August 30th, I took a trip to TD Bank Ballpark in Bridgewater, New Jersey to watch the Somerset Patriots.

On most occasions in which I make the roughly half-hour drive to watch the Yankees AA affiliate, I select a random free evening and never put much thought into it.

This time, though, I was quite intentional about the date.

That Friday night the Patriots honored the New York Black Yankees as part of Minor League Baseballs The Nine initiative which honors the Negro Leagues and amplifies Black communities past, present, and future contributions to the game.

Somerset wore special uniforms with Black Yankees emblazoned on the front of the jerseys, giving a fresh look to a historic franchise which never had its own identity.

You can read more about the night here .

Yankee legend Willie Randolph, who helped unveil the new uniform ahead of the season, threw the ceremonial pitch before the game in front of a sellout crowd.

After the game, the Black Yankees jerseys were sold at an auction to benefit a local African American history museum.

The Patriots 2-0 loss to Reading while wearing the special jerseys did nothing to dampen the positive atmosphere, as the festivities continued after the final out.

It was a rousing success for Somerset and all the groups with whom they collaborated.

Naturally, the thought occurred to me a few times that night.

If the Patriots, who have only been affiliated with the Yankees for four seasons, were able to drum up this much excitement and enthusiasm on a special night to honor the Negro Leagues, why aren't the Yankees themselves holding a similar initiative? Over the past few years, MLB has worked together with institutions like the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City to spotlight the history of pre-integration baseball the various organizations which made up the Negro Leagues and the stars who dressed for them, playing in relative obscurity on the other side of the color line.

Thanks to these efforts, more baseball fans have come to learn about players like Josh Gibson , James Cool Papa Bell , and George "Mule Suttles .

The 2024 season has had two particularly big Negro League-related stories.

First was the May 29th announcement that a sizable portion of Negro League statistics would be entering the official MLB record books .

Among many other things, it made Gibson, a dominant slugging catcher for the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays from 1933 to 1946, the all-time leader in career batting average (.373) and OPS (1.176).

This update to the record books indicated albeit mostly symbolically that the exploits of these players whom the league once shut out were finally on equal historical footing to those of the players in pre-existing MLB franchises.

The second big story was the Rickwood Field Game , played between the Giants and Cardinals in Birmingham, Alabama: Rickwood Field is the oldest professional ballpark still standing in the US, and it was the home of the Birmingham Black Barons, one of the Negro Leagues most storied franchises.

Seventeen year old Willie Mays played his first professional games with the Black Barons on that same field in 1948.

Mays sadly died two days before the Rickwood Field Game, but his passing brought the baseball community together to celebrate his life that night, as well as the contributions of the people who came before him.

It was a great night for our nations pastime.

The Yankees were among the last MLB teams to integrate, with Elston Howard becoming the teams first Black player in 1955.

Howards No.

32 is retired to this day, and since the start of his time in pinstripes, the franchise's long and storied history has been indelibly etched with the contributions of countless Black and Latino ballplayers.

Honoring that history with a night where the Negro Leagues legacy is also celebrated seems a cinch.

But to this point, they have not done so.

As it stands, the Yankees do not tend to put too many special event nights on their calendar.

They do plenty of giveaways, of course, but themed nights are relatively few and far between.

That said, they never fail to do a Star Wars night once every year, and last season they hosted a postgame fireworks show at the Stadium for the first time.

The organization appears to be displaying a greater appetite for those kinds of events, so an event like the one Somerset put on is a distinct possibility even if the special uniforms don't make the trip up I-78.

If they can celebrate a major media franchise every year, they can find room to celebrate an important part of baseball history.

Of course, one other opportunity remains for the Yankees to participate in a major event which would honor not just the Negro Leagues broadly, but the Black Yankees franchise which Somerset proudly repped that Friday night.

Hinchliffe Stadium, located in Paterson, New Jersey, was in fact the home of those same Black Yankees in the 1930s.

Hinchliffe had been closed down for decades, but finally reopened last year following a lengthy renovation process which began over a decade prior.

If it is ever feasible or desirable for MLB to host a Hinchliffe Stadium Game in the near future, the Yankees would almost certainly be one of the teams tapped to participate.

Regardless of whether Hinchliffe Stadium could host the Yankees one day, the time is ripe for the team to celebrate that history to which they are connected.

If Somersets success with the initiative is any indication, fans would relish the opportunity to come to a game where these stories are not just told, but placed front and center.

With the amount of resources the Yankees have at their disposal, they should be able to involve tons of community organizations, just like Somerset did, but with an appropriately MLB-sized reach.

If the Yankees were to go forward with such an event, I would circle the day on my calendar as I did August 30th this summer and no doubt thousands more Yankees fans and baseball fans who love this sport and value its history would do the same..

This article has been shared from the original article on pinstripealley, here is the link to the original article.