[In honor of MLB’s Opening Day, this week I’ll be blogging about historic baseball teams! Leading up to a weekend post on the upcoming second season of my narrative history & baseball podcast.]
Three very real histories to which a fictional cinematic baseball team can connect us.
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976) was the feature film debut for legendary director John Badham, who while English by birth (he was born in Luton to a U.S. Army General dad and English actress mom) had grown up in 1940s and 50s Birmingham, Alabama. (Semi-related fascinating fact: his sister Mary played Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird [1962]!) Birmingham was at that time home to “the jewel of Southern Black baseball,” the Birmingham Black Barons, a dominant force in the Negro Leagues for four decades and the team for which such legends as Satchel Paige and Willie Mays played. Bingo Long wasn’t an original idea of Badham’s—it’s loosely based on William Brashler’s 1973 novel of the same name—but he worked with Brashler and other writers to adapt it for the big screen, and it’s fair to say that both the titular team overall and specific players like Billy Dee Williams’s star pitcher Bingo Long (definitely a Satchel Paige-like character) were inspired at least in part by the legendary Birmingham Black Barons.
The story of Bingo Long commences when Bingo, having grown tired of being under the thumb of the dictatorial owner of his current (fictional) Negro Leagues team the Ebony Aces, decides to start his own barnstorming squad with other dissatisfied Negro Leaguers. As I traced at length in this prior post on the groundbreaking life and legacy of Curt Flood, for most of baseball history prior to Flood’s successful 1970s fight for the concept of free agency players were almost entirely at the mercy of their teams and owners. Moreover, a good deal of the time those owners treated their players much like the robber barons treated their employees, a reality at the heart of the Black Sox scandal (as depicted pitch-perfectly through the character of White Sox owner Charles Comiskey in John Sayles’s film Eight Men Out). I know it’s difficult to think of professional athletes as put-upon workers, but for much of the 20th century that’s what they were (they’re still workers to this day, just not nearly as put-upon), and that’s another history which Bingo Long helps us remember.
Bingo Long ends with another, even more significant historical turning point—a Major League scout is in the stands for the team’s climactic victory against the Ebony Aces, and recruits star young player “Esquire Joe” Calloway (Stan Shaw) to try out for his team, which will break the color barrier. That’s not exactly how Jackie Robinson was recruited by Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey, but it’s not far off either—Robinson was playing for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues when he was selected by Rickey as the ideal player to break the color barrier. And what the film’s ending really helps us better remember is how bittersweet a moment that was for players and teams like those featured in the film—of course the possibility of integrating the Major Leagues was both personally, professionally, and culturally attractive for all sorts of good reasons; but it also meant the gradual but inevitable death knell for both the Negro Leagues and, not as fully but certainly to a degree (given how racially diverse it also was), the barnstorming circuit. Which makes it that much more important for us to commemorate those historic teams, as aided by wonderful stories like Bingo Long.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Baseball or sports histories you’d share?
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