‘The League’ Review: The Negro Leagues Finally Get Their Due in Moving Baseball Documentary

variety.com:

Michael Nordine author There’s no shortage of great movies about baseball, but there is a severe lack of films about the Negro leagues.

The fifth inning of Ken Burns’ expansive “Baseball” covers them with admirable reverence, but feature-length projects — whether narrative or documentary — are vanishingly rare. “The League” is therefore something close to required viewing for devotees of our national pastime just by virtue of its existence, so it comes as a relief that Sam Pollard’s documentary (exec produced by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson) is also quite good on the merits.

Given his résumé, that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Pollard’s prior work as director includes “MLK/FBI” and “Citizen Ashe,” and he’s also edited several Spike Lee joints; in addition to a Peabody Award and career achievement prize from the International Documentary Association, he shared an Oscar nomination with Lee for 1997’s “4 Little Girls” about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

One of the film’s earliest, most important points is that the color line broken by Jackie Robinson in 1947 didn’t come into being the moment baseball was invented.