One of the underlying draws of sports gaming is getting to both experience and create your own version of history. Legendary athletes are a staple of the genre, butis now in its second year of highlighting the most fraught period in baseball history.
“Every day on my various social media channels I’m getting messages from people who played the game saying ‘I can’t wait to come to Kansas City to come and visit your museum.’ This is what’s so exciting for me. We’ve introduced this history in a very entertaining fashion, but people are embracing this,” Kendrick said. “I’ll be honest, I was a little surprised. I thought that they would love the players. I wasn’t sure how they would embrace the stories, and they love the stories.
To provide a sense of scale, Babe Ruth holds the MLB home run distance record with a 575-foot moonshot in 1921, and we knowwas just 36 inches in length and weighed 44.6 ounces. While MLB regulations still allow bats to be up to 42 inches long today, modern players rarely use anything bigger than 34 inches and. As for weight, modern bats are usually no more than 35 ounces.
“The Zulu Cannibals would ultimately become the Ethiopian Clowns, and then you would finally see the Indianapolis Clowns. So they started to move away from the grass skirts thing. They took on a more Harlem Globetrotter-ish kind of routine with the Indianapolis Clowns. Now there were very serious baseball players who were playing with the Indianapolis Clowns, but think about what we’re seeing right now with the Savannah Bananas,” he said.
While Jackie Robinson broke the MLB’s self-imposed color barrier in 1947, it was a slow process as the Boston Red Sox were the last team to integrate more than a decade later in 1959. During those final years of the Negro Leagues, the MLB arrival of Hank Aaron left an opening on the Indianapolis Clowns that was filled by Toni Stone, the first woman to play in a professional baseball league.