| Andrés Martinez
The old Paseo YMCA stands on the road named after Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma, just a block west from the intersection of 18th and Vine Street that gives Kansas City’s historic African American neighborhood its name. This YMCA chapter was first organized in 1900, nine years after James Naismith invented basketball at a Massachusetts Y and two years after he was hired as a PE teacher and chaplain at the nearby University of Kansas, but the four-story building seen today was opened in 1914. For several decades it was the hub of social and civic life for Kansas City’s African American community, the sole venue in a heavily redlined city for dozens of clubs and community organizations to hold meetings.
The Paseo YMCA is a long way from FIFA’s imposing “House of Football” in Zurich, but one small gathering held by eight gentlemen convened at the Paseo YMCA by Andrew “Rube” Foster in February 1920 would prove an early step in Kansas City’s subsequent journey to become not just a Midwestern or a national sports town, but a global one – indeed, an improbable 2026 FIFA World Cup host. The eight gentlemen represented independent Black baseball teams who’d come together to establish the first Negro National league, anchored by the Kansas City Monarchs.
There is much to be said about the history of the various Negro Leagues that would spring up around the country over the next few decades in response to Major League Baseball’ persistent and pernicious color line, and many of those stories are engagingly told a couple of blocks away at the excellent Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. But for purposes of our Great Game Lab inquiry, exploring how sport connects America to the rest of the world, what’s worth highlighting is the pioneering international engagement of these Negro Leagues, as they sought to break loose from an American sporting isolationism and exceptionalism that for them, in an era of racial segregation, was always going to prove suffocating.
The Negro Leagues and their players were forerunners of today’s sporting globalizers. Baseball inhabited a transnational Afro Atlantic community that covered the U.S. mainland, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, other Caribbean islands, Venezuela, as well as Mexico’s eastern coastline. There was much fluidity, with players constantly crossing borders to play a season here, a season there. The Havana Cuban Stars were one of the teams represented in that first organizational meeting at the Paseo YMCA. A poster in the museum promotes a 1938 game at Chicago’s Wrigley Field between the Colored National League All-Stars and a team from Córdoba in the Mexican state of Veracruz.
In the 1930s and 1940s, many of the Negro Leagues’ biggest stars played in the Mexican league, lured by bigger salaries and a reprieve from living under Jim Crow laws. Leroy “Satchel” Paige, Andrew Porter, James “Cool Papa” Bell, Roy Campanella, and Monte Irvin were among the African American players who thrived in Mexico. Irvin left his Newark Eagles to play for the Azules de Veracruz in the 1942 season (who for some reason played in Mexico City, despite their name).
The baseball was great, but life off the field was even greater. Irvin, who’d eventually play for the New York Giants in the Major Leagues, would call his season in Mexico the best time of his life (he had planned for it to be more than one season, but he was drafted midway through World War II). “For the first time in my life, I felt really free,” he would recall later. “You could go anywhere, go to any theater, do anything, eat in any restaurant, just like anybody else, and it was wonderful.”[i]
I hadn’t known about the Negro Leagues’ engagement with Asia prior to visiting the museum on one of my reporting trips to Kansas City. I’d always assumed that baseball’s popularity in Japan was a postwar occupation legacy, but the game had first been introduced by American teachers and missionaries in the late nineteenth century. In 1927, a Negro Leagues all-star team toured Japan, 7 years before Major Leaguers (led by Babe Ruth) would do so, and they were a sensation.
Bob Kendrick, the museum president, pointed out to me when I interviewed him after my visit that some of those African American players in the 1920s had first acquired a global consciousness going off to fight in World War I, and then became “instrumental in making baseball a global game.” Kendrick believes the popularity and success of Negro League players abroad, especially in Mexico, helped accelerate the Major League’s integration, which famously started with the Los Angeles Dodgers signing Jackie Robinson away from the Kansas City Monarchs in the fall of 1945. Satchel Paige, the phenomenal sometimes-Monarchs pitcher many considered the Negro Leagues’ greatest player ever, would become the oldest rookie to debut in the Major Leagues when he threw his first pitch for the Cleveland Indians in 1948, at the age of 42. He went on to play until he was 58.
“These were among America’s earliest ambassadors for sport, and they were fantastic at it,” Kendrick said. It’s one of the reasons, he added, that the museum’s overall subject, anchored in the ugliness and hatred of segregation, is also a story of triumph and resilience, as the creation of these “leagues of their own” managed to connect globally even as they served their local communities. Japanese historians credit these touring Negro Leagues stars with increasing the game’s popularity and have highlighted the strong bonds the visitors forged with Japanese players and members of the public who had also suffered discrimination in the United States.
Kendrick explained that the All-Stars who went to Japan in 1927, and on subsequent Asian tours, distinguished themselves by playing well without humiliating or disrespecting their hosts. “You can call it smart diplomacy,” he said, “but it also came from understanding the culture and dynamic of barnstorming, as this all amounted to trans-Pacific barnstorming. These players knew that when you are barnstorming you don’t ride into every town and beat up on the locals, at least not too badly; not if you’re thinking about getting your paycheck and hopefully getting invited to play again.”
When Major League players toured Japan in 1934, by contrast, they apparently made no effort to act as anything other than boastful winners, running up scores and relishing their dominance.
Kendrick is proud of how the Negro Leagues pushed back against America’s traditional sports insularity, and views the city’s selection to co-host the world’s biggest sporting event in the summer of 2026 as a fitting recognition: “Our city in the middle of the country is the envy of so many cities because of what we have accomplished through sport, most recently with the Chiefs,” he told me. “Sport unites us like nothing else, building community and camaraderie, and it has this wonderful clarity that comes from having rules that are apparent, unchanging, and applicable to all, which you can’t always say about the business world or other aspects of our lives.