Streeter: Baltimore Black Sox sculptures will complete the city’s baseball story

There is something simultaneously sad and liberating about realizing that the history you’ve believed all your life is either a complete lie or has had large swaths of the truth removed in jagged cuts to protect the status quo.

That’s how it felt in 2024 when Major League Baseball reworked its historic stats to include the Negro Leagues, as an acknowledgment that the previous record didn’t tell the whole story because it didn’t include everyone. In a way, that’s what famed sculptor Toby Mendez wants to do with Baltimore’s baseball history. And it could not come at a better time than right now, when the truth of the contributions of Black people is being obscured or erased.

“This completes the story of baseball in Baltimore,” said Mendez, just named by Maryland Art Place as the artist who will eventually bring to life 10 legends of the Baltimore Black Sox. He was chosen from a field of 21 sculptors. The project is a collaboration by Parks & People, South Baltimore Gateway Partnership and Reimagine Middle Branch.

You’ve seen his gorgeous work in and around Camden Yards in his sculptures of Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson and Earl Weaver, among others. Now the Washington County resident is getting to fill in the lines artistically.

“My hope is that when people are in Camden Yards, looking at the Baltimore Orioles, somebody says ‘Have you seen the Baltimore Black Sox?,’” he said.

The works, to be displayed in the new Westport Waterfront Park in South Baltimore, are not merely about numbers. They’re really about telling the truth about a time when Black and white players weren’t allowed to play together, and when those who integrated the sport or challenged the records of white players got death threats.

Baseball, to me, is the perfect microcosm of this imperfect country — a sport romanticized as the nation’s pastime but that started out segregated. We have to be honest about what we were, and who we are.

“As our nation reflects on its history and baseball celebrates its own legacy, we have an opportunity and a responsibility to ensure that the story of the Negro Leagues is fully recognized,” Frank Lance, president and CEO of Parks & People, said in a statement. “This memorial honors players whose achievements helped shape Baltimore and American baseball, yet whose contributions were too often overlooked. Through this project, we are helping restore those stories to their rightful place in our shared history.”

Again, this project represents an intentional effort to expose the complete historical record. Do you understand how important that is? The current presidential administration wants to install signs that say some Smithsonian exhibits are anti-American. They removed evidence of President George Washington’s slaveholding from a Philadelphia museum. They literally removed Emmett Till’s battered face from the image of him in the casket. They want you to believe that the past didn’t happen, that things weren’t that bad and that white men are the real victims of racism.

Poppycock. Let’s keep calling that out.

Mendez’s body of work is varied, but much of it has been about either baseball or the Civil Rights Movement. “The Black Sox sculptures will marry both of those together,” he said. “It’s kind of kismet.”

The project will start with three sculptures whose subjects have not yet been selected but are being chosen by historians, he said.

Mendez’s artistic fascination with baseball started at 14, when he saw a show about sports artists in D.C., initially thinking he might become an illustrator. But eventually he wound up interpreting sports in a different medium. He’s gone on to memorialize players like Nolan Ryan of the Texas Rangers, Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox, and six Orioles. The Brooks Robinson sculpture is part of my personal family lore, from the time we took my then-5-year-old son, named for the legendary third baseman, and he looked at it and said, “That’s not me!”

Mendez became interested in the Negro Leagues while researching other projects and watching Ken Burns’ “Baseball” documentary series, which featured those players. Again, he said, his interest in civil rights and baseball collided. He’s currently working on a sculpture of the late Osceola Smith, a former player for the Edgewater Giants who became a coach in the historically Black Turner Station community, home to Henrietta Lacks, the woman at the heart of HeLa cells, and Rep. Kweisi Mfume.

Mendez noted that Major League Baseball observes Jackie Robinson Day, in honor of the league’s first Black player, and staged a Negro Leagues tribute game in 2024 at the site where the Birmingham Black Barons played in Alabama. Even closer to home, near Mendez’s Orioles figures, is a Negro Leagues mural.

All of these tributes do not erase the past, nor do they change the insidiousness of the forces currently trying to lie about it. But they are a bold testament to the truth, and a beautiful strike in the fight to move forward and not go back.

We’re not going back.