Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Ten Speed Press, author Gerard Early, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

There are many books out there that detail the breaking of the color barrier in Major League Baseball. There are also many good movies as well. I’ve read a few books that give some insight into the Negro Leagues before the integration of the sport. I have to say that Play Harder is one of the best resources I have found, where I actually got a sense of the history of the Negro Leagues and how integral baseball once was to the identity of African-Americans.

Play Harder is not a “deep dive” into the history of black baseball. It does function to support the integration of Negro League statistics into the official baseball statistics. I heard the complaints in May of 2024 by some sports fans that the statistics shouldn’t be integrated with Major League Baseball statistics due to there being “no way to confirm” them. Well, there’s no one who can confirm a lot of things in history. All we have is what’s written down at the time. After reading Play Harder, I’m all the more certain that it was the right thing to desegregate baseball statistics.

The early days of Negro League baseball are fascinating. In conjunction with the rise of the white major leagues, the African-American citizens also tried to organize and failed most of the time. They didn’t have the resources available to them that white owners had. There were several African-American players in the early days of Major League Baseball, and I was surprised to learn that the color barrier was not there in the beginning, even if it wasn’t common to see a black man on a professional baseball field. The South, of course, had a different attitude compared to the rest of the country, and eventually it was Baseball Commissioner Kennesaw Landis who enforced a ban on African-American players.

I also learned a lot about those early Negro League players and what they endured. It wasn’t just the obvious prejudice and biases of the day, but also many more subtle ways they were used to “put them in their place.”

Play Harder also built on the historical fiction biography I read about EffaManley, one of the prominent Negro League owners in the 1940s. She resented the breaking of the color barrier because she knew it would mean the end of the Negro Leagues, even as it advanced the status of the black man.

Everything was not sunshine and roses after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. There are interviews with various baseball players who talk about the problems they faced, even as everything looked copasetic on the outside. The use of steroids is touched on, as are the problems faced by players such as Darryl Strawberry and Dwight “Doc” Gooden.

If there was one thing I found lacking it is that while discussing African-American baseball teams that were “barnstorming” in the 1920s. there’s no talk about how the Negro League plers playes against Major League barnstorming teams. Babe Ruth was noted at the time for having said he would have his barnstorming team playa against anyone regardless of color, and did. Yet, it’s never mentioned. That’s the only omission I noticed, but it made me question if there were others.

There are also pictures which I found were easier to view when reading on the Kindle app on my iPad rather than my Paperwhite. Many of the pictures I’d never seen before and were a revelation.

Although not deep, Play Harder does a great job presenting an overview of the history of the African-American baserball player. There was a scene in the HBO series The Gilded Age which depicted an early version of Negro Baseball and this helped me understand why it was such a popular activity among even the upper-class black culture of the time. It’s a great piece of history that was written in conjunction with the National Baseball Hall of Fame that isn’t a difficult read but gives enough history for a greater understanding of why the statistics should have been merged.