For baseball’s Black and Latino players, it’s always 1926 somewhere

From home-run celebrations to tilted caps, players embracing joy continue to collide with an old guard devoted to Dust Bowl grimness

Over the last several years, simultaneously lauded and paralyzed by its ironclad traditions, baseball has undergone various forays into reinvention, trying to free itself from its unwritten rules of retaliation, its seeming aversion to joy, its demand that every generation of player of every culture and background play the game with the grimness of a Dust Bowl farmer.

The sport even attempted to change those customs by promoting a cultural shift with an industry-wide motto: Let the Kids Play. But in a time of intense division within the aggressive backdrop of Trumpism, the result is a racial clash that is actually a generational and cultural one that predates current politics by a century.

Howard Bryant is the author of 11 books, including Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field, and Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. He writes at Substack.