Kansas City, Missouri’s Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is now dealing with a good problem to have.
The historical institution, which preserves the long history of African American baseball in the U.S., was featured in the premiere of the new season of “Ted Lasso” in August. And since, the museum’s president Bob Kendrick tells TODAY.com, the establishment has been flooded with visitors. Sales, Kendrick says, are up around 50% to 60% compared to where they were last year at this time.
“I’ll tell you — it has superseded anything that I could have ever even remotely imagined,” Kendrick says of the outpouring of interest in the museum from the show. “I honestly did not know that it would have this kind of interest and immediate impact on the museum.”
While the show’s third season, which wrapped in May 2023, ended with star and co-creator Jason Sudeikis’ character Ted Lasso leaving his life in the UK for Kansas City, the new season is all about his hop back across the pond. This time, Ted is tasked with helping to lead AFC Richmond women’s soccer team, the Lady Greyhounds, to success.
But the first episode of the new season doesn’t start in the UK. Ted, who’s now working in a grocery store and parenting his son, still needs some convincing to leave the stability behind for the coaching gig abroad. And several of his old friends, including Rebecca, Keeley and Higgins, show up in KC to do just that.
While there, Higgins, played by Jeremy Swift, attempts to hit up the American Jazz Museum — which is housed in the same building as the NLBM — but finds it unexpectedly closed for the day. So he ends up taking a tour of the baseball establishment and becomes wildly moved by the figures he’s introduced to. One of these impactful players is the legendary Satchel Paige, widely recognized as one of the best pitchers in the history of the game. Paige’s career in the Negro Leagues began the 1920s.
“Satchel was a showman. He had a wild throwing style and all these crazy names for his pitches. ‘The Hesitation.’ The Midnight Creeper.’ ‘The Dipsy-Do’,” an NLBM employee, played by actor Milan Carter, tells Higgins. “Many thought old Satch would be the first to break the major league color barrier. He wasn’t. But he finally got in at the age of 42. Oldest rookie in history, and he was still incredible.”
As the NLBM staff member says in the show, “the Negro Leagues were glorious.”
“They didn’t do it for fame or fortune. They did it ‘cause to not play would have been unacceptable,” the staff member says of the leagues, which were formed in 1920 as a response to a decades-long unwritten “gentleman’s agreement” between club owners that kept Black players out of all professional leagues with white players.
The visit leaves a huge impression on Higgins, who is seen later in the episode, decked out in a Kansas City Monarchs jersey. The Monarchs were one of the most successful teams in the Negro Leagues and boasted Paige as one of its alumni.
Kendrick tells TODAY.com that the episode’s representation of the museum was moving.
“The scene was so beautifully done,” Kendrick says. “The care, the concern, the understanding of the essence of what Negro Leagues history represented both on and off the field —you saw that in that scene.”
The only complaint he’s gotten?
“I got a lot of calls, people ask me why wasn’t I in it. Because they wanted me to be the guy that was talking about Satchel Paige,” he says, before laughing. “What I told him was, ‘Number one, you never play yourself. You go find somebody who’s younger and better looking for you.’”
Kendrick explains that the NLBM scenes were filmed about a year ago. Back then, he says he had no idea what would happen after the episode aired.
“Perhaps I was a little bit naive on just how big this show really is,” he says. “It has just absolutely captivated the hearts and the imaginations of ‘Lasso’ fans around the world, and it obviously has exposed Negro League’s history and this museum to millions of people around the globe.”
Kendrick, who met Sudeikis years ago at a holiday ceremony, says that the “Ted Lasso” creator has visited the museum and been a fan for some time.
“There are many great attractions here in Kansas City, and for Jason to write us into this this love letter to Kansas City speaks volumes about what this museum meant to him,” he says. “I was here on the set when they were shooting it, so I had seen it already. I saw it in real time, but when I saw it in the show, it was very emotional for me.”
Now that Paige has even more fans, Kendrick says that there’s a plethora of Negro Leagues stars that people can look into, like the great Martín Dihigo, perhaps the most versatile player in baseball history. Dihigo, whose nickname is “El Maestro,” hailed from Cuba and began playing professionally in 1922.
“He was essentially Shohei Ohtani before we ever knew who Shohei Ohtani was. Martín Dihigo played all nine positions and played all nine of them well,” Kendrick says, referencing the current Los Angeles Dodgers two-way phenom.
He added that Dihigo is among the only baseball players “in the history of our sport to be enshrined into five different countries’ baseball halls of fame. He’s in the Mexican, Cuban, Venezuelan, Dominican, and in Cooperstown.”
As more people continue to be introduced to the museum through “Ted Lasso,” Kendrick says that the institution’s existing plans to expand and move out of their current space has become even more important.
“A new, much larger, expansive Negro Leagues baseball museum is looming on the horizon,” he says. “I need more space now to handle all these people and to expand on the stories that we have and to tell new stories.”