The Missouri History Museum's program is billed as Beyond the Diamond: An Evening with Mike Claiborne and Bob Kendrick, and the title is a fair warning. The conversation, scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, from 5 to 6 p.m. at the museum at 5700 Lindell Blvd., is not built around box scores or nostalgia. It is built around the argument that Negro League baseball was never only a game — that the teams were Black institutions, businesses, community anchors and stages, assembled under segregation and thriving anyway.
One of the two men on stage has spent most of his life telling St. Louis stories. Mike Claiborne is a St. Louis native who joined KMOX, the city's radio giant, in the early 1980s and never really left the airwaves. Over a career spanning more than four decades he has covered seven St. Louis Cardinals World Series appearances, worked alongside Jack Buck, and called Stanley Cup and NBA finals. He is currently part of the Cardinals' broadcast team. That résumé matters here: Claiborne is a local witness to how sports and civic identity braid together in St. Louis, which is exactly the thread the evening pulls on.
His conversation partner, Bob Kendrick, is president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City — the only museum in the world devoted to preserving and celebrating African American baseball and its impact on American social progress. Kendrick's path to that job was not a straight line. He first encountered the museum as a volunteer while working at The Kansas City Star, where he spent a decade and, as a senior copywriter in the promotions department, dreamed up the campaign that drew more than 10,000 people in under 30 days to see the museum's first traveling exhibit in the summer of 1993. That success landed him on the museum's board that fall. He became its first director of marketing in 1998, was named vice president of marketing in 2009, left briefly to run the National Sports Center for the Disabled in Kansas City, and returned in March 2011 as president. Since then he has helped orchestrate a nearly $20 million turnaround that restored the institution's financial footing.
Kendrick is, by acclimation, one of the great storytellers in American sports. He grew up in rural Georgia, came to the Kansas City area on a basketball scholarship to Park College, and broke his foot his freshman year — ending the hoop dreams and, in a roundabout way, setting him on the baseball history he now carries. "I'm always thinking as if no one knows anything about the story," he told MLB.com. "I got to make them fall in love with it the way I fell in love with it. That's where the energy and the passion comes from."
The story he tells is bigger than the field. The museum sits in Kansas City's 18th and Vine district, a few blocks from where Negro Leagues players once walked off the field and into a neighborhood alive with jazz — Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Kansas City's own Charlie Parker. "All the jazz musicians wanted to be baseball players, all the baseball players wanted to be jazz musicians," Kendrick likes to say. He also points out that Kansas City Monarchs owner J.L. Wilkinson staged night baseball in 1930, five years before the major leagues got around to it, and that Buck O'Neil — a Monarchs manager, a museum co-founder and Kendrick's mentor — signed Joe Carter and Lee Smith to their first professional contracts. Kendrick has been blunt about why so few people know these things: "American historians did us all a tremendous disservice," he told FOX4KC. "They kept this wonderful chapter of baseball and Americana away from us."
St. Louis has its own chapter, and it is a rich one. The St. Louis Stars played in the Negro Leagues from 1920 to 1931 and, beginning in 1922, hosted home games at Stars Park at Compton and Market — one of the rare stadiums built expressly for a Negro League team rather than borrowed from a white club. Three Hall of Famers wore the Stars uniform: Cool Papa Bell, Willie Wells and George "Mule" Suttles, all of them on the roster for the team's titles in 1928, 1930 and 1931. For decades no photograph of Stars Park was known to exist. Then Lauren Sallwasser, a photo archivist at the Missouri Historical Society — the institution that runs the very museum hosting this event — pulled an image she took to be Sportsman's Park and noticed the details refused to line up. Comparing it against documented views of Sportsman's Park and the surrounding blocks, she made out the words "Stars Park" on the sign above the ticket windows. She had found the missing picture. "Once I started to figure out what it really was, it was pretty neat to find something of which there aren't really any other photographs," she said.
That discovery is a useful frame for the evening. The history of Black baseball in America is not lost so much as it was allowed to go missing — unphotographed, unarchived, left out of the record — and the work of recovering it has been done largely by people who refused to let it stay gone. Kendrick's museum began in 1990 and, in its early years, was so shoestring that O'Neil and other former players would pay the rent themselves to keep a one-room operation open. It is now in the middle of a $30 million expansion project next to the historic Paseo YMCA that will roughly triple its space, with plans for an attached hotel. "We've simply run out of space," Kendrick said. "And every time we want to tell a new story, we literally have to tear something up."
The program's description promises a conversation that moves past nostalgia to examine how Negro League teams built thriving Black institutions amid segregation, and how figures like Jackie Robinson helped transform the nation. Robinson's breaking of the major league color line in 1947 is the moment most Americans know; the evening's premise is that the decades of Black-owned, Black-run, Black-supported baseball that made him possible are the part worth understanding. The teams were enterprises. The ballparks were gathering places. The players were, in Kendrick's telling, some of the most compelling Americans of the twentieth century, and the fact that so many of their names went unrecorded is a failure of the archive, not of the achievement.
For St. Louis audiences, the local resonance runs deep — from Stars Park to the archivist who found it again. Claiborne, who has spent forty years narrating this city's teams, and Kendrick, who has spent his career insisting that the whole story get told, will have an hour to connect the two.
The event runs Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2026, 5 to 6 p.m. at the Missouri History Museum, 5700 Lindell Blvd. Tickets are required.