Black Boys of Summer

When the popular video game MLB The Show 22 came out last year, it featured a new addition to the lineup: the 1934 Chatham Coloured All‑Stars, the first all-Black team to win an Ontario Baseball Amateur Association championship. To help promote the virtual ­players — including the likes of Don Tabron, Cliff Olbey, Hyle Robbins, Wilfred “Boomer” Harding, and Ferguson Jenkins Sr. (the father of the legendary Hall of Fame pitcher Ferguson “Fergie” Jenkins Jr.) — the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, in conjunction with Major League Baseball, released a short documentary, Chatham Plays On. “They were just a group of young men wanting to show people that this is everybody’s game,” Dorothy Wright, president of the Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society, explains on screen. “They may not have had the money and the houses and everything else, but they were our heroes.”