Baseball is in my blood. My grandfather, Leonard Jeffrey Sr., a hulk of a man with hands the size

of a catcher's mitt, played semi-pro baseball in the 1930s and 1940s in Newark, New Jersey,

on teams comprised of working-class black men who labored at local factories such as Ballantine and Sun's brewing

company. His teams took the field against other black factory workers, friends from his neighborhood,

as well as rivals from across town. And on occasion, he even got to test his skills against

professional players when barnstorming Negro leaguers came to

town. My grandfather passed his love for the game onto his two children, my father Marland

and his older brother Leonard Jr. When they were youngsters, he would drive them to Brooklyn to Ebbets Field, home of the Brooklyn Dodgers,

to watch the fleet-footed Jackie Robinson lead the once hapless Dodgers to World Series glory.

On other occasions, my grandfather drove the family to Philadelphia, to watch Robinson and the Dodgers take on the Phillies in Old Connie Mack Stadium.

No matter the venue, they always had great seats.

Neither ballpark was officially segregated, but it was rare to see African Americans seated behind the dugout

or home plate. But that's exactly where you would find them. My grandfather was a hustler

of sorts, or at the very least knew how to hustle, and leveraged mob connections he made

working as a custodian for the New York, New Jersey

Port Authority into prime stadium seating. Now it didn't hurt that he often put a little something

on the games. Baseball was in his blood. Soon, my father and uncle were playing America's pastime themselves.

They graduated from Newark's Police Athletic League, which was run by Irish cops,

to star on Barringer High School's mostly Italian 9.

This was just the way Newark worked in the 1950s, segregated and integrated all at the same time.

My father, after a stint in the Air Force, went on to play college ball at Central State in Ohio.

When I was growing up, he regaled my brother and I with stories of his five-tool talent,

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