Ashawnta Jackson wrote about the influence of POCs in baseball during the Jim Crow era, when Black players were banned.
Major League Baseball may have been exclusionary in Jim Crow–era America, but people of color found a way to showcase their talents regardless. In 1888, for example, Moses Fleetwood Walker, a mixed-race man from Ohio, played for the Toledo Bluestockings. When he took the field in a game against the Chicago White Stockings, he was abused with racial slurs by White Stockings player Adrian “Cap” Anson, who refused to play if Walker did. Anson and several other players had been threatening to leave the league if Black players were allowed, and, acquiescing to their demands, the league stopped issuing contracts to Black players after 1889. This year, as Laliberte points out, was “the last in which African American players appeared in major professional baseball for fifty-eight years.”
For more on the subject, check out the books from these bibliographies: