After a three-year hiatus, the beloved sports comedy “Ted Lasso” is back on Apple TV+ with a record-breaking return.
In the premiere episode, Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) reunites with old friends Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham), Keeley Jones (Juno Temple), and Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift), who have flown to Kansas City to ask him to coach AFC Richmond’s first women’s soccer team.
In the same episode, Higgins — the club’s director of operations — plans to visit the Kansas City Jazz Museum, only to find it closed. After a brief chat with a museum tour guide, he decides to visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum instead.
There, Higgins learns about baseball legends like Satchel Paige, including his famous quote: “Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.”
Upon learning about the segregation and adversity that baseball players like Paige, Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, and Cool Papa Bell faced, Higgins can’t help but draw comparisons between their story and modern-day discrimination in sports.
“You know, their story is quite similar to how women in England weren’t allowed to play football for years,” he tells the tour guide, Charles (played by Milan Carter).
After Charles shoots him a skeptical look, Higgins backtracks, apologizing and saying it’s “much, much, much, much” worse.
However, when Higgins notes that women weren’t allowed in England’s professional leagues until 1971, Charles admits: “Damn – that’s recent as hell.”
“The storyline was very interesting,” Bob Kendrick, the president of the Negro Leagues Museum, told Major League Baseball’s official blog. “They were looking at the history of the Negro Leagues and comparing it to the history of soccer. It forms a tremendous kind of odd, but interesting parallel.”
Kendrick first met Sudeikis — star, showrunner, and co-creator of “Ted Lasso” — back in 2022.
Ever since that encounter, Sudeikis, a Kansas City native himself, has been working on a way to organically incorporate the museum into the award-winning series.
Since the season four premiere, Google Search trends indicate searches related to Paige and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum have increased by more than 5,000% compared to last year.
“It’s a natural boost to the organization,” Kendrick said. “It’s going to introduce the museum to a lot of people who are fans of his show, but likely who have never heard of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.”
“I dare believe that it’ll entice a lot of folks to make the trek out to Kansas City to experience it. Any time that you can establish a platform that shines a bright light on the work that we’re doing, we’re always excited about it,” he said, adding that the episode made him emotional.
“And to have one of your own tout why this place is so important, and to see fit that it's written into the script, man, it’s just so special.”
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Featured Image: “Ted Lasso” season four aired on August 5. Photo courtesy of Apple TV+
