Clubhouse Conversations
The Clubhouse Conversations Interview Series exists to celebrate and give more visibility to the professional Black baseball players in Minor League Baseball and Major League Baseball, Black coaches/scouts/managers/front office members, and the Black writers who cover professional baseball. These interviews will solely be featured on Unculture and conduct the same purpose as my articles, which will move back over to my personal Medium page. This interview series’s focus is on Black people throughout the African diaspora who have a hand in making baseball the global phenomenon that it is.
This is the sixth Clubhouse Conversations interview in a series that is produced and hosted by Unculture’s Senior Baseball Contributor Patrick Ellington Jr. This episode features Teddy Blackwell, the Minor League Medical Coordinator for the Cleveland Indians. He started working in the Indians organization as a trainer in 1988. To be able to tell Blackwell’s story and his role in making professional baseball what it is is an honor. For context, Teddy Blackwell’s career in the Indians organization started ten years before I was even born! Expanding the scope of the Clubhouse Conversations Interview Series from Black players in MiLB/MLB to include Black people in other roles to provide more comprehensive coverage and to tell more stories.
When I googled Teddy Blackwell’s name barely anything popped up, and that needed to change. Another facet that made this interview so special was the fact that Teddy Blackwell works for my favorite baseball team, the Cleveland Indians. The fact that I never knew who Teddy Blackwell was until his son reached out to me emphasizes the purpose of this series, to tell the stories of Black people in professional baseball. These first-hand accounts must be on record for the generations to come.
This series came to life after the editor of Unculture gave me the green light to take a home run swing on a dream concept we just stumbled upon in a casual conversation. I scraped and crawled through my connections in the various realms of baseball to get my first conversation set up with Justin Lewis in mid-April(S/O Jen Ramos). After a month passed, I got to do the second installment with DJ Gladney because of a writer named Dave Brown, who put me in contact with individuals in the Chicago White Sox organization. Since then, there have been another four interviews published in the last month including this one.
This project has grown exponentially, but it has not yet reached its true peak. I have not yet had any Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean, or African individuals who work in the various realms of baseball as guests on any installments yet, and I am eagerly trying to change that. Thank you to everyone that has helped me get this far. My editor, every individual that been a guest on the Clubhouse Conversations series, and every individual that has played a part in making these interviews happen by connecting me with the various guests. Thank you to everyone that has watched, shared, liked, subscribed, etc. also. I am honored you all would be willing to be a part of my audience. I will make this interview series the best it can be for you. This is a long-term project. I hope you will stay to see how far we can run with this.
