Before he became an Emmy Award-winning and Oscar-nominated documentarian, andwaybefore he wasSpike Lee’strusted collaborator, Sam Pollard was a baseball fan growing up in New York.

But he was not a fan of the Yankees or Mets.

“I had a dad who had made the journey from Mississippi to New York,” Pollard told The Chronicle in a recent interview. “Along the way, he stopped off in St. Louis. In 1964, I was 14 years old and my dad and I were huge St. Louis Cardinals fans. I was a Cardinals fan because they had(Curt) Flood,Lou Brock,Bob Gibson, Bill White,Tim McCarver.”

As he got older, Pollard’s heroes became San Francisco Giants greatsWillie MaysandMonte Irvin, as well asHank Aaron,Ernie Banksand, of course,Jackie Robinson— all Black men who first played in theNegro Leaguesand helped integrate baseball.

His latest documentary, “The League,” is a look back at the organizations that formed around 1920, after World War I led to a South-to-North migration of Black families eager for factory jobs, creating a ready-made fan base that lasted until the 1950s. In it, you’ll meet not just the Hall of Famers who made it to the major leagues, but figures such as Josh Gibson, “Cool Papa” Bell, Buck Leonard and Satchel Paige, whose legends were word-of-mouth lore.

Pollard, who recently retired as a full-time professor at New York University and has relocated with his wife to Baltimore, is as busy as ever as a filmmaker. He recently directed the Netflix documentary“Bill Russell: Legend,”aboutthe lifeof the Oakland, University of San Francisco and Boston Celtics great. Other successes include“MLK/FBI”(2020); “Citizen Ashe” (2021), about tennis greatArthur Ashe; and“I Gotta Be Me,”about Sammy Davis Jr.

His breakthrough came in the 1990s, when he co-directed two episodes of the groundbreaking PBS civil rights series “Eyes on the Prize” and became Lee’s house editor for films including “Mo’ Better Blues” and“Clockers.”They shared an Oscar-nomination for 1997’s“4 Little Girls,”a documentary about the four Black girls who died in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church.

Pollard spoke to The Chronicle by phone from Baltimore.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: One of the many interesting elements in “The League” was your focus on not only the players, but the economics of Negro League baseball. It was great for Black communities.

A:We had not only all these great players, but teams like the Homestead Grays, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Kansas City Monarchs, the Newark Eagles. And you had owners like Effa Manley, Cumberland Posey, Gus Greenlee and Rube Foster who were giving opportunities to young Black men to play a sport. So this documentary puts front and center the importance and the impact of the Negro Leagues, not just on sports but on the communities that they played in and how they helped these communities thrive like other Black businesses at the time.

The other part of the story that is important is the fact that it wasn’t so simple that Jackie Robinson was scouted by (Brooklyn Dodgers general manager) Branch Rickey’s people, and he basically integrated the major leagues. We go deeper. Branch Rickey would get someone like a Jackie Robinson or a Roy Campanella or a Don Newcombe, and he wouldn’t compensate the Negro League teams they came from, which was a horrific way to do business.

Q: One fascinating figure that deserves her own film is Effa Manley, who owned the Newark Eagles, a rare female owner.

A:She was phenomenal. She had a voice and was vocal about how she felt. She stood up for the players, the Negro Leagues and the owners for fair compensation. She didn’t win the fight, but she made a bit of a dustup.

Q: It’s intriguing how both world wars, which featured units of Black soldiers fighting for freedom, affected the Negro Leagues. World War I directly led to the leagues’ beginnings; World War II helped lead to the integration of baseball and the end of the Negro Leagues.

A:Here are Black men fighting for America, fighting against fascism and Nazism in other countries in the world, being shown so much more respect in foreign countries than they were being shown in America. So you come back with a little bit of a chip on your shoulder saying, “I want my rights.” There was a groundswell of activism in Black communities with Black people saying we no longer want to be treated like second-class citizens.

It’s important to understand that as Black people in these communities, we didn’t just sit on our hands and not do anything. We wanted to make a change in America because we saw that we had contributed to America winning the war.

Q: In 2023, Black American players make up just 6.1% of major-league rosters, the lowest since 1955. Compare that with the 1980s, when Black Americans made up about 20% of rosters. Why is that?

A:Because baseball isn’t America’s pastime like it was when I grew up. The sports that our people watch all the time or play on teams is either basketball or football, because the tempo of those games are fast. Baseball was always a slow game and got slower over the years. So it doesn’t attract young Black kids.

对我来说,这是一种精神体验去落下帷幕lpark, to walk out and see that field, sit in the stands and have your scorecard and watch the game, have a hot dog, have a beer, watch the people. But we live in a different world now; the tempo is much faster.

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@BRFilmsAllen