The 2022 Negro Leagues Baseball Silver Dollar

On February 13, 1920, eight team owners crowded into the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City and signed the Negro National League into existence. Black ballplayers had been pushed out of organized white baseball for decades. So they built something of their own — a league that, over the next forty years, would send hundreds of players into history and a handful into the Hall of Fame.

A century after that meeting, Congress voted to mark it in metal. The Negro Leagues Baseball Centennial Commemorative Coin Act became Public Law 116-209 when it was signed on December 4, 2020. It told the Treasury to strike three commemorative coins for the anniversary: a $5 gold piece, this silver dollar, and a clad half dollar.

Here is the part that makes the coin more than a tribute. By law, every coin carried a built-in surcharge — $10 on each silver dollar — and all of it was directed to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, to fund its educational programs and exhibits. Buying the coin paid for the keeping of the story.

Commemoratives like this only exist for a moment. The law allowed the Mint to sell these coins for a single year — calendar 2022 — and not a day longer. When the year closed, the dies were retired. There will never be a 2023 of this coin.

The obverse — the "heads" side — puts you on the mound. A pitcher is frozen in mid-throw, the baseball pushed forward in the foreground and a ring of baseball stitching running around the rim like a seam. It carries the usual legal inscriptions: LIBERTY, IN GOD WE TRUST, and the date 2022. The obverse was designed by Matt Swaim and sculpted by U.S. Mint medallic artist Eric David Custer.

Flip the coin and the point of view flips with it. The reverse shows the pitch arriving at home plate — a batter with his eyes locked on the ball, the catcher set, the umpire leaning in. It reads UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, E PLURIBUS UNUM, and the denomination, $1. The reverse was designed by Don Everhart, one of the Mint's most prolific modern sculptors, with medallic artist Craig A. Campbell.

There is also a special version. Some coins carry a small privy mark — a tiny extra device struck into the surface — in the shape of a stylized baseball diamond reading "100," tucked on the obverse beneath the pitcher's raised knee. It nods directly to the centennial: one hundred years since 1920. That diamond-privy coin was made in far smaller numbers than the plain version, which is why collectors single it out.

This is a modern commemorative, so the appeal is not the chase for a coin nobody can find — it is a coin tied to a great story, struck in real silver, in a year that will never repeat.

The law set a hard ceiling of 400,000 silver dollars across every finish. The Mint never came close. Reported sales were a fraction of the cap, split between a Proof finish (the mirror-and-frosted look made for collectors), a standard Uncirculated finish, and the limited diamond-privy Proof. Because the privy-mark coin was the scarcest of the three, it tends to draw the most attention.

A note on grades: because these coins were sold straight from the Mint in protective packaging, most survive in pristine condition. That makes the top certified grades — PR70 / MS70, a perfect 70 on the 70-point Sheldon scale — far more common here than on a coin that actually circulated. With moderns, the gap between a 69 and a flawless 70 is often what separates two otherwise identical coins.

If you want the "why it was made" in your hand, any of the three works. If you want the version most collectors talk about, look for the 100-diamond privy mark beneath the pitcher's knee.