The Weekly Dispatch: The End of an Error

We depart from the typical focus on the Brewers to discuss a far more important matter happening this very weekend about 950 miles east from where I type. The scene is Cooperstown, New York and the National Baseball Hall of Fame, where seven inductees will be formally enshrined. Amongst them will be the late Buck O'Neil.

I would call this class the revenge tour, including long-overlooked and underappreciated guys like Jim Kaat, Tony Oliva and Minnie Miñoso, but Dick Allen inexplicably didn't get the nod from the committee, so we're not quite there yet. Further, Buck would've never liked being part of a revenge play. He was far too classy and too decent a human being for that.

John Jordan O'Neil: Kansas City Monarch, Chicago Cub, coach, scout, executive, teacher, ambassador, humanitarian, historian, icon. And now, a Hall of Famer. This is the end of an error.

The Weekly Dispatch is a column on the Brewers. 'On' may do heavier lifting on some weeks than others.

Buck was snubbed.

In 2006, a special committee explicitly designed to recognize overlooked Negro Leagues players and influential figures selected 17 for enshrinement into Cooperstown. Buck was not one of them. In what could be characterized as insult to injury, Buck was tasked with delivering the induction speech honoring those including Effa Manley, Oscar Charleston, Cristobal Torriente and JL Wilkinson, and he did so, almost 16 years to the day this piece is published, with the grace, good humor and dignity that were his hallmark.

Buck, sick with an ailing heart and what would be diagnosed later as bone marrow cancer, would not live to see the 2006 World Series. While Buck would never admit it, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick would later concede this failure haunted his friend, the singular force behind developing the facility that, along with the American Jazz Museum, serves as a twin diamond in Kansas City's historic 18th and Vine District.

He would be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom that winter. A year later, Buck would be honored with the inaugural, eponymous lifetime achievement award and a statue in Cooperstown, a tacit non-admission of that committee's failure to get it right. After all, when it comes to the Hall of Fame, nothing less than a plaque will do.

You probably know Buck O'Neil best from his liberal interviews with Ken Burns and company when they interviewed and shot footage for Baseball for PBS, that seamhead creature comfort MLB Network runs regularly between Christmas and New Year's Day. A firsthand witness to the victory Jackie Robinson earned for Black Americans, as well as the beginning of the end of the Negro Leagues, that beautiful byproduct of distinctly American institutional atrocity, Buck recognized early on that the opportunity Robinson and Larry Doby opened up for he and his peers also threatened to wipe their chapter from our societal memory.

"While a fine ballplayer in his own right ... and nurturer of the likes of Ernie Banks and Lou Brock," writes Lawrence Hogan in Shades of Glory, "...in his senior years [Buck O'Neil] has been even a finer preserver and disseminator of the history of Negro baseball."

Buck himself recognized the ramifications of integrating Major League Baseball. In his interviews for Baseball, he sympathetically noted "[T]he one thing I didn't like--in the Negro Leagues, there were some 200 people with jobs. Now, these people didn't have the jobs anymore. We eliminated those jobs."

When societal evils ossify into ways of life, life adapts. No one, not even Buck O'Neil, would say that the Negro Leagues were a good thing: everyone knew this brand of baseball only existed as a result of racism and bigotry. To put a finer point on it, it was dues to the 'gentleman's agreement' [probably] initiated by Cap Anson, who would solidify his on-field greatness as a member of the Chicago White Stockings, later the Cubs.

Buck would never see the field as a major league player, but was hired as a scout in 1955. For the Cubs. 

In those years with the Cubs, he also worked as an instructor and coach, the first African-American coach in MLB, and after his career with the Cubs came to a close, became the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum's chairman in 1990, championing Black Baseball's history from the Paseo YMCA in Kansas City through the construction of the museum at 18th and Vine.

Returning to the city where he spent nearly his entire career as a ballplayer, Buck adopted Kansas City, and Kansas City returned the favor. His tireless advocacy for baseball's rich Black heritage, as well as for Black youth and education in the area, continues to inspire long after his passing. 

His induction in 2006 should have been a slam dunk. Joe Posnanski, who was there with Buck when the committee held its ballot behind closed doors: 

Now, after everything, he was being told that the life he had spent in baseball was not worthy of the Hall of Fame. It was enough to make those around him cry. But Buck laughed. “I’m still Buck,” he said. “Look at me. I’ve lived a good life. I’m still living a good life. Nothing has changed for me.”

Ollie Gates, of Kansas City barbecue fame and a longtime patron and board member for the NLBM, insists the news that day killed Buck. His body destroying him from within, he kept his focus on the celebration of those others who won induction. That's the man he was, dignified to the very end.

Buck's induction this weekend places a bookend not only on his life and legacy, but a fitting coda on a chapter of American sports history that never should have been written in the first place. Those proceedings in a small town in central New York will mean more than any baseball game played, because the game would not be what it is without those players whose legacy Buck O'Neil fought to keep from being memory-holed.

There will be other HoF-related causes to champion and wrongs to right -- Dave Parker and the aforementioned Allen, to name two -- but Sunday is a good day for our game, regardless of what happens in the Menomonee River valley. This is the end of an error.

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Postscript: If you haven't made the trip to Kansas City to visit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the Paseo YMCA, I cannot more strongly recommend taking a long weekend and bringing your family to the middle of the country. The stories housed at the NLBM are inspiring, hilarious, poignant and heart-breaking. It will make you smile, laugh, think and cry, sometimes all at once. If you love this game, or even have a passion for American history and civil rights, you owe it to yourself to make the trip. It is as essential for the baseball lover as Cooperstown.