Buck O'Neil belongs in

By Andrew Neumann
Collegian Staff
September 27, 2006

You’ll never hear Buck O’ Neil complain about anything. Not about his poor upbringing in Carrabelle, Fla., not about the fact that he was barred from ever playing in Major League Baseball because of his skin color and certainly not about the fact that he is still not a member of Baseball’s Hall of Fame. O’Neil should be a Hall of Famer, as a baseball player, manager, and scout. More importantly, though, O’Neil is a Hall of Fame person, and the fact that he does not have a plaque in Cooperstown is an absolute travesty.

In his playing career, which began in 1934, O’Neil was one of the best first basemen in the Negro American League, winning the batting title in 1946 and playing in the East-West All Star Game four times. Statistics from the Negro Leagues are sketchy at best, so numbers on O’Neil do not exist in the traditional sense, but he is regarded as one of the premiere players on perennially the best team in the Negro Leagues, the Kansas City Monarchs.

In 1948, the year after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier, O’Neil was promoted to Player/Manager of the Monarchs, and lead them to two League Championships in 1953 and 1955. By this time, the Negro Leagues were suffering mass defections to the now integrated MLB, but O’Neil was simply too old to play in the Majors. After years of looking in the window, the door was now wide open for black ballplayers, but Buck O’Neil could not get through the threshold.

After the 1955 season, O’Neil left the Monarchs to work as a scout for the Chicago Cubs. In 1962, he became Major League Baseball’s first black coach with the Cubs. Although not nearly as glamorous as Robinson’s accomplishment in 1947, O’Neil’s barrier was one that may have been even more difficult to cross. People had long since accepted that blacks were as good as whites in athletics, but with O’Neil, this was breaking part of the commonly-held belief that blacks were somehow intellectually inferior.

He worked in various capacities with Cubs for a quarter-century, before joining the Kansas City Royals as a scout in 1988, where he was quickly named “Midwest Scout of the Year” in that same year. Based solely on these facts, O’Neil is a Hall of Famer, and we haven’t even gotten to the interesting part yet.

The baseball world in general was introduced to O’Neil through the Ken Burns documentary Baseball that first aired in 1994. In that nine-part series, O’Neil revealed himself to be a well spoken, intelligent man, who remarkably harbors no resentment towards anyone in the baseball business. At one particular time in the Burns series, O’Neil says, “So why feel sorry for me? We did our part in our generation, and we turned it over to another generation and it’s still changing — which is the way it should be.” The fact that a man who has endured such hardship due to baseball could be so forgiving is truly remarkable.

That, more than anything, speaks to the character of O’Neil. He has endured so much, yet he sees only the positives in situations. While having been blocked from Major League Baseball has surely hurt him, he chooses instead to focus on the remarkable achievements of African-American ballplayers since his day.

Basically, it comes down to this: if a person’s life has undoubtedly been a benefit to the game of baseball, then he is a Hall of Famer. Pete Rose is not a Hall of Famer because he jeopardized the purity of the sport. Shoeless Joe Jackson, one of the greatest hitters of all time, is not a Hall of Farmer because, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, he abused “the faith of 50 million people.”

But, O’Neil has been an ambassador to the game. After a magnificent playing career, he has broken boundaries, educated and entertained throughout the country. He is a humble, modest man who will never himself campaign for the Hall of Fame. But someone should. O’Neil deserves not only to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but to be inducted immediately so that he himself can take the podium in Cooperstown, rather than receive the award posthumously.

neumanna1@lasalle.edu