KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Quite belatedly, Buck O’Neil on Sunday will be inducted in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
To be sure, it’s hard to get past the agonizing shame that he won’t be there to revel in it as he would have in 2006, when a process in part created for him to be immortalized went awry.
We’ll ache for his tangible presence. We’ll long for the missing sequel to the jubilant speech he gave then, even amid the personal snub, on behalf of the 17 former Negro Leagues players and executives being honored posthumously at the Hall of Fame. And we’ll be wistfully wishing we could hear him sing as he did there at the time, when he punctuated his talk, as he often did, by urging all in the crowd to hold hands and join him.
“The greatest thing … come on, everybody! … The greatest thing … in all my life … is loving you,” he sang, repeating the chorus several times.
But this doesn’t mean it’s not a monumental development.
Indeed, there’s something more to be divined, and maybe just something divine, about the way this has gone for the beloved Kansas Citian whose autobiography was aptly (now as then) entitled, “I Was Right On Time.”
Considering the name of the book, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick laughed and said, “There’s something very poetic about this … 2006 may not have been the time, you know?”
On that poignant day, Buck “basically wrapped his arms around all of us,” as Kendrick put it, despite whatever anger or agony he was feeling inside. Most who were on the scene (and many beyond it) were somewhere between despair and fury over what felt like gratuitous rejection. Kendrick often has struggled to reconcile it, maybe all the more so since Buck died later that year.
A number of things that have happened since helped soothe some of the torment. And the timing now, after the pandemic derailed extensive 100th anniversary fundraising plans, provides some compelling visibility for the NLBM, aka “Buck’s house.”
But something else speaks to why 2006 may not have been the time. Or at least why there is something consoling about how things have unfolded this way.
The amazing grace with which Buck managed it.
It was nothing less than a phenomenon that Kendrick cited last year during the museum’s #MyBaseballMemory campaign as his favorite despite its bittersweet context.
Because the way Buck handled it illuminated who he was. To the core. To have arguably his finest moment, or at least one of them, amid a shattering disappointment affirmed in an ever-lasting way the trait that Kendrick is thinking of when he says he endeavors to be more “Buck-like.”
And it helps simply explain why Buck resonated with so many.
“He was just a gift, some angel that for all his (94) years still wasn’t enough,” Ken Burns, the renowned filmmaker whose “Baseball” documentary made Buck a national sensation, said last week in an interview with The Kansas City Star. “Buck had deserved this honor in his lifetime and didn’t get it, but we’re all tested in different ways. And Buck passed that test magnificently. Without a murmur of complaint. And he bore it like the extraordinary sort of baseball god that he was, and is, and gave us all a lesson in humility. And avarice and ambition.
“And then now he’s in. And just by the very virtue that he’s there, the place suddenly got a little bit more distinguished.”
Burns added, “He showed us a humility, an absence of ambition that would of course expose our own, if we’re honest. Our … greed, it was exposed by that. And, yeah, those of us who reacted, reacted. He did not.
“He maintained something. He knew there was something bigger than all of this. And that then makes him bigger than all of this: All of our disappointment, all of our sadness, all of the petty, whatever, political stuff that delivered that particular verdict at that time.
“He transcended it. And now he’s transcended it again. … Whatever the elevation is at Cooperstown, it’s now a few feet higher because of Buck being there.”
Befitting his singular persona, Buck’s latest place in Cooperstown, where since 2008 a life-sized statue of the larger-than-life man greets all who enter, was earned for reasons entirely unique to him.
Simply put, the story of baseball can’t be told without him, as Kendrick explains it and Burns demonstrated.
When Kendrick ponders all the reasons, he thinks about the impact of seven decades of significant contributions to the game: as a player and manager in the Negro Leagues and as a pioneering scout with the Chicago Cubs, from whom he either discovered or signed three Hall of Famers (Ernie Banks, Lou Brock and Lee Smith) and a possible fourth in Joe Carter.
He thinks of his groundbreaking role as the first African American coach in Major League Baseball, a designation conferred in 2020 upon the Negro Leagues from 1920-48.
All of which were preludes to his marquee role in the “Baseball” documentary and becoming the driving force for the creation and popularization of the museum.
“I think you could have made a case for his induction just on the work that he did to create this museum to further enlighten people about the history of the Negro Leagues,” said Kendrick, who is disappointed that he won’t be Buck’s presenter but understands the Hall of Fame protocols that led to it being be done by Buck’s niece, Angela Terry.
“But when you combine all of those elements, I don’t think you will find any one individual who is currently enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame who gave the game any more than Buck O’Neil.”
Considering the same point, Burns put it thusly:
“Well, it’s an interesting thing, because the Hall of Fame is supposed to be just about stats, right? … But Buck doesn’t get in on statistics, right? He falls a little short …” he said. “But what he has done in the totality of his life is almost beyond measure.
“I mean, he helped connect an entire dominant white society to the glories and the thrills of the Negro Leagues baseball. Just by speaking in our film. And speaking all his life about it to audiences big and small.”
That was amplified because along the way Buck was what Burns called “a higher form of human being.” Burns recalled using that term at Buck’s memorial in the context of our religious traditions suggesting “man is made in God’s image and there is almost nothing in our behavior that suggests that could even be remotely true until you meet somebody like Buck.”
That’s why this became so deeply personal to Burns, who was near tears when at long last Buck was named a Hall of Famer in December along with former Negro Leagues player Minnie Minoso and pre-Negro Leagues pioneer Bud Fowler.
The relationship began after interviews by his colleague Lynn Novick, producer of the “Baseball” series, who told him, “This one guy, he’s really, really great.”
Like about anyone, including me when I came from St. Louis to interview Buck in 2001, Burns was immediately charmed. That led to Buck becoming what he called the “heart and soul” of the documentary.
Buck would tell him, “I’ve been talking about this all my life and nobody listened until you came along,” but Burns flipped that on him:
“ ’Other way around, Buck,’ ” Burns recalled telling him. “‘You gave us access to be able to tell a story that was much more complete about the history of the Major Leagues (and) the separate but athletically equal league that more often than not in barnstorming games beat the white major-leaguers who were not allowed to play with them professionally on a day job.’”
The documentary was just the start of a relationship that included Buck treating Burns’ daughters as his own grandchildren. Daughter Sarah detoured hundreds of miles out of the way on her honeymoon to visit Buck in the hospital in his final days.
“I mean, I don’t know anyone who’s had a more profound effect on my life, in terms of reminding us of our possibilities as human beings,” said Burns, who regrets not being able to attend because of conflicts with his latest work on “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” “Buck was a mentor. Buck was a father figure. Buck was a dear friend. … He was everything to us. A member of the family. I can’t put it any better.”
Kendrick, of course, has many of the same senses of attachment to Buck, whose presence he constantly feels looming on his shoulder.
That’s why it hurt both so much in 2006. So much so that Burns said Bob Costas, the late Joe Morgan and he “made a big, big, big stink, and we didn’t stop yelling and screaming until we turned blue in the face.”
Their shared reaction helped lead to the aforementioned statue of Buck in Cooperstown. The Hall of Fame also created the Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award. And those distinctions have been important, enough so that Kendrick has said “you could argue” that they may even be more meaningful than a plaque on the wall.
But there was still something hollow without it.
Just like there is maybe something still not quite fulfilling about this happening now without Buck attending.
Still, as one who has long believed that everything happens for a reason, Kendrick likes the idea that Buck now will have a unique trifecta in Cooperstown. And that it comes at a time when the museum needs him again.
Meanwhile, this much he knows about what it will feel like on Sunday in what Buck liked to call “the valley”:
Even if we won’t see him in person …
“I’m sure,” Kendrick said, “that his spirit is going to fill up the valley.”
