Words like “legend,” “unbelievable,” and “incredible” get overused in this era of hype, with a seemingly endless amount of cable channels and social media competing in what author Jenny Odell has called the “attention economy.” I try to use those words lightly, but they aptly describe how I felt when I met Buck O’Neil in the summer of 1996.
Born John Jordan O’Neil in 1911, he became a familiar face to baseball fans when he was featured prominently in Ken Burns’ 1994 documentary miniseries Baseball. O’Neil began his career as a utility player for the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League in 1937. The next year, he was sold to the Kansas City Monarchs of the NAL, where he served as their first baseman from 1938-55, except for 1944-45 when he served in the Navy, and as their manager from 1948-1955. He was an All-Star in 1942 and 1943. He just missed being a teammate of Jackie Robinson when Robinson was the Monarchs’ shortstop in 1945. That October, while aboard a Naval ship in Subic Bay, O’Neil learned that the Brooklyn Dodgers had signed Robinson to play for their Triple-A Montreal Royals. The commanding officer summoned O’Neil to his office via loudspeaker to deliver the news.
Records in the Negro Leagues were sketchy or nonexistent. In recent years, researchers have painstakingly gone through accounts of the games and compiled statistics based on what they could verify. In 1946, he won the NAL batting title, but the records no longer recognize him as a batting champion due to the inability to prove some of his stats. O’Neil is thus officially credited with a lifetime stat line of .256/.316/.357, 12 HR, and 185 RBI in 376 games from 1937-48. NAL stats are not recognized after 1948. At that point, it was considered a minor league, with Major League Baseball teams having raided most of its talent. For what it’s worth, the 10th Edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia shows that O’Neil was 36-for-109 in 1949 and 21-for-83 in 1950.
O’Neil became a scout for the Chicago Cubs in 1955. He broke another color barrier in 1962, when he became a coach for the Cubs, and thus the first Black man appointed to a major league coaching staff. The year before, Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley instituted his infamous “College of Coaches.” Wrigley felt that the pressures of managing a major league team over a long season were too much for one man. The College of Coaches would be a system in which the coaches take turns managing on a rotating basis. Wrigley kept the system in place in 1962, but O’Neil was skipped over for a turn at managing. MLB wasn’t ready for a Black manager yet. That was O’Neil’s only year as a major league coach. Afterwards, he returned to scouting, working for the Cubs and later, the Kansas City Royals.
Too Good to Be True
I don’t remember how I found out about that summer evening when O’Neil would be in Pittsburgh signing copies of his autobiography, I Was Right On Time, at the Squirrel Hill Bookstore, which has since sadly gone the way of many other independent book stores in a low-attention-span society that prefers to get its information from tweets. My youngest child, who would turn three the following October, wanted to come along and meet a “real baseball player.” He was at that age where kids like to go somewhere, anywhere with Dad. He would have accompanied me to a hanging. I tried not to turn my kids down when they wanted to spend time with me. I figured by the time I got to my present age, they’d be the only ones who remembered how much overtime I’d worked. So far, I’ve been right about that.
What I didn’t know was that before the book signing, O’Neil would give a talk and hold a question-and-answer session. Bringing a two-year-old to a lecture is a recipe for disaster.
O’Neil had a reputation as a kind, optimistic, cheerful man. In 2006, author Joe Posnanski accompanied O’Neil on a cross-country trip to promote Negro League awareness and wrote about it in his book, The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America. One would think that if a person seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t true. Spending a long time with one on a long trip might reveal a chink in the armor. Posnanski never found it. He wrote of O’Neil, “He always found the good in people.” At a ball game in Houston, the pair saw an adult catch a foul ball that was headed for a child. O’Neil defended the man against Posnanski’s complaints, saying that the man might have a sick child of his own at home. “And I realized that no matter how hard I tried,” wrote Posnanski, “I would never beat Buck O’Neil at this game.”
Neither would the group of some 30-40 people who gathered at the Squirrel Hill Bookstore. O’Neil showed up looking younger than his 84 years, clad in a white Negro League Museum ball cap and T-shirt, blue jeans, and off-white loafers with tassels. He wore glasses and looked fit for his age. Heck, he looked fit for my age. People in the audience addressed him as Buck. Given his age, Mr. O’Neil would have been more appropriate, but he had a way of making everybody feel like they were his long-time friends.
Leaning on a Bookcase
The store was short on chairs for the occasion, so my son and I sat on the floor, leaning against a bookcase, directly in front of O’Neil, who was seated on a chair about four feet away. The highlights from what I can remember from his remarks follow.
O’Neil expressed no bitterness or regret about his playing career ending before MLB integrated, hence the title of his autobiography. There was no complaining about how Blacks were banned from certain restaurants or stores in his playing days. Some business owners were racists; others were not, but feared the damage to their businesses that would ensue if they served Blacks. In the book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, author Ibram X. Kendi stresses that racism isn’t natural; it’s taught, usually by people who stand to profit from it. O’Neil seemed to implicitly understand this, without saying so. He knew all along that the Black players could play just as well as the white players, and probably better. They would play against one another in exhibition games, he noted, and the Black teams won most of them. He also said that the Black teams couldn’t play the same aggressive baseball they played against one another. They couldn’t pitch inside or slide hard into a base, for fear of injuring a white player and inciting the crowd.
Of course, the topic of Satchel Paige came up. O’Neil felt that baseball never had a better pitcher, Black or white. If somebody brought up the name of another pitcher, O’Neil would say, “There was nobody like Satchel!” Paige was such a gate attraction for the Monarchs that O’Neil started him in every game. Paige would pitch the first three innings so that he’d be rested for the next game. If the Monarchs had a day off, they would lease Paige to another team to help boost their attendance. It’s hard to fact-check O’Neil on this from the official records, which are missing many unverified games, but it seems there’s at least a grain of truth in his recollections. What we can tell from the records is that in eight seasons, Paige pitched in 89 verified games for the Monarchs, of which 80 were starts, completed 20 of those starts, and amassed a total of 449.1 innings. That’s not a lot of innings for 89 games during Paige’s era, so it proves there were many brief appearances. The record also shows that Paige pitched one game each for the New York Black Yankees in 1941 and Memphis in 1943, possibly in situations where he was on loan for a day.
For Whom the Bell(e)s Toll
Another interesting topic that arose was Cleveland left fielder Albert Belle, who, it turned out, O’Neil knew quite well. Belle was on his way to winning his third American League RBI title in four years, which he would parlay into a two-year, $20 million free agent deal with the Chicago White Sox. However, he was getting more attention for his boorish behavior. When asked about some of Belle’s antics, O’Neil insisted that he was a good kid. “I’d have to talk to him about it” before passing judgment, O’Neil said. During this part of the program, my son kept crawling over to play with the tassels on O’Neil’s shoes, and I kept pulling him away.
In May, Belle was involved in a controversial play where he leveled Milwaukee Brewers second baseman Fernando Vina with a forearm smash as he fielded a potential double play grounder. Across the sports media, it was considered a cheap shot. O’Neil said it was a legitimate way to break up a double play, one that was often employed in the Negro Leagues. I raised my hand and said, “But he ran right into him. Aren’t players taught not to run into a tag? Stop and get into a rundown instead?” I can still see O’Neil smiling and pumping his fist for emphasis and saying, “You gotta break up the double play!” He spoke in italics a lot.
At that point, my son crawled over again and started playing with the tassels. When I motioned for him to come back to me while O’Neil was speaking, my boy let out a loud “Nooooooo!” The store manager then quietly banished us to the back of the store. I listened from there while my son perused some storybooks.
Finally, I can recall a discussion of the long-time Negro Leagues center fielder Cool Papa Bell, who never made it to the majors and was noted for his speed. Two folk tales made the rounds about Bell over the years. One said that Bell once hit a line drive up the middle and was called out when the ball struck him as he slid into second base. The other said he could turn off the light switch in his bedroom and be under the covers before the light went out. O’Neil confirmed that the latter story was true, at least for one night. Bell once had a cheap hotel room with a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The electricity was so shaky that it took the light a few seconds to respond when it was turned on or off. Bell’s teammates won a few sucker bets that night.
I wish I remembered more from the talk.
Meeting the Hall-of-Famer
At the end of the session, we got in line to have our books signed. I bought one for myself and each of my kids. At the time, nobody knew they were meeting a future Hall-of-Famer. O’Neil was finally inducted into the Hall in the Pioneer/Executive category by the Early Baseball Era Committee in 2022, 16 years after his death at the age of 94. For all he did for baseball and especially raising awareness of the Negro Leagues, it shouldn’t have taken that long.
When it was our turn, before I could get out an apology for my son’s fascination with his shoes, O’Neil tickled him in the stomach and said, “It’s OK, little boys are supposed to be rambunctious!” Before we had cameras in our phones, there were only two occasions when I brought a camera specifically to have my picture taken with a celebrity. This was one of those times. (The other was when I met the author, Roger Kahn.)
However, I decided that I just wanted O’Neil and my son in the picture. O’Neil put his arm around my boy and leaned in. It’s one of my favorite family photos. They look happy.
