John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil was much more than a Negro Leagues icon. He was a glaring symbol of America as both an aspirational concept and oppressive colossus.
His long overdue enshrinement into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., this past Sunday was the sport finally acknowledging, if only implicitly, that O’Neil, who passed away in 2006 at the age 94, was one of the most important figures in Major League Baseball’s twofold sublime and shameful history.
Two pioneering players also joined O’Neil. Bud Fowler, born in Frankfort, N.Y., in 1858 and raised in Cooperstown, is the earliest known African American player in organized professional baseball. Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso, a native of Perico, Cuba, became the first Afro-Latino in the major leagues when he took the field for the Cleveland Indians in 1949 and was the Chicago White Sox’s first Black player. Additionally, Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat were enshrined.
While his status on the field didn’t match the towering accomplishments of fellow Negro Leagues contemporaries such as Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, O’Neil, who played all but one year of his career with the Kansas City Monarchs, with which he won the Negro World Series as a first baseman in 1942, was significant to the progress of Blacks in baseball.
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