Baseball’s Big Problem -- The Case of Buck O'Neil

by Bryan Joiner

Outside of strikes and steroids and Sox, there’s not much to learn about baseball that you can’t pull the Buck and Bud story.

On Tuesday, 94-year-old Negro League veteran Buck O’Neil batted twice in a minor league All-Star game, presumably to bolster his case for the National Baseball Hall of Fame. He walked both times, which adds up to 180 wasted paces with Commissioner Bud Selig and the Hall of Fame Veterans’ Committee, over which Selig exerts influence, standing in his way. They won’t induct O’Neil as long as he has strong support, because they don’t want to seem like they are kowtowing to public pressure.

Also, O’Neil is on the Veterans’ Committee, which just inducted a bevy of former Negro Leaguers. Imagine if he were merely a former Negro League batting champion, its leading living ambassador to baseball, and NOT on the committee. They’d be bronzing his plaque already.

Selig is the most recent gatekeeper of the game and architect of this attitude. The former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, Selig’s family sold the team in 2004, but he retains his oligarchic bent. He knows what’s good for us. Our heads are in the clouds, after all, way up in Shea Stadium Section 504.

It is in this and a wealth of other ways that the administration of baseball is, and always has been, an Enos ‘Country’ Slaughter-sized joke. The fans want one thing, and the Powers That Be deliver another and laugh all the way to Citizens Bank Park.

The O’Neil saga is just one example. Fans clearly want him in the Hall of Fame, and he’s a justifiable candidate for his post-career work alone. Don’t think so? Well, then you don’t know the Hall of Fame well enough. For all the griping about who’s not in there, let’s take a look at some of the players who are: Ray Schalk, .253 career batting average, Johnny Evers, .270. Sure, these numbers was during the dead ball era, but let’s not get carried away. Schalk couldn’t have hit .300 with enough Human Growth Hormone to bag Barry Bonds.

The Hall of Fame building, in its anonymous grace on Main Street in Cooperstown, New York, is perfect, but the standards for its honor roll are not. Players are either voted in by members of the press, some of whom uses the voting to even the score, so to speak, against the players. There has never been a unanimous vote for a player on his first chance on the ballot, which occurs five years after their retirement (that includes the elections of Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Lou Gehrig). There is a tradition that some writer, somewhere, must refuse to make any vote unanimous, just to show the player who is boss. Somehow, I don’t think Jose Canseco’s going to buck that trend.

If a player is not elected within 20 years, they are eligible to be inducted by the Veterans’ Committee, who places players in the Hall not because of their actual statistics, but because of the power of our memory. Schalk was an innocent member of the juggernaut  “Black Sox” team (the 1919 Chicago White Sox, many of whom were banned from baseball for match-fixing; at two Hollywood movies and counting, they certainly were memorable), while Evers was part of the most famous double play combination of all time, the Cubs’ Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance.

Younger people will remember O’Neil as the face of the Negro Leagues, bigger than Satchel Paige or Bob Gibson. He’s a living, smiling textbook of one of the sorrier eras in our history. Bud Selig, with his asinine All-Star Game and punchless steroids policy, is the sorry Sultan of today’s scandal-filled game. O’Neil’s story is one of the most interesting in baseball history, and we should recognize it.

O’Neil already walked 180 feet toward Cooperstown. Let’s push Bud aside, and send him the rest of the way.

Click to sign a petition to elect Buck O’Neil to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

(Image from ASU.)

Comments

[Bryan]

I was just informed that Enos 'Country' Slaughter was a small dude. Who knew?