Baseball Hall of Fame Honors Negro Leagues by Choosing Two White People & a Mobster Over Buck O’Neil and Minnie Minoso.

“ . . the special committee elected Alex Pompez, owner of the New York Cubans team... Also an organized crime figure... Part of the mob of the infamous '30s gangster Dutch Schultz... Indicted in this country and Mexico for racketeering.
He's in the Hall of Fame. For all time. Buck O'Neill is not. It is not merely indefensible. For all the many stupid things the Baseball Hall of Fame has ever done... This is the worst.” Kieth Olbermann.

Buck O’Neil was the first black coach in the Majors. He managed Elston Howard and Ernie Banks in the Negro Leagues and signed Banks and Lou Brock to Major League contracts with the Cubs . “. . O'Neil [is] the best player still living who built most of his baseball reputation in the Negro Leagues. . . . won the 1946 Negro American League batting title with an average of .353"

I don’t have any personal memory of Buck, but I saw Minnie play and he was something to behold. “Minnie Minoso. . . prevented from playing in the majors until he was 27 years old because of the color of his skin . . . went on to record the sixth highest batting average in all of baseball during the prime of his career, 1951 through 1963.”

I’ll pretend that this is something out of a Vonnegut book and nominate a couple of other white folks. The first, is Dial Pearl Estelle Snoddy Prim, mother of my mother, the coal miner’s daughter. Granny wasn’t a coal miner but she could have been, and she could have played major league baseball. The second is my Uncle Joe, brother of the coal miner’s daughter and Granny’s son. Joe survived Anzio and the Battle of the Bulge, but his proudest moment was playing in an exhibition game against the Kansas City Monarchs and having the honor of being struck out by Satchel Paige. Granny is the woman pictured. I don’t have one of Joe.
Buck would have taken Granny’s & Joe's selections in stride. He knows he’s a class act. He proved it when it was announced that he was not selected. He said that the committee did what they thought was right. “‘God's been good to me,’ he said’ You can see that, can't you? It didn't happen. They didn't think Buck was good enough to be in the Hall of Fame. That's the way they thought about it and that's the way it is, so we're going to live with that. Now, if I'm a hall-of-famer for you, that's all right with me. Just keep loving old Buck. ‘Don't shed any tears 'cause I'm not going to the Hall of Fame.’ Everyone broke into applause. ‘You think about this,’ he said. ‘Here I am, the grandson of a slave. And here the whole world was excited about whether I was going into the Hall of Fame or not. We've come a long ways. Before, we never even thought about anything like that. America, you've really grown and you're still growing.’”