Give It Up for Buck O'Neil

Fifteen years is a pretty long time. The last time we all went through this with Buck O’Neil, our older daughter (the one Buck called “Sunshine”) was five years old, and our younger daughter (the one Buck called “New One”) had just turned one. Buck, himself, was 94 years young, with young being the key word; he still drove that Caddy he loved so much to the Negro Leagues Museum every day, and he gave tours and told stories and hugged everybody.

“Give it up,” he used to say, and he would stretch out those arms and smile that big smile of his and people wouldn’t go in to hug him as much as they would melt into him.

Bob Kendrick and I used to say to each other around that time that while nobody lives forever, Buck was going to give it his best shot.

Fifteen years. That amount of time doesn’t ring true to me. It feels much longer ago. It also feels like yesterday. Sunshine is away at college now. New One is in the next room doing her Shakespeare assignment. Margo is standing next to me, and we are staring at the television screen, and my friend Josh Rawitch—the new president of the Baseball Hall of Fame—is on that screen, and he’s smiling. What does it mean? Would he be smiling if Buck didn’t make it? Does he have to smile no matter what news is coming?

It had already been an extraordinary announcement. Four players from the Golden Days ballot had been elected to the Hall of Fame. Each name Josh announced—Gil Hodges! Jim Kaat! Tony Oliva! Minnie Miñoso!!—sent a wild surge of joy through me. It was so much more than I expected.

Yes, we should pause for a moment to say that it hurt to have Dick Allen fall a vote short again—he also fell one vote short on the 2015 Golden Days ballot. But I actually have a couple of thoughts about that. One, you probably know about the hard math of these Hall of Fame committees. There are 16 people on the committee, and each person gets four votes. This means there are 64 votes available.

It takes 12 votes for any player to get elected, which means that the only way to get five people elected is to perfectly spread those 64 votes so that 60 of them go equally to five players. It’s a nearly impenetrable math maze.

Miñoso got 14 votes—so that’s already two extra votes. That means that for Allen to be the fifth, he basically had to get every single other vote with no more than two total votes going to Maury Wills, Ken Boyer, Roger Maris, Billy Pierce and manager Danny Murtaugh.

As it turns out, three votes went to those five men—and if I had to bet, I would bet all three went to Maury Wills, who has also come very close to being elected before. I don’t think you can blame a committee for not magically coordinating their votes when there are so many good candidates on the ballot.

Two, I believe the committee did something that is very difficult but, in my mind, essential: I believe they took into account that Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat are still alive. And I think it’s right that they did. This is a difficult topic, but we all hurt for those people who get elected after they are gone. When Josh said Minnie Miñoso’s name, the first thought was, “Yes! Finally!” But the second thought immediately rushed in: “He should have been alive for this moment.”

If Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat are Hall of Famers (and I do believe they are) then there’s no time to waste. Both men are 83 years old—they were born less than four months apart in 1938—and the next Golden Days ballot will not be for another five years. It is no fun thinking about such things; when it comes to the Hall of Fame, we prefer considering immortality to mortality. But I want to see Tony Oliva and Jim Kaat in Cooperstown giving their own speeches and soaking in all the love they’ve earned.

Back to the moment. Josh is smiling. Margo is pacing nervously. And I’m thinking about a few words that I wrote 15 years ago, words I wrote that I had long forgotten. The words from my first book, my most personal book, The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America.

I talk about how long ago 15 years was: I had no earthly idea what I was doing when I wrote that book. Early Sunday, I picked up one of the two hardcover copies we still have—it had been forever since I looked at it—and I was taken by how earnest it was, how badly I had wanted to make it great. For Buck. I shot for the stars. I tried to make every sentence sing. I had titled chapters after classic songs. I Like To Recognize the Tune. I Got a Right to Sing the Blues. Blue Skies. Isn’t This a Lovely Day.

One of the chapters is called, “I’d Rather Have a Memory Than a Dream,” an old Sarah Vaughan tune:

For dreams are just imagination,
While memories are as real as you
And I’ve enough imagination
To wish that all my dreams come true

I couldn’t for the life of me remember what that chapter was about, so I went back and read it—the chapter is about the great Negro leagues pitcher and one of Buck’s closest friends, Hilton Smith. Toward the end of his life, Hilton Smith wrote letters to the Baseball Hall of Fame detailing his career. It was entirely out of character for Smith; he was a profoundly modest man who almost never even spoke about his playing days unless asked. Bob Feller thought Smith threw the best curveball in the world. But that was for other people to say.

But Hilton’s son DeMorris told me that at the end he became preoccupied with the Hall of Fame. So he wrote those letters. When the phone rang, he would hope it was the Hall of Fame calling to let him know he’d been elected.

“What does it matter?” DeMorris would ask his father. DeMorris had played in the minor leagues himself in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and he shared his father’s modesty and quiet nature. “You know how good you were.”

And Hilton Smith would look at his son and whisper, “I deserve to be there.”

In his later years O’Neil was recognized as the oldest man to play professional baseball. (Douglas Jones/Icon SMI/Icon Sport Media via Getty Images)

When I told Buck about the letters, he insisted that it couldn’t be true, that he definitely would have known if his friend had sent letters to the Hall of Fame. Maybe, he thought, Hilton Smith wrote the letters but never sent them. In any case, Hilton Smith died in 1983 at the age of 76.

He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2001.

“I came back to Kansas City after that,” Buck told me, “and I went out to see Hilton Smith’s gravestone. I said, ‘Hilton you’re a Hall of Famer.’”

And then Buck said a few words that I wrote in the book as a little poem.

Those are the words I think of as Josh Rawitch gets ready to make the announcement.

I wish he had lived
To see that day.
He was a little sad
At the end of his life,
Just a little.
Thought he had been forgotten.
I wish he had lived
To hear them say,
”You were great.
You were one of the greatest ever.”
But I’m sure he heard it.

Josh announces that two people were elected to the Hall of Fame. And the first is Bud Fowler, the first known African-American player in organized baseball.

And as soon as he announced Bud Fowler, I knew. The second person had to be Buck. Here’s how I knew: The player on the ballot I thought most likely to be elected, other than Buck, was the great John Donaldson, who won more than 400 games in his amazing career and was, in many ways, Satchel Paige before Satchel Paige.

But as soon as Josh announced Fowler, I knew it couldn’t be Donaldson because Josh was announcing the names in alphabetical order.

This is the ridiculous way that my mind works.

Josh Rawitch then looked at the camera, and said some words about someone who was a player and a scout—and at the word “scout,” the room began spinning, and Margo began sobbing joyfully, and my phone began buzzing with texts from people all over the world. I pulled myself together enough to hear him say the name: John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil. Welcome to Cooperstown.

What a happy blur. Over the last few weeks, when I dared, I had wondered what the feeling would be like should Buck get elected. I so vividly remember the horrible feeling when he was not elected in 2006. I so vividly remember the few years after his death when people would ask me about Buck and the Hall of Fame, and I would try to talk about it but, in truth, I didn’t care anymore. To me, then, if Buck wasn’t there to enjoy it, his election to the Hall of Fame meant nothing.

So I wondered: How would it feel if he really got in this time?

And how did it feel? I won’t be able to find the words, but I can tell you that something surprising did happen. As Josh said those words—John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil—I saw Buck. I really saw him, standing there, a memory and a dream, and he was smiling. I could hear him too.

“Minnie Miñoso,” he was saying. “How about that?” And I remembered a time when he and Minnie talked about going to Cuba together.

“Jim Kaat,” he was saying. “One of the best fielding pitchers I ever saw. Yeah!”

“Gil Hodges,” he was saying. “He hit so many home runs against the Cubs when I was there.”

“Tony Oliva,” he was saying, “my hero! As good a hitter as I ever saw.” And I remembered a time when Buck asked Oliva how big that baseball looked to him when he was young and in the zone.

“It looked as big as the moon, Buck,” Oliva said. “As big as the moon.”

And, no doubt, Buck talked about how meaningful it was to have Bud Fowler elected to the Hall of Fame, and how sad it was to see John Donaldson and Dick Allen fall just short. As for himself? I couldn’t hear him say anything about himself. What, after all, was there to say? On the day after he just missed getting elected in 2006, he called me and said, “I want you to do me a favor.”

“Sure, Buck.”

“I want you to thank all the people who have said nice things since the Hall of Fame thing happened. … I have never felt more loved. All my life. Tell them that.”

And he told me then that God works in mysterious ways, and that by not getting into the Hall of Fame he found out just how much people really loved him.

“Buck,” I said, “you’re the only person I know who could feel that way.”

And he said: “You might be right about that.”

He laughed — Buck used to talk about the greatest sound he ever heard, the sound of the ball coming off the bat of Babe Ruth … and then Josh Gibson … and then Bo Jackson.

The greatest sound I ever heard was Buck O’Neil laughing.

And in the moment, I heard that laugh again—a laugh of happiness, a laugh of kindness, a laugh of elated disbelief. Buck O’Neil is a Hall of Famer.

And yes, of course, obviously:

I wish he had lived
To hear them say,
”You were great.
You were one of the greatest ever.”
But I’m sure he heard it.