Touching home at last

I met Buck O'Neil once in a minor-league ballpark that doesn't exist anymore.

It was, I don't know, 20 or so years ago, and Buck came to the Fort for an appearance at Memorial Stadium, which is a parking lot now. The team that played there, the Fort Wayne Wizards, is now the Fort Wayne TinCaps.  This is how it works, with time and baseball. Teams and ballparks appear and have their day and then disappear, and the years roll on.

And so here came Buck, speaking of years rolling on. He was a star in the old Negro Leagues, which had their own day and disappeared, and then Ken Burns found both Buck and the Negro Leagues and made TV stars out of them in his epic "Baseball" doc. 

Buck smiled his way into America's hearts in that doc, and he smiled his way through our interview, as thoroughly delightful a gentleman in person as on camera. And so it takes no gift at all to know he was smiling yesterday, too, in heaven or some great celestial cornfield in the sky.

Yesterday, you see, the Negro Leagues finally touched homeplate.

Major League Baseball officially welcomed them home at long last, announcing it was re-classifying the Negro Leagues as a major league on the 100th anniversary of their founding. This means Negro Leagues records between 1920 and 1948 will now be incorporated into MLB's official record book.

It was a day far too long in coming, and it was for all of those shut out of the bigs for decades by that crusty old racist Kenesaw Mountain Landis. It was for Buck O'Neil and Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, for Oscar Charleston and Cool Papa Bell and Buck Leonard. It was for Martin Dihigo, and for Judy Johnson. And it was for Bill "Plunk" Drake and Floyd "Jelly Roll" Gardner and Walter "Steel Arm" Davis, and also for Roy Campanella and Larry Doby and Monte Irvin and Willie Mays, who played in the Negro Leagues before Jackie Robinson, another Negro Leagues graduate, broke the color barrier and opened the bigs to players of color.

That happened in 1947, and that was long overdue, too. Because, yes, time may pass in baseball as in all else, but in baseball it passes at a glacial pace. 

Maybe that's why Buck O'Neil was always smiling, and why he never seemed bitter at coming along too early for Jackie. Maybe he understood, better than any of us, the nature of baseball -- and that eventually baseball, epic foot-dragger that it is, would get where it needed to go.