A Buck's admission

John Jordan "Buck" O'Neil went into the baseball Hall of Fame yesterday, and what you can say about that is it's about damn time. The man was as baseball as a frozen rope to the opposite field. He was a hit-and-run, a drag bunt, a pitch-out that catches a baserunner napping.

America got to know Buck, and fall in love with him, in the Ken Burns documentary "Baseball", and if America had never heard of him it was a testament to the world African-American players were forced to inhabit for the game's first 90 years or so. Racism kept black players out of major league baseball until 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the color line. Until then, the Buck O'Neils and Satchel Paiges and Josh Gibsons -- the Cool Papa Bells and Oscar Charlestons and Judy Johnsons -- played what Burns dubbed "shadow ball" in the Negro Leagues. People who knew, knew how good the baseball was there; white America did not.

What they didn't know hurt them, because the record books would look a lot different today if Kenesaw Mountain Landis, racist and authoritarian commissioner of baseball, hadn't kept MLB lily-white for decades. It fell to O'Neil, in the Burns doc, to be their chronicler.

He was the perfect man for the job, kind and whimsical and folksy, and grandfatherly in a way grandfathers should always aspire to be. That he was also a figure of some historical note didn't hurt; after his playing days with the Kansas City Monarchs, he became a scout and, later, the first African-American coach in Major League Baseball. He also was instrumental in establishing the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in K.C.

I met Buck once, years ago, when he came to Fort Wayne for some function or other with the Fort Wayne Wizards. He was every bit as charming as you'd expect, and I was duly charmed. Told the story again about how he'd only heard a certain sound when ball met bat three times in his life;  once it was Babe Ruth, once it was Josh Gibson and the third time it was Bo Jackson.

Confirmed for me what I always thought, which is that Bo might have been the first man to wind up in both Cooperstown and Canton had he not suffered that career-ending hip injury.

Winding up in the former should have happened years ago for Buck, but to my knowledge he never openly campaigned for it. It simply wasn't in his nature to shine himself up. That the HOF frittered around until Buck was gone -- he died 16 years ago, at the full-to-the-top age of 94 -- feels like just another the slap among many for those old Negro Leagues players.

 That's probably unfair, given that there's now 36 Negro Leaguers in the Hall. But that's how it feels in these precincts.

In any event, the wrong was made right yesterday. And wherever Buck is in the Great Beyond, you can be sure he's smiling about it.

He always was, after all.