Only Major League Baseball could enshrine a white woman for her Negro League team ownership before it selected living Negro League legend Buck O’Neil.
Effa Manley became the first woman elected to the baseball Hall of Fame on Monday when the former Newark Eagles co-owner was among 17 people from the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues.
Mule Suttles and Biz Mackey were among the 12 players selected, along with five executives.
The 11-member voting panel snubbed O’Neil and Minnie Minoso, the only living members among the 39 candidates on the ballot.
Manley was white, but married a black man and passed as a black woman, according to Larry Lester, a baseball author and member of the voting committee.
Manley is quite deserving of being enshrined. She used baseball to advance civil rights causes with events such as an Anti-Lynching Day at the ballpark. She died in 1981 at age 84.
Also elected to the Hall were Ray Brown, Willard Brown, Andy Cooper, Cristobal Torriente and Jud Wilson. Five pre-Negro Leaguers – Frank Grant, Pete Hill, Jose Mendez, Louis Santop and Ben Taylor – were also selected.
One of the inductees, played for the St. Louis Browns in 1947, hitting .179 in 21 games with the St. Louis Browns.
But the most deserving Negro League player that is not in the Hall of Fame is O’Neil. In fact, the Hall had just 18 Negro League players before Monday’s vote, and almost all of them are there because O’Neil campaigned for their inclusion.
Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski wrote in a Tuesday column, “When the voting was finished, no one had the guts to explain why Buck O’Neil was kept out. He was an All-Star player in the Negro Leagues. He was a successful manager for the Kansas City Monarchs. He sent more Negro Leagues players to the major leagues than anyone. He was the first black coach in the major leagues. For the past 50 years, he has been — as author Jules Tygiel calls him in Shades of Glory, the Negro Leagues book commissioned by the Hall of Fame — “the primary spokesperson for the legacy of the Negro Leagues.”
“Shed no tears for Buck,” the classy O’Neil said after learning he had not garnered enough votes for election.
“No, no. Ol’ God’s been good to me. You can see that, don’t you? If I’m a Hall of Famer for you, that’s all I need. Just keep loving ol’ Buck.”
As a member of the Kansas City Monarchs, O’Neil won two Negro Leagues batting titles as a first baseman. He later managed one of black baseball’s most storied franchises to five pennants. With the Cubs, he discovered Lou Brock and Ernie Banks as a scout and then became the first African-American on a major league baseball coaching staff.
“Who has done more for baseball than this man?” said Banks, a Hall of Famer and the Cubs’ first black player.
“I can’t think of a single person more deserving than Buck to get into the Hall of Fame. Just look at the number of people he helped get into the hall. Who are the people that voted on this? How could they leave him out?”
“It is clear the Baseball Hall of Fame has made a terrible error in not inducting Buck on this ballot,” said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.). “I have no idea how you do not include Buck in the Hall of Fame.”
The fact that there is no explanation for O’Neil’s snub is no surprise. The Lords of Baseball always refuse to explain their foolish ways when it comes to Hall of Fame voting. This is also true in other sports.
Hall votes are the last bastion of white male domination in American sports and those that cast them make sure they remind baseball fans that they still have the power to hurt those with no power to stop them – including black baseball elders like Buck O’Neil.
