Paying My Respects to Buck O'Neil

I spent much of the morning in Kansas City's Jazz District, particularly at the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. I didn't realize that the Negro Leagues Museum was in Kansas City until I heard this morning that former baseball great Buck O'Neil died yesterday, just shy of his 95th birthday. O'Neil, the first African American to coach in the Majors—joining the Cubs' staff in the 1960s—was largely responsible for founding the museum. As you can see in the picture to the right, Buck's Kansas City fans (O'Neil played much of his career for the city's Monarchs) set up a small memorial outside the museum. Sadly, O'Neil had not yet been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame before he died.

My visit to the Negro Leagues Museum was very pleasant. I especially enjoyed overhearing a trio of older white men tell stories about Satchel Paige from when Satch was in his prime. The museum isn't terribly big, and you can see just about everything in a few hours. (If I didn't have a flight to catch this afternoon, I would have also toured the Jazz Museum, which is in the same complex.)

Here are some nuggets of information I picked up at the Negro Leagues Museum:

• Night baseball was invented in the Negro Leagues, where teams were playing games under the lights five years before the Major Leagues caught on.


• "Cool Papa" Bell was once tracked running around the bases in 12 seconds, a record that still stands.


• A quote from Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe of the Pittsburgh Crawfords posted in the museum reads, "We used to play four [games] in one day just about every Fourth of July. I'd pitch two and catch two. The way I made it was to sleep the 35 minutes between each game."


• During the Depression, when attendance at all sporting events suffered, many of the best black players made a living playing in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Venezuela. Games in Havana reportedly drew an average of 40,000 fans. Player Willie Wells said of the experience, "We live in the best hotels, eat in the best restaurants, and can go any place we care to. . . . We don't enjoy such privileges in the United States." Some Latin American teams paid players better than their Major League counterparts.


• Toni Hall, who played fifty games for the Indianapolis Clowns, was the first woman ever to play pro baseball. Another Toni, Toni Stone, was an adept second base-woman for the Clowns and the Kansas City Monarchs, in the 1950s, when many of the Negro Leagues' best players had left for the Majors. She batted .267 in 1953.


• Two of my hometowns had teams in the Negro Leagues: Indianapolis had the storied Clowns and ABCs; Nashville had the Elite Giants (who later moved to Cleveland then to Baltimore). My other hometown, Evansville, had the Colored Braves, an all-black baseball team that sometimes played teams from the major Negro Leagues.