This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro National League, the first organized major league for black baseball players and the predecessor of the Negro American League that lasted into the 1960s.
MLB has been celebrating the anniversary in numerous ways this season, and on Sunday, that included a Negro League patch/logo on all players’ uniforms, lineup cards, and bases league-wide, as well as an appearance by the Negro League Baseball Museum’s president, Bob Kendrick, on ESPN’s Sunday night telecast of the Yankees-Red Sox game.
Late Sunday night, after that game, New York Post columnist Mike Vaccaro, who wrote a column over the weekend about his 1998 visit to the Negro League Museum, joined Lori Rubinson on WFAN to discuss the anniversary and the friendship he developed with Buck O’Neil while working in Kansas City.
“Honestly, getting to know Buck very well was one of the great privileges of my career. He was everywhere in Kansas City – he was at every game behind home plate, and the stories he told were gold,” Vaccaro said. “He had a renaissance of sorts when Ken Burns featured him in his ‘Baseball’ documentary, and that was what it was like to talk with him all the time. When they refurbished the Negro League Museum to the jewel is it now, I got to walk around it with him, and it was an incredible afternoon. Essentially, you walk among these statues of guys who made the Negro League what it was. Buck made it his mission to make it a permanent part of baseball conversation until the day he died.”
It’s a relationship that runs so deep that Vaccaro, who is known for deftly bashing the teams he covers when they deserve it, noted that the Baseball Hall of Fame’s omission of O’Neil in its blanket induction of Negro Leaguers took the cake as one of his most vitriolic pieces.
“One of the angriest columns I’ve ever written in my career was when the Hall of Fame inducted about 15 or 20 guys who deserved admission, but they didn’t include Buck O’Neil, who certainly deserved it,” Vaccaro said. “They later tried to make up for it posthumously, but there’s no greater tribute to what Buck did (than the Negro League Museum).”
Several Negro League stars went on the play in Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, but there were many who didn’t get that same opportunity, and more who were past their primes by the time they did.
So, who is the one player Vaccaro would have loved to watch, specifically in MLB, in his prime?
“It would have to be Satchel Paige…he did spend some time in the Majors, but he was winning games on guile and cleverness by them,” Vaccaro said. “But in the research I’ve done, there were times when the white press would go to watch him play, and they understood that he would’ve been a star if he had been given the opportunity to play in the Majors in his prime. The stories say he was as good at pitching a baseball as anyone who has ever lived, and I would have loved to have seen that.”
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