Negro League great Buck O'Neil dies
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Buck O'Neil, a batting champion in the Negro Leagues before becoming the first black to serve as a major league coach, has died. He was 94.
The beloved national figure as the unofficial goodwill spokesman for the Negro Leagues died Friday night in a Kansas City hospital, eight months after he fell one vote short of the Hall of Fame.
Long popular in Kansas City, O'Neil he rocketed into national stardom in 1994 when filmmaker Ken Burns featured him in his groundbreaking documentary "Baseball."
He saw Babe Ruth hit home runs and watched Roger Clemens throw strikes. He talked hitting with Lou Gehrig and Ichiro Suzuki.
"I can't remember a time when I did not want to make my living in baseball, or a time when that wasn't what I did get to do," he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2003. "God was very good to old Buck."
Positive attitude and enthusiasm marked baseball ambassador
John "Buck" O'Neil, one of a handful of survivors from the Negro Leagues, grew up too soon to benefit during his life's prime from a country that went on to dismantle the color barrier that stood in front of him.
"A steady hitter, O'Neil won the 1946 Negro American League batting title with an average of .353 to lead the Monarchs to another pennant," wrote baseball historian James A. Riley in "The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues."
O'Neil played baseball in Cuba and Mexico, and he managed the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro Leagues powerhouse, through some of its best years. He later coached and scouted for the Chicago Cubs, though he never got an opportunity to manage in the bigs.
Barred by skin color from a career in the Majors, he toiled in Negro Leagues through its glory years in the 1930s and '40s, but when Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby opened the door to the big leagues in 1947, O'Neil was too old to walk through it.
Yet he'd often tell people, "I was right on time." He'd say his life was absent regrets, and that's a belief that might well be O'Neil's endearing message to others. It should be a message that Americans, black or white, cling to.
Negro League Baseball Museum
ESPN interview.
Good bye, Buck.
