KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Quite belatedly, Buck O’Neil on Sunday will be inducted in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
To be sure, it’s hard to get past the agonizing shame that he won’t be there to revel in it as he would have in 2006, when a process in part created for him to be immortalized went awry.
We’ll ache for his tangible presence. We’ll long for the missing sequel to the jubilant speech he gave then, even amid the personal snub, on behalf of the 17 former Negro Leagues players and executives being honored posthumously at the Hall of Fame. And we’ll be wistfully wishing we could hear him sing as he did there at the time, when he punctuated his talk, as he often did, by urging all in the crowd to hold hands and join him.
