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I have another reason for sticking around: Sometimes I think the Lord has kept me on this earth as long as He has so I can bear witness to the Negro leagues. I'm fortunate enough to be a member of the Veterans Committee for the Baseball Hall of Fame. Monte Irvin and I are the only Negro league players on the committee now that Roy Campanella has passed on, and for years I've been putting forward the names of the players I think belong in the Hall.
Oh, we've been represented very well in Cooperstown ever since 1971, when Satchel Paige became the first black man to be named to the Hall based on his Negro league career alone.
Josh Gibson and my name-sake, the great
Buck Leonard, who played first base like I did and was our answer to Lou Gehrig, went in the next year, followed by Monte Irvin, Cool Papa Bell, Judy Johnson, and Oscar Charleston.
These men were elected by a special committee set up by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn specifically to nominate Negro league ballplayers. When the committee was done with its work in 1977, it fell to the Veterans Committee to make the nominations, and over the next four years John Henry Lloyd, the great Cuban Martin Dihigo, and Rube Foster, the father of the Negro leagues, got in. But then things slowed down. It took until 1987 before Ray Dandridge made it in, and then nothing happened for eight more years.
The problem was, the Veterans Committee votes on all kinds of managers, umpires, baseball executives, and the ballplayers who were passed over by the baseball writers when they were eligible for admission. The committee could elect only up to two people each year, and, being one of the eighteen people on the committee, I could see how tough it was for any of the Negro league players to get the 75 percent of the vote they needed. Listen, it's hard enough to get fourteen people to agree on anything.
But the Negro league ballplayers were at a greater disadvantage because the other candidates were getting a second crack, while the Negro leaguers had never been voted on at all by the writers, because Negro league players aren't on the original ballot. They don't get all the publicity that other players get for making it or just missing when the writers' votes are announced every year. So I got to thinking, and I talked to the committee and the Hall of Fame people about it, and we were able to change the rules to make it a little easier for the Negro league players.
It sounds strange, but I told them, "You got to start putting us in a separate category the way you did fifty years ago." They call that ironical, but all I know is that it worked out. There are about a dozen men left who deserve their own plaques, but the one guy I was concentrating on was Leon Day, a great little pitcher and a fast little outfielder for the Newark Eagles, among other teams. The reason I wanted Leon in was that he was still alive, living down in Baltimore in ill health.
So, last March, when the Veterans Committee elected Richie Ashburn and William Hulbert, we also elected Leon Day. Leon was in the hospital when he got the word, and a week later he passed away, knowing he was a Hall of Famer. We made it just in time with Leon.
The problem is, the Hall only gave us five years to rectify this unfair situation, which isn't enough time, because we've got more than four players who should be in the Hall of Fame. Just off the top of my head, I can rattle off about a dozen, pitchers like Bullet Joe Rogan and Smokey Joe Williams and Willie Foster and Hilton Smith and Cannonball Redding. Hitters like Turkey Stearnes and Mule Suttles and Louis Santop and Biz Mackey and Willard Brown and Ted Strong, and slick fielders like Willie Wells. There are 82 players from the major leagues during the years the Negro leagues existed who are in the Hall; it stands to reason that more than eleven of us were good enough to be worthy of the honor, too.
Some folks are saying maybe I belong in that Hall, too. But I'm honest with myself about it. If people say it, it's probably because of the Ken Burns series, not because they saw me play ball. The truth is, I don't belong; I was a very good ballplayer, but very good ballplayers don't belong in the Hall of Fame. Great ballplayers do. Oh, I'd like to think I might get in the Hall one day, but maybe as a manager or for other contributions that I made to baseball. Right now, my job is seeing to it that the guys I know are qualified to get in do get in.
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