To appreciate a potential shimmering light ahead, let’s start with a baseline point of contrast:
This week in the sad parade of events postponed or canceled amid the scourge of the COVD-19 coronavirus pandemic, another phase of the 100th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Negro Leagues has been shelved — a commemoration of the first game in Negro National League history in Indianapolis, where the Indianapolis ABCs played the Chicago American Giants on May 2, 1920.
Perhaps most movingly, the Saturday ceremony was to feature a tribute to the great Oscar Charleston that included replacing his nondescript gravestone with what Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick called a “proper and more fitting headstone” of marble.
Like so many Negro Leagues players, Kendrick said, Charleston toiled in relative anonymity and shouldn’t also be “buried in anonymity.”
Like so much of what had been planned, Kendrick considers this too special and important to allow it to be what he called “watered down.”
So it will be reset for a still-undetermined appropriate time as the NLBM basically recalibrates all of what it set out to do this year.
“So, we’re already thinking about how much of this will carry over into 2021 and (becoming) essentially ‘Negro Leagues 101,’” he said.
But that’s a course that feasibly could include something utterly remarkable: the induction at last of Buck O’Neil into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Having suffered the acute heartache absorbed by many when O’Neil unfathomably was snubbed in 2006, Kendrick knows by now not to take anything for granted and even to gird himself for disappointment.
But he also has taken a certain comfort in the understanding that O’Neil’s name has been discussed by the Hall of Fame’s “Eras committee” — most likely under the “Early Baseball” (prior to 1950) division … even though O’Neil defies categories and in a sense bestrides them all.
Thus he will be considered as the group refines its discussion along the way to creating ballots of 10 names (one for Early Baseball and another for the Golden Days, after 1950).
With no disruption on account of the pandemic, something that can’t be assured, the ballot would likely be set by early fall in time for voting by the 16-member committee at the Winter Meetings, tentatively scheduled for December in Dallas.
According to the Hall of Fame website, a quorum will consist of three-fourths of the total membership of the committee. In the absence of a quorum, it adds, a conference call with absent committee members will be permitted.
Under current guidelines, anyway, it will be 10 years before that committee meets again.
Meanwhile, under current conditions, Kendrick figures a pro-O’Neil result would have nearly as much meaning now as it would have in 2006.
