Buck Leonard: The Black Lou Gehrig : The Hall of Famer's Story in His Own Words

by Buck Leonard, James A. Riley

Tracing his life from its humble beginnings, the story of an accomplished baseball player who never dared to dream of the Hall of Fame furnishes an eyewitness account of the Negro leagues and a saga of the black experience.

Genres: Baseball

272 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 1995

Reviews

[Dick Hamilton · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good story about one of all time best baseball players whose career was limited to the Negro Leagues. It is clear that the story is in the author's own words, what comes across most to me is that Mr. Leonard did not spend a great deal of time lamenting the fact that he did not make more money and did not play in Major League Baseball. He presents as a man who was glad for what he had, what he achieved, and praised God for both. Today's players would do well to learn from his example.

[Tom Shrimplin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book to read to learn a little about the Negro Leaques. Get to know more about the players than just their records.

[Brett T · Rating 3 out of 5]

It seems like it will forever be Buck Leonard's fate to be known in terms of someone else. While playing for the Homestead Grays between 1934 and 1950, Leonard was called "the black Lou Gehrig" to pair with Josh Gibson, "the black Babe Ruth." Gibson and Leonard batted third and fourth for the Grays for many years and formed a very dangerous heart of the order for opposing pitchers. Nowadays, Leonard might be more likely to be thought of as "the other Buck," to avoid confusion with the Kansas City Monarchs' Buck O'Neil, one of the best-known ambassadors of the Negro Leagues during the 1990s and 2000s.

But Leonard was his own man, working from age 13 on to help support his widowed mother and five brothers and sisters before deciding to try to make a living playing baseball. He hooked on with the Grays in 1934 and began posting stellar batting averages; despite Gibson's deadly power few tried to pitch around him because Leonard would make them pay for the move. Leonard was offered a major-league contract in 1952 but figured that at age 45 he would not perform well enough to continue making the argument that African-American players deserved the same shot at baseball glory as everyone else.

Touches like that are some of the best parts of Riley's 1995 co-authored autobiography of Leonard, in which the author serves more as an interview transcriber than anything else. While Leonard is clear that many of the Negro League's best players could have excelled on any major league team and some of them, like Gibson or Satchel Paige, might have dominated, he has no illusions about the playing level of the leagues overall. Few Negro League teams would have regularly competed for titles if they had been transferred directly into the majors, Leonard said, because the mid-level Negro League players didn't match their journeymen American and National League counterparts.

The reality of segregation in the US during these years also meant, Leonard said, that most Negro League players did not spend a lot of their time wishing they could play in the majors. That's probably the most damning testimony to the evil of the practice -- some of the sport's greatest players simply accepted they'd never be given the chance to show themselves as such until they were too old for it to matter.

Leonard's hometown had not offered high school for African-Americans so his education had ended with the eighth grade. During his playing career, though, he had earned his GED and following his playing days worked for schools and founded a realty company. He was also an owner of the minor-league Rocky Mountain Leafs. Leonard died in 1997 at the age of 90. He had been elected to the Hall of Fame in 1972 along with his late teammate Gibson.

Original available link: here.