I Was Right On Time

by Buck O'Neil

There is nothing greater for a human being than to get his body to react to all the things one does on a ballfield. It’s as good as sex; it’s as good as music. It fills you up. Waste no tears for me. I didn’t come along too early—I was right on time.

While the major leagues relied on the longball that Babe Ruth brought to the game, black baseball was fast and aggressive,

with lots of stealing, bunting, hit-and-run play. It was the game Jackie Robinson learned and then brought to the majors twenty-four years later—speed, intelligence, unbridled aggressiveness on the basepaths—and

I always claim that Willie Mays was the greatest major league player I have ever seen … but then I pause and say that

Oscar Charleston was even better.

a tremendous left-handed hitter, but he could also bunt, steal a hundred bases a year, and cover center field as we...

Andrew “Rube” Foster, who’s often called the father of black baseball, although he came along after black baseball had been around for fifty years.

Rube Foster was black baseball starting in the early part of this century.

Only a man like Rube, with his genius and ambition, could have established the Negro National League in 1920. He was so astute and so far ahead of his time.

Baseball didn’t expand until 1962, but Rube was thinking expansion in 1920.

Some you’ve got to stroke, some you’ve got to challenge to get the best out of them. But the most important rule was that every player on a team was equal. That rule stayed with me through the years.

got an offer to join the Miami Giants. It seems like half the teams in black baseball were called the Giants.

Bacharach Giants, the Lincoln Giants,

the Brooklyn Royal Giants, the Brooklyn Cuban Giants, the Cuban X Giants, the Philadelphia Giants, the Pittsburgh Giants, the Chicago Giants, the Chicago American Giants, Cole’s American Giants, Gilkerson’s Union Giants, the Celeron Acme Colored Giants, the Shreveport Acme Giants, the Page Fence Giants, the St. Louis Giants, the Harrisburg Gia...

Giants, the Twin City Giants, the Quaker Giants of New York, the Zulu Canniba...

Holy shit that's a giant list...sure to truncated as too long.

Giants became a code word. If

you saw a placard in a store window or an advertisement in the newspaper announcing that the River City Giants were coming to town to play the local semipro team, you knew right away that the visiting team was a black one.

I actually got a salary for playing baseball: ten dollars a week, plus room and board.

You can imagine what Harlem represented to a fourteen-year-old boy from the Deep South. Any black kid in the world would have had to have heard

of Harlem.

Miss Booker used to tell us about the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance, like Langston Hughes, and the great musicians like blues singer Bessie Smi...

you better believe I went to see showtime at the Apollo. Me and everybody else in town. Uncle Handy knew all the places to go. But to me, Harlem was more than great attractions. It was a state of mind. In Sarasota, you knew your place. But in Harlem, I didn’t know anything about segregation.

didn’t have to go to the back seat or back door for nothing.

zoot suit, the kind made famous by Cab Calloway, with the big flaps down the back. I wore it and then I took it home to Sarasota and wore it some more. I remember it so well: Oxford gray. Wide at the shoulders and tight at the hips. Made me feel like a movie star.

now I was a man, twenty-three years old, and for a man Harlem had added meaning. You had to look good for the ladies, like you knew what you were doing. So when we left Sarasota, I was the guy in charge of telling these older guys about Harlem.

we stayed at the Woodside Hotel, which was another dream come true.

The Woodside was where all the black ballteams stayed. The big bands, too. That was a jumping joint, a lot of action, and Count Basie immortalized it in his song “Jumpin’ at the Woodside.”

going to Yankee Stadium for the first time to watch the New York Black Yankees and the New York Cubans play in a four-team Negro league doubleheader. Black baseball was a matter of great pride in the black community, and it was important for black celebrities to be

associated with the game.

Negro league ball was one of the black arts, like jazz and the blues. Louis Armstrong owned his own team in New Orleans, the Smart Nine, and the Black Yanke...

favorite player was David “Showboat” Thomas, the flashiest first baseman I have ever seen. The Cubans had the great Martin Dihigo, the only player to be elected to the Mexican, Cuban, and American Baseball Halls of Fame.

one of the pitchers for the Cubans was a left-hander named Luis Tiant, the father of the Luis Tiant

Negro league all-stars played teams headed up by Dizzy Dean or Bob Feller, guys could make more money in thirty days than they made all season. Satchel was a money tree for all of us, and for our game.

Cool Papa was the fastest man I’ve ever seen. He was faster than Maury Wills and Lou Brock and Mickey Mantle when Mickey had good legs. He was faster than Bo Jackson and Kenny Lofton.

baserunning isn’t only about speed. It’s about technique, cutting the corners and keeping your balance. And Cool Papa, he was a master at all of that.

didn’t have but the one car, and we had eleven ballplayers. So what we did was, we put three guys into the front seat, three more in the jump seat, three in the back seat, and two guys

out on the running boards.

after you would go about 250 miles, you’d stop and two other guys would come out and the two on the running boards would come in. We’d rotate that way.

sounds a lot like the Bingo Long story. And it was. It was a lot like a circus act. Man, I was starting to think I had joined Ringling Brothers after all.

hoboed on that trip, too. Caught a freight train. That was when we lost the automobile.

we had to get to Wichita Falls, Texas, to play a team there called the Black Spudders—this was potato country, you see—on June 19.

celebrated by the blacks in the South as Emancipation Day, the day in 1863 when the last slaves in west

Texas were notified of their freedom.

got to be a fair country pool player. When we got stranded in Wichita Falls, I collected the little bit of money we had and started playing some nine-ball. I did pretty well, too. With the four or five dollars I made, we bought some groceries—beans, rice, cornmeal, bread, white pork.

it’s not generally known that out in the heartland and in the West, black baseball had a good base of white fans.

no big-league teams of their own, knew there was another “big-league” level of baseball around, and they loved to come watch black teams.

Satchel was blazing in Wichita, winning all four of his games and striking out sixty batters, which I hear is still the tournament record.

Satchel Paige had pitches

that included the bat-dodger, the two-hump blooper, the four-day creeper, the dipsy-do, the Little Tom, the Long Tom, the bee ball, the wobbly ball, the hurry-up ball and the nothin’ ball.

Baseball is better than sex. It is better than music, although I do believe jazz comes in a close second. It does fill you up.