I Was Right On Time

by Buck O'Neil

spring of ’36 I hooked up with Welch and his players in Monroe. The Crawfords were also there, and they had Satchel back, which gave them five future Hall-of-Famers: Paige, Gibson, Bell, Johnson, and Charleston.

first time I faced my future friend. He was a pure flame-thrower back then—someone once clocked his fastball at 106 miles per hour. I couldn’t tell you if he was throwing the bee

ball or the hurry-up ball because it went so fast I couldn’t see it.

Satchel of course.

In terms of Negro league history, Mr. Wilkinson took black baseball into new territory.

he came up with the idea of a portable lighting system for night games. I do believe that if it wasn’t for those lights, Negro

baseball wouldn’t have survived the Depression. Those lights were so popular that other teams would rent them from Wilkie when the Monarchs weren’t playing.

What Wilkie did was mortgage his house to buy, for $100,000, a portable system he

could fold up, put on six trucks, and erect wherever the Monarchs stopped.

Wilkie correctly figured that nighttime was the best time for working people to see games And, again, it wasn’t until 1935

that the major leagues made the same discovery.

the Negro American League, was about to start up in 1937, and the Memphis Red Sox and the Monarchs were going to be rivals in the league. So he talked to the manager of the Red Sox, and they bought me from the Acme Giants.

Certainly not the Boston RedSox...

They paid me ninety dollars a month, no matter the crowds, which was quite a step up from the thirty or so a month I got playing percentage ball with the Acme Giants.

Larry Brown was a great defensive catcher who once threw Ty Cobb out stealing five straight times in Cuba

contracts only came in after Jackie Robinson went to the majors and the owners tried to protect their players from being taken by white teams with no compensation, like Jackie was from the Monarchs.

the owners practically showed us the way about every man being for himself, because they used to raid each other’s teams all the time.

I was mostly a straight player all along. I left the clowning to some of the other players on the Zulus. But I did have to wear the war paint and the skirt.

The Zulus might have taken away a little of my dignity, but even in that kind of setting, a tradition was being handed down.

Shadow ball went way back in our game, and the guys who could do it best were looked up to. I saw the best of all time in Goose

Tatum,

You may know his name from the Harlem Globetrotters, but Goose played baseball just as well as he did basketball, and he was just as funny in each. Goose was a...

the catcher would hold the ball and pretend to toss it to the guy hitting the ball, who’d hit an imaginary ball. And the fielders would go through this whole routine where they’d make like they were throwing it around. They’d be doing all kinds of tricks until people realized what they were doing—and it would take a while, because they were so good at it.

playing for the Kansas City Monarchs in the late thirties and early forties, staying in the Streets Hotel at 18th and Paseo, and coming down to the dining room where Cab Calloway and Billie Holiday and Bojangles Robinson

As somebody once put it, “People are afraid to go to sleep in Kansas City because they might miss something.”

At 18th and Vine, you couldn’t toss a baseball without hitting a musician, and you couldn’t whistle a tune without having a ballplayer join in. Baseball and jazz, two of the best inventions known to man, walked hand in hand along Vine Street.

New Orleans might have been the birthplace of jazz, but Kansas City is where it grew up. And the same goes for Negro league baseball, which started on the East Coast but came of age in KC.

The son of a college president, Wilkie played a little cornfield

ball in Iowa, until the manager of his semipro team took off with all the money.

went on to organize the All Nations, a barnstorming mixed-race and mixed-gender team—his second baseman was a woman named Carrie Nation—that traveled alo...

my favorite Satchel Paige quote is this: “Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.”