When he was away from the common fan, whose sincerity he appreciated but whose demands consumed the last years of his life, Buck O’Neil would slip into a ballpark as quietly as a celebrity could. He would find his seat behind home plate, where, surrounded by baseball men, he would cease to be Buck the legend and become Buck the Baseball Man. Among members of his tribe, he would dispense with the public Buck and become as shrewd and vulgar as he wanted to be.

The nostalgic population of the baseball would perhaps be frightened away by the blade of opinion that permeates inside the game. No matter the mileage, Buck still derived incredible joy from his true love of evaluating players, the very argument that makes professional baseball what it is.

For years, Buck had scouted amateur players with great success, but his method was not one that would be welcomed today. He carried nothing but a stopwatch and used it only when he decreed the player’s talent earned him the right to be judged. There would be no paperwork or scouting reports. Buck’s stature was such that a paper trail was not necessary, but when he believed a player could play, he spoke with the swift incantations of a high priest. He would validate the player with crisp praise or ruthlessly discard him with liberal usage of the word ‘horseshit.’ In truth, Buck didn’t scout. He anointed.

He’d survey the field, and then, as he raised his hand and pointed his index finger, the baseball men would lean in to be closer to the judgment of their master. “No, no, no, no,” Buck would say, marking off each position player by the direction of his finger. Upon his finger arriving in the direction of the player would anoint, his words would be his gavel. “Yes,” he would simply say.

The famous ‘Yes, No,’ trials of Buck O’Neil were legendary inside the game, because yes was usually right. Buck’s skill was also in his memory, which was vivid, rich and detailed. A natural storyteller, Buck spoke like a writer writes, conveying tiny details that were able to provoke sensory images of power (“Pow, pow pow!” he described the sound of Josh Gibson hitting), speed (“Cool Papa Bell had tiny feet, but that don’t matter when you move ‘em that fast!”) and the elusive combination of power and speed. “I’m going to throw you a pee at the knee!” he’d say, mimicking Satchel Paige.

There was a team photograph of Buck’s beloved Kansas City Monarchs that had been passed down through a family. It came into the hands of the wife of an outfielder playing for the Kansas City Royals in 1992. This photograph would soon become more than a memento for Chris Gwynn, who sought Buck when he discovered the existence of this photograph.

“My wife’s great aunt grew up in Kansas City,” Gwynn explained. “When I came to play in Kansas City, she was in her 80s. She pulled out this picture. And I still don’t know how she got it. I didn’t know what year it was, but it was the Kansas City Monarchs. I said, ‘Wow, I gotta show Buck.’ So I came up to him and said, ‘Buck, I got this picture. I want you to see it.’ He said, ‘OK, bring it to the park tomorrow.’”

“The next day, Buck looked at this picture. Tears started to well up in his eyes. He knew everybody in the picture and their nicknames. He knew it was the 1929 Kansas City Monarchs. The kid who was the bat boy was the bat boy after him.”

During games in Kansas City, Buck could often be found sitting in his seat behind home plate. During batting practice, he would mill around the infield grass chatting with players behind the cage. To Chris’s astonishment, Buck remembered every name in the photograph, every player and every story worth telling. He remembered that these men could play. Yes, yes, yes and yes.

Gwynn had come up with the Dodgers. He had Buck write down the names of the players in the picture, then called the Dodgers team photographer and asked him if he could reproduce the photo. Gwynn forgot about it, and after the 1993 season, Kansas City released him. Gwynn had more pressing matters to attend to, namely, finding another playing job. He found his new opportunity back with the Dodgers. One of his first orders of business was to finish having reproductions of the photo made.

“The photographer made four copies for me. And it is outstanding! Most of the guys are black, some of them are Cuban, and they are all just strong, strong men. They look like they’ve been working on the railroad. There’s so much character in that picture. I sent it to Buck. Later that year, I was in Candlestick Park, and the Giants were honoring the Negro Leagues. Guess who walked out on the field? Buck. He knew I was in the other dugout. He pointed to me and said, ‘Come here, come here!’ He gave me this gigantic hug and said, ‘Man, that was so outstanding.’ He was as happy as he could be. I haven’t been back to Kansas City, but from what I hear, that picture is hanging the Negro League museum there. I have a print on my wall at home, and every day, I glance at it.”

“Some people who played then would probably say that when Jackie Robinson went over, that it was the demise of the Negro Leagues because some black players didn’t get a chance to play anymore. There’s mixed feelings, but Buck would always be telling us stories about what it was like to play with Satchel Paige. It didn’t matter who you were. You could be a fan off the street, you could be a big league player, you could be a manager or a General Manager. If you cared about baseball and you sat with Buck, he would have you hypnotized.”

You won’t find Buck’s name in the player pages of the Baseball Encyclopedia. In the last year of his life, a collection of statistically-obsessed box score researchers denied him admittance to the Baseball Hall of Fame because they deemed his numbers to be inferior to other Negro League players. But in doing this, they denied his spirit, and the very kinship that he imparted onto thousands of people who he hoped would care about the game the way he did. You can keep Buck from the Hall of Fame, but only those who denied him looked bad. Like Paige, Gibson and Bell before him, it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t die with some degree of a broken heart. The man who celebrated the walls that came down, and embraced the history that had prevented him from having his own as a player, will be left to history as more than a photograph hanging on the wall. He’ll carry on in oral history, which grows stronger with each generation. Buck never complained. When his life was finished, it was easy to realize that, all along, it had been he who had been anointed.

Buck O’Neil died on October 6, 2006 at the age of 94.