Opinion: Buck O'Neil is finally a Hall of Famer. That it took so long is another stain on baseball.

Baseball righted an egregious wrong Sunday by voting the late John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil into the Hall of Fame.

O’Neil was a player and manager in the Negro Leagues, mostly with the Kansas City Monarchs, and became a scout for the Chicago Cubs in the 1950s. He was the first Black coach in the major leagues when the Cubs hired him in 1962.

His greatest legacy, however, is the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, which he founded in Kansas City in 1990.

What can’t be undone is the travesty that O’Neil is no longer around to give his own Hall of Fame speech. He died Oct. 6, 2006, a month before his 95th birthday – the same year a committee inducted 17 other individuals who had contributed to Negro Leagues, but not O’Neil.

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