Decisions, Decisions: Snubbing Biz Mackey

We’ve got a big day coming up here on November 15 (moved back from November 1 for a variety of reasons, among them, believe it or not, the weather). It’s the day my book, Cooperstown’s Back Door: A History of Negro Leaguers in the Baseball Hall of Fame, is published and available to purchase. I’m pretty excited about that, and hope everyone who enjoys my work here will give it a shot.

The book is about the journey that the greats of the Negro Leagues had to endure in order to finally be recognized by the Hall of Fame. The most obvious part of that was the first step, the one that got Satchel Paige elected in 1971. He had famous advocates like Bob Feller and Ted Williams, and broadly-read writers like Dick Young, publicly making his case, and once baseball’s new commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, joined that cause, the Hall of Fame’s leadership finally caved in.

There was a lot of drama around that decision, as you can imagine, and a few half-measures that were attempted by the powers that be, and all of that is covered in the book. In the decades that followed the dam breaking, the Hall of Fame dragged their feet repeatedly in doing anything more than the bare minimum to include other Negro Leaguers, and that resulted in a variety of really questionable decisions. Those are covered, too.

I want to focus on one of those decisions, because it’s illustrative of the commitment to inequality the Hall’s leaders and the voting members of the Veterans Committee demonstrated during these years.

In 1984, Rick Ferrell was elected to the Hall of Fame. The class that year was: