O'Neil played most of his baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs and retired as an active player when the team was sold in 1955. He became major league baseball's first African-American scout, working for the Chicago Cubs and helping them sign Hall of Famer Lou Brock (Because they were the Cubs, they traded Brock to the St. Louis Cardnals. Not everyone who worked for Chicago was as smart as their scout). He became a coach for the Cubs as well, again the first African-American to do so in the majors.
The 1996 collaboration with Steve Wulf and David Conrads, I Was Right on Time, records O'Neil's own reminiscing about these times, as well as his days scouting for the Kansas City Royals beginning in 1988. It covers his efforts to establish the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and to win recognition for the top talents among his fellow players. The Major League Baseball Hall of Fame sports the plaques of several Negro League stars present only because O'Neil worked to make the sport aware of them.
The title comes from O'Neil's view of his own life. He notes that people often seem to think he was cheated by playing during baseball's segregated era, unable to match his talent against the best in the game and just a shade too old to make the jump to the majors after Jackie Robinson started for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. No, said the ever-positive O'Neil. Who's to say he didn't match up against the best he might have seen, and far from being "too early," he considered himself a blessed and lucky man who was "right on time."
That gracious and optimistic attitude as much as anything else gave O'Neil renown in the sunset of his life that he never had during his playing days. It makes reading Right on Time a pleasure, even if the history comes from the viewpoint of just one man and the tone is more remembering than reporting. A baseball library without it is much poorer.
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The rest of the time, Fireovid pitched in the minor leagues, spending a lot of time at AAA-level ball not unlike a pitching version of Bull Durham's Crash Davis. He kept a journal of his 1990 season with the Montreal Expos' AAA affiliate, the Indianapolis Indians, and with the help of co-author Mark Winegardner turned it into the 1991 book The 26th Man. The title refers to the major league roster limit of 25 players -- the 26th man is the one not quite good enough to catch on and stick permanently but too good to just give up and go home.
That image fuels much of Fireovid's journal as he realizes the end of whatever career he may have in baseball is approaching. Indeed, he only pitched one more game in "The Show," as players refer to the big league teams, a 1992 win for the Texas Rangers.
The most interesting parts of 26th Man are the insider looks at what kinds of decisions teams make about the players they promote and the ones they let go. Talent tells, but so do many more undefineable qualities. And as with any endeavor that involves human beings, sometimes choices that seem smart and get made for all the right reasons turn out badly, and the universal sport of second-guessing commences. Would any of the teams for which he played have been better off bringing up Fireovid instead of someone else they did promote? Maybe, but there's no way of knowing, so maybe not, as well. Despite that underlying echo of melancholy, there's a lot of fun in reading his story and often wry observations on what it's like to get paid to play a game.
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Oh debuted with the Giants as a pitcher but was moved into the everyday lineup as his hitting skills began to show and his pitching skills never did. He hit the ball often as well as far, posting a lifetime .301 batting average, but really only blossomed a few years into his career after being coached by Hiroshi Arakawa, both in baseball fundamentals and Zen philosophy. His 1984 collaboration with David Falkner, A Zen Way of Baseball, focuses on how this meditative school of Buddhist thought helped him focus on baseball activities and improve his ability.
The book is an interesting exploration of how a very Eastern way of understanding things matches with a very Western activity. It's also a great story of how Oh himself survived prejudice in post-WWII Japan. His father is Chinese and he holds dual Chinese and Japanese citizenship; people who mixed ethnicities in vanquished and war-devastated Japan weren't among anyone's favorites.
The sport of the war's victors blossomed after the Nippon Baseball League formed in 1950, with holdover teams from the earlier Japanese Baseball League holding much of the attention. Oh's story also offers a picture of the larger stage of how the more structured and reserved Japanese society changes the way baseball is played there.
Today, with Japanese baseball's major stars finding their way to American and National League teams, it's hard to imagine that someone like Oh would have stayed in Japan for his entire career. In that way, his biography is look at a past moment in time, as much history as biography, and well worth the time for the baseball fan.
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