Buck Leonard

Amazing Grace

One of an occasional series

Buck Leonard, 1907–1997

The major leagues had Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The Negro leagues had Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard, and the latter pair may have been the more dynamic duo.

Buck Leonard could hit just about anything, but he lived for fastballs. In the words of fellow Negro League great Monte Irvin, you had a better chance of sneaking a sunrise past a rooster than slipping a fastball past his bat. He didn’t just sit on fastballs. He stalked them.

But with Leonard, it went further. Everything went further. It had to.

The formal education of Walter Fenner Leonard ended at the age of 14 because in his birthplace of Rocky Mount, NC, there was no high school “available” for black students.

While white kids his age were in class, Leonard was making stockings in a textile mill, shining shoes in a train station and working on a railroad as his father had. When the Great Depression came along, he found himself out of work as well as out of school.

That led to baseball.

His playing career began with semipro clubs in Rocky Mount before moving on to a Negro League team in Brooklyn in 1933. The next year brought him to Pittsburgh, where he joined perhaps the most legendary assemblage of talent ever to play the game, the Homestead Grays.

To learn more about Buck Leonard:

Baseball Library

Negro Lgs Baseball Museum

How Stuff Works: Buck Leonard

Homestead Grays

How talented were these guys? Eleven Grays members are now enshrined in Cooperstown, 12 if you count their owner and founder.

Leonard, a first baseman, batted clean–up behind catcher Josh Gibson, and together, they both cleaned up on opposing pitching. They quickly became known in black newspapers around the country as “the Thunder Twins.”

If Gibson didn’t lead their league in homeruns in a given year, it was usually because Leonard did. Unlike Gibson, however, Leonard wasn’t hitting moonshots. He was a line–drive hitter who just happened to have a lot of his line drives clear the outfield walls.

His lifetime batting average in the Negro leagues was .341. In exhibition matches against major league pitchers, he was .382.

In 1948, the year the Grays beat the Birmingham Black Barons, Leonard batted .395.

Poor Birmingham. All they had was some young kid named Willie Mays…

Gibson was already being called the black Babe Ruth, so it didn’t take long for Leonard, being a first baseman, to be referred to as the black Lou Gehrig. Except that those who saw both men play would tell you that Leonard was the better fielder.

A lot of Negro League first basemen were clowns on the field, making goofy–looking catches calculated to draw laughs from the crowds. Not Buck Leonard. A fielder compared to Hal Chase and George Sisler, he played the game for real, not for laughs.

In the dugout, he was a loyal, dependable teammate whose quiet, easygoing manner made him a steadying influence. Gibson might have been the Grays’ greatest hitter and Martin Dihigo their best overall talent, but it assing were pitchers half his age.

But making sure that talented black players got a shot at the majors was too important to Buck Leonard to risk setting back that effort with anything less than his very best, so he said no.

Juxtaposed against today’s generation of selfish, egocentric and largely classless athletes, it was a remarkably gracious gesture.

In a sense, though, Leonard was lucky. Unlike so many other Negro League greats, he lived to see Major League Baseball finally grant him the recognition he deserved. He was enshrined in Cooperstown in 1972, the same year that Josh Gibson posthumously entered the Hall of Fame.

He remains the only Negro League first baseman in the Hall.