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Bud Fowler, Buck O'Neil, and Minnie Miñoso have been elected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
On Sunday (December 5), the famed Negro League baseball players joined three other candidates — Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, and Tony Oliva — to be chosen for the Hall of Fame's Class of 2022.
The six players will officially be inducted in Cooperstown, New York, on July 24, 2022.
Fowler, O'Neil, and Miñoso were three of the seven Negro League and pre-Negro League players who were being considered for induction into the Hall of Fame.
This year marked the first time O'Neil, Miñoso, and Fowler were considered for the Hall of Fame due to new rules that recognized the Negro Leagues as a major league. Last December, about 3,400 players' statistics were added to Major League Baseball's record books after Major League Baseball announced that it was "correcting a longtime oversight in the game's history."
O'Neil was a two-time All-Star first baseman who played 10 seasons with the Memphis Red Sox and Kansas City Monarchs. He was also the first Black coach in the National or American leagues history with Chicago. Prior to his death in 2006, O'Neil helped found the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.
Fowler, the earliest known African American professional baseball player, played for more than a dozen leagues before his death in 1913.
Miñoso, an All-Star third baseman with the New York Cubans, was a Cuban professional baseball player who began his baseball career in the Negro leagues in 1946. He was the first Black Cuban in the major leagues and the first Black player in White Sox history. He died in 2015.