The last time I saw him, Buck O’Neil was smiling and talking.

It was a gleaming smile as white as his silky hair. And of course he was talking baseball, telling all sorts of wonderful baseball stories with a voice that would sway with the lyrical rhythms of a Southern preacher.

The last time I saw ol’ Buck, we strolled through the halls of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, and his large, expressive hands would clap like thunder and his wonderful voice would cackle, dance and hum. If this was indeed the voice of a preacher, then inside the walls of the Kansas City baseball landmark – or inside the confines of any ballpark – ol’ Buck was in his church, and baseball was his religion.

Late Friday night, John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil died at age 94 in a Kansas City hospital, and baseball lost its most precious living treasure.

When I heard that Buck had died, the first thing I did was cry. But then I quickly remembered the last time I was with him, and the last time I saw him on TV, standing behind that podium in Cooperstown singing another sweet baseball song.

I wiped away the tears, just as he would have wanted me to. I’m glad that my lasting memory of him would involve baseball and a smile, because that was ol’ Buck.

He died knowing that he had barely missed out on the Hall of Fame, which probably hurt him deeply. But he never complained. When the 17 Negro League and pre-Negro League inductees were ushered into the Hall of Fame a few months ago, Buck was there to welcome them in. He had preached the gospel of the Negro Leagues for so long, and now this was the evidence that somebody was listening.

“Maybe that’s what God intended for me to do all along,” he said.

I remember telling him how I wanted him to be mad. I wanted him to be as angry as I was that they had done him wrong. But he wouldn’t go there. There were more important things to be bitter about. “If I was going to be angry about something in my life, I would have been angry ’cause they didn’t let me attend Sarasota High School or the University of Florida when I was growing up in the segregated South. I would have been angry because back then, I didn’t have a chance. But on this (Hall of Fame) vote, I had a chance. Someone just didn’t see fit to vote for me, that’s all.”

Well now, maybe in his death, somebody in baseball can get it right.

If the soul-less historians and pseudo-intellectuals couldn’t get it right by voting Buck into Cooperstown, maybe Bud Selig can correct their mistake by naming the Negro Leagues wing of the baseball Hall of Fame after ol’ Buck.

The John Jordan “Buck” O’Neil Wing.

If Selig doesn’t have the authority to do it on his own, he certainly has the political sway to influence the minds of people like Jane Forbes Clark, the chairman of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, to get the wheels turning. Saturday, Clark talked about how O’Neil was “one of the greatest ambassadors baseball has ever known. He was a giant of a man whose wisdom, kindness and generosity of spirit will live on forever in all those whom he touched and who touched him.”

Fine. If you believe that, put Buck’s name on a bronze plaque over the entry arch to the Negro Leagues wing.

No one deserves it more, because no one told the story of the Negro Leagues better.