I came late to the party. The legacy of black baseball had been cemented long before I was drawn to its lore. I didn't make that love connection until 2002, the year I first visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City.

In my early discussions with people there, I kept referring to the museum as a Hall of Fame, which everybody politely corrected me on. They reminded me that the Baseball Hall of Fame was in Cooperstown, N.Y., which is where all the stars of Negro Leagues baseball should also be.

The museum is a tribute to the men who made the game thrive in an era when color kept them from plying their skills in the Major Leagues. To Satchel, to Cool Papa, to Josh, to Smokey Joe and Biz and Double Duty, names that might have been lost forever if not for the museum. Yet no one who saw these men play could really doubt they were as good as the big leaguers of the day, and they had one man alive to keep those stories of black baseball fresh.

His name was Buck O'Neil. He was a blood-and-guts icon who was, through all of the museum's formative years, its face, its voice, its link to yesteryear. Buck was the museum's ambassador of goodwill, spreading the gospel of black baseball wherever it needed to be spread. And that was seemingly everywhere among a growing population of black sports fans who had loosened their hold on the game.

But Buck kept their grip from breaking free altogether, and Buck did it in his role as chairman of the baseball museum in the heart of the city's black community. Thanks to Buck O'Neil, the place was a shiny gem among unpolished diamonds.

For that alone, the museum owed him whatever fame it had. For whatever the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum is today, it is that because of Buck O'Neil, whose death, at 94, in 2006 left a void at the top of the organization.

One man's death shouldn't kill an organization, and the museum forged ahead without the man who built it. Its board of directors hired a new leader to run the organization -- a man with no ties to black baseball's past to steer it into the future with the steady hands that had always marked its past leadership team.

It was a recipe for mischief.

As the museum heads into its third decade, Greg Baker, almost a year into his job as executive director, has decided to chart a new course. He's forging a strategy that doesn't have Buck's shadow on so many of its objectives. Baker's vision is one that, he has said, will reach a broader community.

His is a moron's view of baseball history. No doubt, Buck shouldn't have been the only figure the museum had at its disposal. It would have benefited all of baseball if, in the early years of the museum, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Leon Day, Willie Wells, Rube Foster, Cum Posey and Buck Leonard had been alive to retell those stories from the past. Can anybody imagine what Satchel would tell us? Can you picture him with Bob Feller, the Hall of Famer, sitting on a dais somewhere and talking about barnstorming in places where white fans came and watched Negro Leaguers play Major Leaguers?

But Satchel wasn't alive. Nor were any of the legendary players from the 1930s and '40s -- aside from Buck O'Neil. He embraced the opportunity to talk about those golden years of black baseball -- to tell rich stories about those days to anybody who cared to listen.

And people everywhere listened -- from the men in Cooperstown, to Ken Burns in his documentary "Baseball in America," to Negro League historians like Leslie Heaphy, Larry Lester, James A. Riley, Larry Hogan, Christopher Hauser, Robert Peterson, John Holway and Dick Clark, academics who combed through the musty archives to find tidbits that filled in the missing pieces of that lost history.

Each of them -- or nearly each of them -- turned to Buck O'Neil to flush out some of the specifics.

All of that seems lost on Baker. He wasn't there when Buck spoke at Cooperstown for the Negro Leaguers who were indicted posthumously into the Hall of Fame in the summer of 2006. Nor was Baker a central figure in the museum when it embarked on an educational project in Buck's honor. He wasn't at the museum to see Buck greet baseball fans from all generations.

Buck was the face of the museum -- then and now. To lessen his place in the museum is to suggest that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gets too much credit for pushing the civil rights movement forward. Sure, others contributed to the movement, but King was its face -- then and now.

Yet that seems of little importance to Baker.

In an article last Sunday in The Kansas City Star, he said: "Honestly, some people were so close to Buck, they're fixated on that. They can't imagine living without him. And they still haven't gotten over that. And maybe they won't get over it."

I didn't see why Buck and all the others can't coexist. The museum should not have been going ahead under Buck's shadow and ignoring everybody else's. To me, an outsider, it was never that way.

All I know is that I was drawn into the history of black baseball by Buck and the stories he told, stories that are forever a part of what the museum should be. No, it's not just about Buck O'Neil, but it's about nothing memorable if Baker persists in trying to still Buck's voice.