“Minnie” Miñoso and Tony Oliva will be inducted into the 2022 Baseball Hall of Fame

(CNN) – The baseball players of the Black league Buck O’Neil and Bud Fowler were chosen for the Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday.

They were two of seven Negro League and pre-Negro League players who were being considered for the Hall of Fame on Sunday. O’Neil and Fowler join four other candidates – Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, “Minnie” Miñoso and Tony Oliva – as part of the 2022 Hall of Fame promotion.

All six players will be officially inducted into Cooperstown, New York, on July 24, 2022, according to the Hall of Fame website.

O’Neil, who was known as a baseball ambassador, played 10 seasons with the Memphis Red Sox and the Kansas City Monarchs, according to the Hall of Fame. After his playing career, O’Neil became a scout for the Chicago Cubs and would become the first black coach in American League or National League history with Chicago.

O’Neil, who died in 2006, also helped found the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri.

Fowler has been recognized as the first black professional baseball player, according to the Hall of Fame. He pitched and played second base for different teams in more than a dozen leagues. before his death in 1913.

The election of these two players to the Hall of Fame comes a year after Major League Baseball (MLB) announced that it would recognize the Negro Leagues as a major league and that it counted the statistics and records of thousands. of black players as part of the game’s history.

The MLB said it was “correcting a long-standing oversight in the game’s history” by raising the status of the Negro Leagues, which consisted of seven leagues and some 3,400 players from 1920 to 1948.

The decline of the Negro Leagues began in 1947 when Jackie Robinson became MLB’s first black player, joining the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In 1969, the Special Commission on Baseball Records did not include Negro Leagues among the six “Major Leagues” it had identified since 1876.

CNN’s Ray Sanchez and Dan Kamal contributed to this report.