Chipper Jones
photo by Tim Evearitt
ATLANTA -- The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum will honor Chipper Jones as one of its 2008 Legacy Award winners.
As the National League batting champion, Jones will receive the Walter "Buck" Leonard Award. The Museum annually presents the Legacy Awards to the top performers from the National and American Leagues.
Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols and Twins catcher Joe Mauer have been named this year's Oscar Charleston Legacy Award winners. This award is the Museum's top honor, and it's presented to the best player from both the NL and AL. Charleston was a Negro League outfielder who has been compared to Willie Mays.
Each of the Legacy Awards winners will be recognized on Jan. 10 during a ceremony at the Gem Theater in Kansas City, a venue across the street from the Negro Leagues Museum. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Museum, which keeps alive the legacy of
men and women who played, coached or owned teams when baseball was a segregated sport.
This marks the second year that MLB.com will sponsor the Sam Lacy Legacy Award, which is reserved for a baseball writer who embodies the pioneering spirit of Lacy, a Hall of Fame sportswriter whose half-century of work for the black press beat the drum for equality in the sport.
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Adapted from MLB.com