The stories about Satchel are legendary and some of them are even true.
—Hall of Fame Cleveland Indians pitcher BOB BELLER
His unerring control and his ability to change speeds made him, according to some experts, the greatest pitcher of all time—any color, any league.
—JAMES HIRSCH, Willie Mays
According to some baseball historians, Satchel Paige was “the most celebrated moundsman in the history of our national pastime”; “the greatest pitcher who ever caressed the seams of a baseball.”1 Buck O’Neil, the Negro League star, said not all hyperbolically that “Satchel Paige wasn’t just one franchise. He was a whole lot of franchises.”2 Chicago Defender sportswriter Eddie Murphy called Satchel “the greatest baseball pitching attraction in the entire world.”3 Noted sports author Allen Barra calls Paige “the man who might be the greatest pitcher in baseball history.”4
Larry Doby’s achievements have been masked by the legend of Satchel Paige not only in recent times. Doby also played on the Cleveland Indians with Paige, when briefly, for the second half of the 1948 and all of the 1949 seasons, Paige pitched for the Tribe. Although Paige’s first Major League career was short, he became the darling of the media and crowded out much else, not only in his single good year (6-1 in 1948) but in his less-than-mediocre year (4-7 in 1949) and beyond.5
He could fire a baseball “as fast as a shooting star.”6 His fastball could “beat a bullet to the plate.”7 To a batter, the heater simply disappeared as it came toward him, reappearing with a “pop” in the catcher’s glove. “Like Babe Ruth in the Major Leagues, Satchel single-handedly moved team ledgers from red to black.”8 A black sportswriter credited Satchel Paige with “turning out more Negroes than Lincoln freed.”9 Paige “cobbled together . . . part Cy Young, part B. T. Barnum, Stepin Fetchit, Will Rogers and Frank Merriwell.”10 Six feet four, 140 pounds, with arms and hands that hung below his knees and great oversized hands, Satchel seemed an exclamation point that had jumped off a printed page.11 His face had sagging, almost basset hound features. But, oh, could he throw a baseball.
To other historians, however, Satchel Paige was a liar, a philanderer extraordinaire, a showoff, a clown, and a buffoon. He showed little or no loyalty to teammates, owners, and fans. Ignoring any contractual ties that should have bound him, he would jump to any baseball club that offered him a few dollars more. He pitched for 250 teams (his estimate) in his career. He would miss complete games or arrive late to them. He would rent himself out for single games to semipro and other professional teams for $250, $500, or $1,000 in extra compensation, many times for pitching only three innings, his regular team and its players be damned.
Once he could afford it, Paige purchased big, showy cars, Packard convertibles or Cadillac’s in garish colors, red or gold. Not only would he never ride the bus with his team; he would wait until most of the team had boarded the lumbering behemoth, in those days never air-conditioned (christened the “Iron Lung” by members of the Birmingham Barons) and spewing exhaust and fumes.12 Pulling abreast of the parked bus, Paige would toot his flashy convertible’s horn. After arousing the jealousy of his teammates, he would squeal off to the city where his team would play its next baseball game.13
On outside assignments, and sometimes with his regular team, after tossing his allotted three innings, Paige would not return to the dugout. Instead, he would wade into the stands to enjoy his celebrity and receive onlookers’ adulation. He would spend his time signing autographs and visiting with his fans, “preferably ones with shapely legs.”14
The long shadow Satchel Paige cast results from no fewer than three factors: his amazing longevity, his nearly unrivaled skill set as a baseball pitcher, and the colorful image he projected, and still projects today, as one of the baseball’s greatest and quirkiest players of all time. Most particularly, the shadow he casts obscures the accomplishments of Larry Doby, for Cleveland team owner Bill Veeck added Satchel Paige to the Indians pitching staff for the latter half of the celebrated 1948 Indians season. In that year, Doby’s sophomore season, Larry Doby hit .301 (.396 down the stretch) and fifteen home runs, leading Cleveland to the American League pennant and then the world championship. Most baseball historians, at least the amateur ones, however, remember only Satchel Paige and recall Larry Doby only dimly, if at all. One leading Paige biographer refers to Doby as “obscure.”15
Paige also pitched three seasons, 1951, 1952, and 1953, for the St. Louis Browns, forerunner of today’s Baltimore Orioles. He made a last Major League appearance, a token one, for Charley Finley’s Kansas City Athletics, in 1965. His last game of organized profession baseball came with the Minor League Peninsula Pilots in Hampton, Virginia, on June 21, 1966, when he was fifty-nine years old. He had pitched his first with the Chattanooga, Tennessee, White Sox in 1926.
Over a forty-year career, Paige, who claimed to have kept accurate records, pitched in 2,500 games, winning 2,000 of them. He threw 250 shutouts and 50 no hitters.16 He claimed to have struck out twenty-two of twenty-seven hitters several times. He once recorded twenty-nine starts in a month, including pitching three full games in a single day. The modern record (post 1920) for longevity belongs to the knuckleball pitcher Phil Niekro, of the Atlanta Braves, who threw 5,404 innings. Even conceding that many of Paige’s “guest appearances” involved only three innings of pitching, and late in his career only a single inning, over his career Paige must have pitched as many as 20,000 or more innings of baseball. No one knows even the approximate number.
But, of course, Paige accomplished these feats and compiled awesome statistics pitching for the likes of Bismarck, North Dakota; Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic; Guayama, Puerto Rico; and various teams over nine seasons with the California Winter League. He did pitch all or part of seventeen seasons in the fabled Negro Leagues, 1927–47, compiling a 103-61 record, pitching mostly for the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Kansas City Monarchs. Of course, in all those years, Leroy Robert Paige could not rise to the highest level, the major leagues, because until 1947 the color barrier remained firmly in place, barring black players from the big leagues.
Baseball statisticians cannot resist attempts at modeling what Satchel Paige’s record might have been had the major leagues granted entrance to African American athletes and had Paige pitched there from a relatively young age. One statistician’s model projected a 391-246 lifetime Major League record for Paige, ranking him number three all time in wins, after Cy Young (511-316) and Walter “Big Train” Johnson (417-279) but ahead of Christy “The Christian Gentleman” Mathewson (373-188). Another historian rates Satchel the seventeenth best Major Leaguer of all time, several spots higher than Cy Young. Henry “Hammerin’ Hank” Aaron, all-time home run leader and, like Satchel, a native of Mobile, Alabama, goes the statisticians one better, saying that Satchel might have won three hundred Major League games lifetime “with his outfielders sitting down.”17
His “outfielders sitting down” evokes a Paige legend. On numerous occasions Paige is rumored to have begun an inning by waving his outfielders in to the edge of the infield, motioning for them to sit on the grass. He would then proceed to strike out the opposing side. Of course, in doing so he had no need of outfielders.
Paige would intentionally walk the first three batters he faced. He would then strike out the next three, often on nine or ten pitches. In a demonstration of pitching prowess before a game, Paige would have an assistant place a board with five or six nails, hammered part but not all the way into the wood an inch or two apart, sixty feet, six inches away from the mound. Then, with five or six fastballs, Paige would drive all those nails completely into the wood. There were no speed guns in those days, but experts rate his fastball at over one hundred miles per hour, in the same category as Nolan Ryan, Justin Verlanger, Steven Strasberg, and very few other flamethrowers of the modern era.
Paige would fold over a handkerchief, place it on home plate, and throwing nine out of ten or ten out of ten fastballs over the cloth.18 Satch threw a fastball, a curve, a sinker, a “slow sinker,” a knuckleball, a “blooper,” a zigzag pitch, and a “whipsy-dipsy-do.”19 Two favorites were his “nothing ball,” a fastball but with no rotation, like a knuckleball with speed, and the hesitation pitch.20 The latter would leave Satchel’s right hand after a tantalizing hesitation midway through his windup, traveling toward the batter and home plate and then seem to accelerate and dive downward as it covered the last twenty feet.
Satch’s windup had a very high leg kick, with his left foot coming almost to shoulder level. One story is that Paige would have “FASTBALL” lettered on the sole of his left shoe, where the batter could catch a glimpse of it, but later in life he denied ever having done that. He threw overhand, side arm, and submarine style (almost underhand). Like the black pitcher Joe Black, who became famous for it, Satchel Paige also threw a “crossover pitch.” Stepping off with his left foot not toward home plate but on a diagonal pointed midway between home and third base, Satch would further extend his long arm toward the third-to-home baseline, throwing sidearm. He thus would slingshot the baseball toward the hitter’s body. Very much thinking that the ball might hit him, many a hitter would bail out, stepping back from the batter’s box. The pitch would sail toward home on a diagonal, inside to a right-handed batter but crossing the plate, or the rear part of the plate, on an angle, for a strike.
Sometimes Paige would pitch with no windup. But on the very next pitch, or in the following inning, he might go through his windup motion three times before throwing the ball toward the plate. In between he might wind up once or twice. There are no records of his winding up four times, but he may have done that as well.
He described his repertoire as follows: “I got bloopers, loopers and droopers. I got a jump ball, a be ball, a screw ball, a wobbly ball, a whipsy-dipsy-do, a hurry-up ball, a nothin’ ball, and a bat dodger. My be ball is a be ball cause it be right where I want it, high and inside. It wiggles like a worm. . . . My whipsy-dipsy-do is a special forkball I throw underhanded and sidearm that slithers and sinks.”21
Paige was colorful in describing his pitches. As he got older, his pitches slowed. He admitted that his fastball had gone from “blinding speed” to “just blazing speed.”22 The “barber pitch” grazed the chin of batters who leaned in too close to home plate. The “bow tie pitch” was similar but lower, glazing the batter’s Adam’s apple. Fastballs were “long Toms” (all out) and “short Toms” (a bit slower). The “trouble ball” was so slow that the hitter grew impatient, swinging long before the ball reached the plate. Paige’s names for his pitches included “the four day rider,” “slow gin fizz,” “butterfly,” “step-n-pitch-it,” “the two hump blooper,” “midnight creeper,” “alley oops,” drop ball,” “single curve,” “double curve,” and “triple curve.” His catcher for eight seasons, Joe Green, said, “I don’t know what they mean.” Perhaps Satchel did not either, at least completely.
Paige kept a constant chatter of trash talk to batters and base runners alike while also pantomiming for the benefit of the fans in the stands. Bill Veeck, who face-to-face always called Paige “Leroy,” never “Satchel,” recalls: “Satchel had all kinds of different deliveries. He’d hesitate before he’d throw. He’d wiggle the fingers of his glove. He’d wind up three times. Satchel was always a practicing psychologist. He’d get the batter overanxious, then he’d get them mad, and by the time the ball was there at the plate, he’d have them way off balance.”23
Central to the Satchel Paige legend is that he pitched well into old age or, indeed, that he was ageless. He had teams’ game programs list his birth year as “1900? 1902? 1904? 1906?” He never allowed himself to be pinned down about his birth date. He encouraged sports reporters’ comparisons of him to Rip van Winkle, Grandma Moses, and Moses. “Methuselah was my first bat boy,” he was fond of saying. He cooperated with teams in putting rocking chairs in the bullpen or outside his team’s dugout. He would sit in those chairs, rocking way until the manager called upon him to enter the game. He would then shuffle toward the pitcher’s mound, evincing no hurry at all to get there. “Satchel stoked that hoopla [about his age] by dishing out estimates of his age that were even more baffling than his pitches.”24 He pushed “his own PR designs of Paige as a literally ageless legend.”25
In Mobile, Alabama, where Satch was raised, it was hit or miss (mostly miss) whether a black child’s birth would be entered into the official records. Also, his mother, Lula, had twelve children, eleven of whom lived into adulthood (Satchel’s brother Eugene died as an infant). But Lula insisted that each of her children’s births be noted in the official records. After the Cleveland Indians brought Paige aboard in mid-1948, team owner Bill Veeck had the Mobile birth records searched. There Veeck found that Leroy Robert Paige’s birth certificate listed July 7, 1906, as the date of birth. Sports Illustrated later confirmed that date. Even after those belt-and-suspenders confirmations, Satchel would prevaricate about this birth date.
Thus the legend continued to trump reality: the ageless pitcher myth not only survived but flourished. The legend gave Satch more of an edge, allowing him to romance sportswriters and sports fans. “They want me to be old,” he said. “Seems like they get a big kick out of an old man throwing strikeouts.”26
Satchel Paige’s legend is so strong, so colorful, so vibrant that his biographers tend to be apologists for his wrongdoing and bad behavior. For instance Paige married Janet Howard, a minister’s daughter whom he met while pitching for the Pittsburgh Crawfords in the mid-1930s. His marriage, however, never much deterred him from continuing womanizing, much of it emanating from the many late nights he spent at the Crawford Grill in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Gus Greenlee, known as “Gasoline Gus” from when he sold bootleg whiskey out of his car’s trunk, was a leading Pittsburgh gangster; he owned not only the Pittsburgh Crawfords Baseball Club but the Crawford Grill as well, after which he named the team. Paige spent many hours at the grill, dancing, drinking, and flirting. “It was hard to number the women Satchel got to know at the Crawford Grill. He was a honeypot, luring the queen bees.”27
In the winter of 1939–40 and again in 1940–41, Satchel pitched for the Guayama Witches in the Puerto Rico League. He had a gold Cadillac shipped there for his use in Puerto Rico. He also married again, to Luz Maria Figueroa. The only difficulty was that Satchel was still married to Janet Howard Paige, who was up north, living in Pittsburgh. Paige’s biographers note the bigamy but excuse it or make light of it. “Well, that’s Ole Satch,” they say. The leading and most compendious biography, Satchel by Larry Tye, explains it all away: “In his mind his marriage to Janet Howard had been over for years, no matter that there was no divorce or formal separation. Formalities like that were as malleable as the baseball contracts [he signed and then] ignored. . . . He also relished the idea of being an outlaw.”28
So, too, do they explain away Satchel Paige’s disrespect for fellow players and team owners. “That he was an introvert” supposedly explains away his aloofness, his arrogance, and his missing games or not showing up at all. His travel by luxury automobile rather than in the team’s bus must have galled the other players, but according to the biographers Satch, like Greta Garbo, needed “to be alone.” “He was a hypnotic storyteller who drew a dugout full of listeners. . . . Performing in the middle of a mob masked the fact that intimate relationships were difficult for him.”29
The search for a psychoanalytic explanation for Paige’s avarice, greed, womanizing, and disrespect for fans, teammates, and owners goes on and on, seemingly without end. “He was a needy man, far more than he would ever let on.” One girl friend, Bertha Wilson, could “see Satchel’s vulnerable side, see and feel his pain.”30 Satchel Paige “was a man with a hurt inside that he could not address.”31
In August 1933, without explanation, Paige left his hometown team, the Pittsburgh Crawfords of the Negro League, for Bismarck, North Dakota, where he pitched against the likes of Jamestown and Fargo, North Dakota.32 He then returned to Pittsburgh. Without apology he resumed pitching for the Crawfords, then locked in the second half of the league pennant race.
In 1933 fans elected Paige to the Negro League All-Star team. He neither played nor even showed up for the game. One biographer states that Paige did not receive sufficient votes, which directly contradicts statements that Paige “was the most indelible black player in the land” and that “at age 26 Satchel Paige was the single biggest name in Negro entertainment, on a par with Joe Lewis and Satchmo Armstrong.”33 More probably than not, based on his track record, Paige simply did not bother to appear.
In 1935, in a dispute with Crawford’s owner Gus Greenlee, Paige again absconded to North Dakota. In between he had run off to play several games in Wichita, Kansas. Biographers ballyhoo his record in Bismarck (35-2). In fact, an entire book, Color Blind, has been written about the Bismarck episodes, but scant attention is given to his lack of loyalty and disrespect of his Pittsburgh teammates that the episodes represent.34
Ultimately, Satchel signed a two-year contract to pitch for the Pittsburgh Crawfords. Then he simply walked away again, among other things, traveling to the Dominican Republic to pitch for the Dragones de Ciudad Trujillo. Pittsburgh owner Greenlee had Paige banned from the Negro League for the 1935 season. He called Paige “AWOL,” an “ingrate,” and worse.
A few years later when Greenlee tried to reconcile with Paige, Satchel instead signed with Abe and Effa Manley’s Newark Stars (Larry Doby’s Minor League team in 1946–47) for $5,000 more than Greenlee offered, but the Manleys could not reel him in either. Paige simply walked away from that contract as well. The Manleys tried but failed to persuade the Negro League to ban Paige for life. Paige’s life as a “jumper” ended when Kansas City Monarchs owner J. L. Wilkinson told him, “If you even think about jumping, I’ll put you out of baseball. You won’t play again in the United States.”35
With not an iota of justification, Paige’s biographers nonetheless excuse his behavior. For example, Larry Tye concludes that “his teammates saw the [antics and] special treatment, but they were used to it and to him.”36 But Paige’s antics must have been difficult for his teammates to tolerate, at least at times. To Negro League shortstop Jake Stephens “Paige was the most overrated player God ever put breath into” and a “pariah” among other black players.37 “Paige thought he was the greatest, that there was nobody like Satchel. But [his egoism] made him somewhat unapproachable. He was not easy to get used to.”38
Somewhat unapproachable? Hilton Smith was the Kansas City Monarchs’ pitching star. Over twelve years he had been 161-22. When Paige arrived in Kansas City, Monarchs’ management ousted Smith from his starting role and replaced him with the crowd-pleaser Paige. They relegated Smith to pitching the remainder of games after Paige had gone his usual three opening frames. Fans began to call Smith “Satchel’s Caddy.” It is difficult to believe that Smith and at least some of his teammates did not resent the special treatment given Satchel Paige. “It really hurt me . . . but there was not much I could do about it,” Hilton Smith recalled.39
More accurate depictions by the biographer peek through here and there: “[His] Pittsburgh teammates resented his absences and antics [and his ‘shameless behavior’]. His shuffle to the mound was a slow-motion spectacle. His windmill windup made him look like a tin lizzie. He talked trash to batters and pantomimed with fans. He bragged . . . not just about his pitching but about prized possessions like his green Packard convertible.”40 If you have ever been on a team, you can easily identify and sympathize with Paige’s teammates and the revulsion they must have felt at his greed, his sense of superiority and entitlement, and his antics.
Apologists for Satchel Paige cannot resist returning to over-the-top statements about the legendary baseball pitcher. By going 14-2, with a 2.16 ERA in 1934, Paige had, according to the leading biographer, “the best season of his life and perhaps anyone else’s.”41 True, his nonleague games, pitching for the House of David in a Denver tournament, and in the California Winter League, elevated his record to 35-2. But ask Bob Gibson (22-9 and 23-7 in 1968 and 1970, ERA 1.12) or Sandy Koufax (25-5, ERA 1.88 in 1963) or any number of other Major League pitchers whether Satchel Paige’s 1934 was the best season of anybody’s life.
Another wildly over-the-top assessment is that Paige’s “down home demeanor belied the sagacity of a Rhodes Scholar and the cunning of a corporate titan.”42 But such is the strength and persuasiveness of the Satchel Paige legend that the legend, even though based not completely on historical facts, leads writers to make such statements. It was in intimate contact with the Paige legend, and under the shadow it cast, that in only his second Major League season Larry Doby led the Cleveland Indians to the World Championship.
Not only were Paige and Doby teammates after team owner Veeck signed Satchel to a contract on July 7, 1948; they were roommates as well. “Veeck had hoped that Satchel would make things easier for Doby, who felt enormous pressure as the first black in the American League.”43 Seemingly, having another black on the roster and sharing a room with him would ameliorate one of the less noted features of being the first to break the color barrier, that is, not racial taunts and epithets but isolation and loneliness accompanying being the only black player on the team. Doby missed “not having another player to communicate with, talk the game over with after it’s over, and start [him] thinking about the next game.”44 Doby could not socialize with teammates earlier in the evenings either. He recalled, “I wasn’t invited out by the other players. They might go to a place where I wouldn’t be served, so they didn’t do it.”45
In spring training Jackie Robinson could retreat to his bungalow in Dodgertown, the state-of-the-art baseball facility in Florida, which the team owned and operated from 1949 onward. By contrast the Cleveland Indians trained in leased facilities in Tucson, Arizona. The team stayed in the Santa Rita Hotel, which, while in the seemingly more enlightened Southwest, would not admit blacks.46 So Chester Willis, a black who supplied laundry services to the Santa Rita, and his family took Doby into their home. Until 1954 each year during spring training, Doby was segregated from teammates. He had to make it to the training facility on his own each morning. The same was true for obtaining transportation to ballparks in the southern cites in which the Indians played exhibitions. Hotels and many taxicabs in southern cities would not admit blacks. Doby was on his own.
So the addition of another black player, in this case, Satchel Paige, and the assignment of him as roommate to Doby, would seem to eliminate some of the sense of isolation, giving Doby a companion. And “what a roomie! Satch arrived with twenty suits of clothes, a big smile and no advice.”47 Paige did everything large: he owned fifteen shotguns, twenty-two hunting dogs, several luxury cars, and more. He brought not only a luxury car to Cleveland but a chauffeur as well.
One of the Paige characteristics that particularly alarmed Doby was that Satchel carried a loaded handgun in his luggage. Satch’s handgun habit carried over from his barnstorming days. Then he often carried thousands of dollars in his suitcase.48 But that would have made no difference to Doby, raised in integrated urban settings in New Jersey rather than in the rough-and-tumble world of barnstorming.49
Another unappealing habit from his barnstorming days was that Paige cooked catfish in the hotel room. “He would set up his small electric stove in their hotel room, buy catfish from the nearest fish store, and fry it up in their room. As soon as Doby got his first whiff of Paige’s dinner, he would look for company elsewhere.”50
Usually, however, it was Paige staying out late, leaving Doby alone in the room, not vice versa. Contrary to Doby’s and the Indians’ expectations for the rooming arrangement, in Doby’s words, “Supposedly I roomed with Satch while he was in Cleveland, but in reality I roomed with his luggage.”51 And what luggage it was. Paige traveled with a “huge steamer trunk,” in which he carried his suits, twenty-four ties, “an abundance of toiletries, silk underwear and sports shirts.” He fitted into the trunk a collapsible heat lamp, an electric massage machine, and a portable cooking grill, among other things.52
As it turned out, Doby and Paige had little influence on each other.53 There was little chance that the forty-two-year-old Paige would change his style and persona to act as a big brother or confidante to his more serious twenty-five-year-old roommate. On Doby’s part, he stated, “I never paid that much attention to [Satch]. In the clubhouse, Satch would start telling stories and the guys would start laughing. I would ease out.”54
Doby’s feeling may have been stronger than that. He and Jackie Robinson became close friends, often sharing notes and commiserating with each other. They conferred frequently by telephone. “Jackie detested Satch, strongly.” Robinson openly expressed his disdain. “I don’t see how you could stay with a guy like Paige. I just couldn’t take it,” Robinson told Doby.55 Those conferences and the feelings expressed must have rubbed off on Doby.
Satch was funny. He was an outstanding athlete. He had the age thing and the Stepin Fetchit thing. He was black. “Jackie and I wouldn’t tell jokes. We weren’t humorists. We tried to show that we were intelligent, and that’s not what white folks expect from blacks,” Doby concluded years later, reflecting back on 1948–49. More pejoratively, Doby added: “Satch gave whites what they wanted” and what they expected of black baseball players.56 An older, more experienced black roommate and companion “would have been a great help to me. I could have forgotten about a great many things I took home at night. [But] going with Satch wasn’t my thing.”57
In 1948, the year the Indians won the American League pennant and the World Series, again, Larry Doby batted .301 and hit 14 home runs, in 489 at bats. In the six-game World Series, won by Cleveland four games to two, Doby batted .318, in 22 at bats.58 His defensive play in center field was nothing short of acrobatic.
In that season, Paige, on the other hand, pitched seventy-three innings, winning six games. Yet according to a 2010 biography, Satchel Paige “was the hottest story in baseball that summer and the hottest draw at box offices nationwide.”59 Doby and his feats were not mentioned by the admiring Satchel Paige biographer.
The backward take on Paige’s brief foray into the Major Leagues, written sixty-two years later, shows the strength and longevity of the Paige legend, as do other sound bites:
“Satchel’s fairy-tale story [captured] the imagination of Americans.”60
Paige was “one of the greatest pitchers of any hue in baseball history.”61
Paige’s pitching performances were “transcendent.”62
Reportedly, Joe DiMaggio called Satchel Paige “the greatest pitcher I ever faced.”63
That the Paige legend has incredible strength and longevity today illustrates how strong that legend must have been back when Larry Doby labored in its shadow. Part of the reason it endures now and was so powerful even back then was its breadth.
Satchel Paige claimed to have pitched for 250 baseball teams, all over the United States and in seventeen foreign countries (Brazil, Columbia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Trinidad, Venezuela, and several countries of the West Indies, to name a few). He pitched in Hawaii, Alaska, and Puerto Rico at the time when all three were possessions of the United States.
Also, “no player barnstormed as wide, or as far, for as long, as Satchel Paige.”64 Many of the Major League greats—Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean, Bob Feller—did it, playing with and against the great stars of the Negro leagues—Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Buck O’Neil, Satchel Paige. Big leaguers could make as much or more barnstorming than playing in the World Series. They traveled by bus, bringing big league baseball to jerkwater towns across America. For example, the 1944 Bob Feller All-Stars, whose day-in-and-day-out opponent were the Satchel Paige All-Stars, played thirty-four games, in seventeen states, after the regular season had concluded. Feller even formed a corporation, RoFel, Inc., which employed the players.
Paige barnstormed for the money. Given his extravagant lifestyle, his expenditures always exceeded his income, which for many years included revenue from barnstorming. He was thought to be the highest-paid player in organized baseball, major leagues included. Barnstorming also help spread the stories, the antics, the humor, and the reputation of Satchel far and wide.
One more story is worth noting in conclusion. In a workout Satchel popped one fastball after another into the catcher’s mitt. “Do you throw that fast consistently?” asked the manager. “No sir,” Satchel answered. “I do it all the time.” That may have been Paige doublespeak, which formed part of the legend.
Paige, however, could back it up with achievements. Denver Post sports columnist Leonard Cohn called Paige “the greatest Negro pitcher in the world.”65 Others made similar over-the-top statements and assessments. “He was the most proficient pitching machine ever.”66 “None (of the mythic greats such as Cy Young, Jim Thorpe or Joe Lewis) was as titanic as Satchel Paige. He was a comic, and preacher, a warrior, and a student of human nature. He could weave a brilliant tale, then reweave it again.”67 Woody Allen, the Academy Award–winning move producer, named his now-estranged son “Satchel.”
Satchel Paige was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1971, six years after his last game and in the second year in which he was eligible. He is the only pitcher in the Hall of Fame with a losing record lifetime (28-31, ERA 3.29 in the Major Leagues), but the Satchel Paige legend and the shadow it casts resoundingly trump that.