I’ll be thirty-five this year, and I can only pitch as long as Satchel Paige. That gives me thirty-five more years.
—Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Tug McGraw
Satchel Paige is an American hero, and one day, if you are good, he will be your hero as well. Paige is the most famous player from the Negro Leagues—leagues that existed because blacks and whites were not allowed to play together. Paige swung and swore. He struck guys out with crazy fastballs. He bragged and showboated and chased the ladies and made a bundle during the Depression when hardly anyone—much less a black man from the South—could do such a thing. He showed America that the black person could be everything the white was in that most narrow-minded and patriotic pastime: the old ball game. He had fun doing it. The greatest clown and showman and maybe the greatest pitcher ever. He persisted and endured countless shortings, slightings, threats, injustices, and nasty prejudice, and came through it all with humor and cool. He was not the first to break the color line in baseball, but he was the first to captivate hearts and minds by playing with, for, and against white folks for dozens of years while the evidence piled up that segregation was bound to fail in the end.
With Paige it is not just a matter of what he did, which is monumental—it is also a matter of what he might have done had he been allowed to play in the white leagues in his prime. He is the most colorful ambassador baseball ever produced, and he charmed the whole hemisphere with his wild individualism. That’s why he is my hero. He had the bluster of Ali, the courage of Wilma Rudolph, the panache of Arthur Ashe, and the agelessness of Lena Horne. Like contemporaries Jesse Owens, the great Olympian, and Joe Louis, the champion boxer, he was a towering figure in sports, a Number 1 pitcher, as he would say.
Some people are described as “legendary,” but Satchel Paige legendizes the word. He was the first black man to pitch in the American League, first to pitch in the World Series, first Negro League player in the Hall of Fame, and the writer of two autobiographies. He embodies longevity. One of his two bios he called Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, and appropriately so: he had a rubber arm that let him pitch for over forty years. Nolan Ryan, he of unflagging stamina and a million no-hitters, pitched a puny twenty-seven years. Paige’s first game was in the 1920s and his last game was in 1965 (for real), and he was still packing them in. He kind of still is.
Leroy Paige had a rough start—he was born somewhere around 1906 to dire poverty in a shotgun house in Mobile, Alabama. He was the seventh of twelve children; his large family headed by his mother, the formidable Lula. Like Babe Ruth, he is a typical poor kid who climbs out of being barefoot and poor to make a huge name for himself. As a boy, he was a loner and a truant, and he hung around the river throwing rocks at everything, harder than anyone else. Like everything with him, where the nickname “Satchel” comes from isn’t altogether certain. He started work as a child, carrying satchels on a stick at the train station, and so it may be there that the name was born. Eventually, he hit the streets and started hanging with an unsavory crowd. Caught stealing costume jewelry, he landed in children’s jail, where he met a coach who turned him around and who realized his value as a star attraction. Under the guidance of Coach Byrd, Paige learned his wild style of high-kicking his giant right foot in front of him so he could whip the fastball in around it. Paige had found his calling as an ace pitcher. Tall and skinny and just a kid, in 1926 he got an offer from the Chattanooga Black Lookouts, and, with his mom’s approval and the understanding he would send her money, he signed. Once he was in organized ball, he made the world take notice.
Paige’s hallmark was brash cockiness and hilarious theatrics. He threw fast and with deadly accuracy. He could throw a ball over a bottle cap or gum wrapper with alarming consistency. Then tell you all about it. At the start of his career, he threw only fastballs, and he even painted the word fastball on the bottom of his shoe so the other team knew what was coming. His fastball had as many names as the Hindu gods: Thoughtful Stuff, the Bat Dodger, the Four-Day Rider, Peas at the Knees, and the Be-ball, because, as he said, “It be where I want it to be.” His wild antics and sense of promotion were rocketing him to black ball stardom.
His marquee move was “Guaranteed to strike out the side.” A sign would announce his eminence: “World’s Greatest Pitcher Leroy Satchel Paige Guaranteed to Strike Out the First Nine Men or Your Money Back.” Baby, this would sell the tickets. He would call in the outfield and sometimes had the infield sit down while he took care of business. Occasionally they played cards on the mound behind him. This outrageous showboating made the fans go crazy, and within a year his team was farming him out to pitch for other teams.
The notorious Gus Greenlee, a racketeer and numbers runner, one of a handful of blacks in ’30s America with capital to run a ball club, signed him up. He built the first black-owned baseball park, and he started the second Negro National League. Greenlee was also the owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords. The 1930s Craws are considered the greatest Negro League team of all time. Some call them the greatest team of all time.
WILD TIMES AT THE CRAWFORD GRILL
Crawford Grill was Gus Greenlee’s place, a hoppin’ joint in the Hill district of Pittsburgh that all the jazz cats played, like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan. Superstar Lena Horne worked downstairs, and her father worked upstairs, where the numbers money was counted. “Numbers” is a catchall for an illegal lottery traditionally played by the poor, and Greenlee was in charge of that racket in Pittsburgh. You could bet as little as a penny on a series of three numbers taken from the totals of racetrack betting printed in the paper. The counters had to deal with mountains of small change. The players ate and made the scene there after ball games. Just across the street in the barbershop, Paige would hold court all day, sending kids over to get food and beer so he could keep his stories going.
It was also here that Paige met his first wife, Janet Howard, working behind the counter. Greenlee paid for their wedding at the Grill. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the dancer, co-founder of the Black Yankees, and movie star partner to Shirley Temple, was the best man.
If you want to know the truth, I wasn’t the onliest one who could pitch in the Negro Leagues. I told them at Cooperstown we had a lot of Satchels, there were a lot of Joshes. We had top pitchers. We had quite a few men who could hit the ball like Babe and Josh. Wasn’t any mebbe so.
—Satchel Paige
The Crawfords ball club was loaded with Negro League stars: “Cool Papa” Bell, who was so fast he could turn the light out and be in bed before the room got dark, hit leadoff; affable Josh Gibson, the “Black Babe Ruth,” was the catcher; tempestuous star Oscar Charleston, whom many consider to be one of the best players of all time, was finishing up his illustrious career and managing; and Paige was the ace and top draw on a team of big names.
Josh Gibson, described by Bill Veeck as “at the minimum, two Yogi Berras,” and Satchel Paige are linked as teammates first as the greatest battery in black ball and later as rivals. They both went into the Hall of Fame, though Gibson was long gone by then. Josh was a good catcher and superb slugger and the easygoing lovable lug to Paige’s showboat braggadocio. They played on the Craws and barnstormed in Central America, but Gibson came back to the States where he hit an alarming number of homers. He is said to have hit the ball all the way out of Yankee Stadium. He is the only man to do so. Paige faced Gibson in the Negro World Series of 1942. In his autobiography, he recalls walking a batter to load the bases and then Gibson coming up. Paige told him he would get only fastballs, and the first two pitches were blazing strikes. “One more to go, I knew Josh knew it. The crowd knew it. It was so tense you could feel everything jingling,” Paige recalled. “The last one was a three-quarter sidearm curveball. He got back on his heels. He was looking for a fastball.” It was knee-high on the outside corner. Strike three. “Josh threw that bat of his four thousand feet and stomped off the field.” Gibson was always genial, but late in his career started to drink heavily and became broody and delusional. He died of a stroke or a brain tumor hallucinating he was going to be called up to the white big leagues. A very tragic end for the greatest Negro League hitter of all. Satchel and Josh were close buddies and friendly counterparts to the last.
Paige also barnstormed every year against Dizzy Dean. Dizzy was the bragginest, rowdiest, most popular player in white ball after Babe Ruth. The leader of the famous St. Louis “Gas House Gang,” Dean is the last pitcher to win thirty games in the National League. He also grew up poor in the South, picking cotton shoulder to shoulder with blacks, and he loved playing against Paige. They riffed, held mock arguments, imitated each other’s exaggerated wind-ups, trash-talked each other, and pretended to fight with the umps. They put on a great show for the fans in L.A. and all over the country where there were no big league teams. Dizzy said of those days, “If Satch and I were pitching on the same team, we’d clinch the pennant by the Fourth of July and go fishing until World Series time.”
A bunch of the fellows gets in a barber session the other day, and they start to arguefy about the best pitcher they ever see. Some says Lefty Grove and Lefty Gomez and Walter Johnson and old Pete Alexander and Dazzy Vance. And they mention Lonnie Warneke and Van Mungo and Carl Hubbell, and Johnny Corriden tells us about Matty, and he sure must have been great, and some of the boys say Old Diz is the best they ever see. But I see all them fellows but Matty and Johnson, and I know who’s the best pitcher I ever see, and it’s old Satchel Paige, that big lanky colored boy. Say, Old Diz is pretty fast back in 1933 and 1934, and you know my fastball looks like a change of pace alongside that little pistol bullet old Satchel shoots up to the plate. . . . It’s too bad those colored boys don’t play in the big leagues, because they sure got some great ballplayers. Anyway, that skinny old Satchel Paige with those long arms is my idea of the pitcher with the greatest stuff I ever saw.
—Dizzy Dean, 1938 interview
Sometime during the years of WWII, Dean got a triple off Paige in a charity game. Paige shouted at him, “I hope all your friends brought plenty to eat, because if they wait for you to score, they’re gonna be here past dark. You ain’t goin’ no further.” He retired the next three batters; like Dizzy once said, “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.”
PAIGE AND HIS WOMEN
All he’s doing is living a sinful, shiftless life. All I can do is keep writing and reminding him to go to Mass and be careful of gambling and the wild women out there.
—Lula Paige
Paige was the top draw in baseball. Chicks dug him. “I’m not married,” he once said, “but I am in great demand.” It had been a fun party at the beginning, but Satchel was—to put it mildly—not a mindful or attentive husband. He blew all the money he was making barnstorming. Paige spent a fortune on colorful suits, shotguns, fishing gear, big cars, and hunting dogs. In his heyday, he was making five grand a week, loads for the Depression, and he held on to little of the cash. He confessed, “I have trouble holding on to the old green.” The marriage to Janet Howard was not a triumph; Paige catted around too much on the road. She finally served him divorce papers before a game at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Paige mistakenly signed it thinking it was a fan asking for his autograph.
He married another Woman, Lucy, in Puerto Rico and later divorced her, too. He met his third wife in a camera store in Kansas City, Lahoma Jean Brown. She had no idea who he was, and that got him going. This marriage was the one that lasted; he stayed married to her to the end of his life, and they had six children and a million pets and chickens.
Paige immediately got the idea that he could earn more money on his own than he could pitching for Negro League teams with their short, somewhat eclectic schedules. Paige split the Crawfords and became famous for “jumping” teams to join others that made better offers. Paige did a lot of this “jumping,” or “barnstorming,” over the span of his career. Paige played in a million places, threw literally thousands of games, and was the most famous black athlete, if not person, in the United States. Most importantly, he proved that he belonged everywhere he went.
He turned a job in the bushes of the segregated black sports world into an international platform, pitching from Mexico to Canada to Venezuela, and even made regular outings to North Dakota for a tournament where the owner gave him a car but then had to beg him to stop riding around with white girls in the daytime. So owners haven’t changed. He lived with his wife Janet in a modified boxcar, since there was no black neighborhood. Paige claimed the Indians thereabouts took a liking to him and gave him snake oil with venom to rub on his arm, which he swore by his whole career.
The biggest semi-pro tourney in the 1930s was in Denver every year sponsored by the Denver Post newspaper. Satch brought lots of black players to the team there, and they dominated. He claims to have jumped to Venezuela in the ’30s because he “didn’t have a topcoat.” While there, he was playing outfield and chased a ball into the tall grass, where he came face-to-face with what he thought was a boa constrictor (even though they live in trees), and the next time he encountered a snake, he picked up a stick and “beat the devil out of that snake,” and because of this the runner scored. “The crowd chased me right out of the park and the manager of the club wouldn’t pay me for the game.” There’s the truth and there is a great story; Paige never let one interfere with the other.
In 1937, Paige flew down to the Dominican Republic. (Paige’s departure broke up the Crawfords and got Paige banned from the Negro Leagues, but he was never banned for long.) The Caribbean was even wilder than the Negro Leagues. The dictator Trujillo had some shady-assed hoods give Paige a suitcase containing thirty grand and told him to put together a team of black all-stars to play on the Los Dragones. To make it weirder, a voodoo priest from Haiti gave him a wanga to help him win (though later he found out it was an evil charm to make him lose). During the championship, Paige saw the armed soldiers on the field—not necessarily to protect the players. The militia fired rifles in the air during games and shouted, “El Presidente doesn’t lose.” On the day before the championship series, the team was locked in jail for the night so they wouldn’t go out and party. They won the championship, but Paige’s nervous stomach couldn’t handle the strain of the lifestyle and the spicy food. He did note that black players were given respect in Latin America and allowed to eat and be with others, unlike in our beloved land of the free.
Paige threw hard, and for years all he used was a fastball with deadly accuracy. Then one day in Mexico, his arm went dead. He tried everything—hot baths, massage, rest, chiropractors—and then he finally shut himself in a room thinking it was all over at thirty-two. He was facing retirement and poverty while he was at the apex of his career. The Negro League teams he had spurned and jumped from were happy to see him beg a little. No job was forthcoming despite his huge popularity. “When you been at the top and hit the bottom, it’s a mighty long fall.”
His second act was just beginning. The Kansas City Monarchs’ white owner, J. L. Wilkinson, whose partner was a Klansman (ironic, that), showed mercy and took him back. “I’d been dead. Now I was alive again,” said Paige. They played him on the Monarchs B-Team, which immediately became known as the Satchel Paige All-Stars. He played first and couldn’t hit, but fans came to the small towns to see him.
I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I toss one that ain’t never been seen by this generation.
—Satchel Paige
Then one day he threw without pain. Hooray. He next learned a changeup for the first time in his career. Cool Papa Bell taught him the knuckleball, which Paige eventually came to throw even better than Bell. He rose from the ashes and became a star again, pitching in the Negro World Series in 1942 and 1946.
The Negro Leagues didn’t bother with helmets, and they had a trifle more latitude in the kind of pitches one could hurl as compared to the majors. This was more than a little pine tar. You could straight out spit and do whatever you liked to the ball. Paige threw a fastball as hard as anybody, but when his arm went bad, he employed a bunch of trick pitches that he gave exotic names—the Hurryup Ball, Midnight Rider, Midnight Creeper, Two-hump Blooper, the aforecited Be-ball, Looper, Drooper, Nothing Ball, Jump Ball, Trouble Ball, the incredibly appointed Whipsy-dipsy-do—and he was just as effective. Players in the majors who faced him in the late ’40s and ’50s said he could still bring the hard one when he had to.
SATCHEL AND THE GREAT DIMAGGIO
I just got a hit off Satchel Paige, now I know I can make it with the Yankees.
—Joe DiMaggio
Paige was pitching in a tourney in California when the young Joe DiMaggio from San Francisco got to face him. DiMaggio was the scourge of the minor leagues, crushing the ball and running up a sixty-one-game hitting streak on his way to the New York Yankees, a zillion World Series, Marilyn, and immortality. He got one fluke hit off Satchel. The Yankee scout wrote a telegram to the big club: “DiMaggio everything we’d hoped he’d be: Hit Satch one for four.” Paige meant that much as a competitor.
The Negro Leagues were a triumph of personal courage and entrepreneurial spirit, but they are also a disgraceful chapter in American discrimination that lasted for far too long. Big league parks would rent to the Negro teams because they paid hard cash and they drew good crowds, especially when Satchel was pitching. The Washington Senators made $100,000 a year renting to Negro teams. They also didn’t allow the black players to use the clubhouse.
There’s a couple of million dollars’ worth of baseball talent on the loose, ready for the big leagues, yet unsigned by any major league. There are pitchers who would win twenty games a season, outfielders who could hit .350, infielders who could win recognition as stars, and there’s at least one catcher who at this writing is probably superior to Bill Dickey—Josh Gibson. Only one thing is keeping them out of the big leagues—the pigmentation of their skin.
—Shirley Povich, Washington Post, 1941
In the ’40s, Time and The Saturday Evening Post ran articles about Paige, and those pieces—even with their racist stereotypes—reminded fans of how long he had been going and his greatness. And how funny he was.
For the first time a white magazine had burned incense at the foot of a black man outside the prize ring. It changed Paige into a celebrity. He immediately developed into a matinee idol among Negroes in this country. The Saturday Evening Post made him ten times more famous than the black press had. He cashed in on it by becoming a one-man barnstormer. He brought people back to the ball game. He got blacks in the habit of going to ball games and spending their money. It caught the eyes of Branch Rickey, who was a money changer from way back.
—Ric Roberts, Pittsburgh Courier
WWII brought home the fact that minorities were being asked to defend the USA without enjoying civil rights when they came home. But that would soon change. Branch Rickey, the man who ran the Brooklyn Dodgers, was scheming to do what no one had done: bring blacks into the majors.
They said I was the greatest pitcher they ever saw . . . I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t give me no justice.
—Satchel Paige
In the Negro Leagues, one of Paige’s teammates was the young Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson had a tryout with the White Sox in 1942, and they thought he was worth fifty grand, but they wouldn’t pull the trigger. Eventually, though, he became the first black man to play in the white big leagues. Jackie was worried he wouldn’t make the grade when he got signed in 1945. He confided in Gene Benson, his roommate, who reminded him of all the illegal pitches the Negro League allowed: “Jackie, just remember one thing: where you’re goin’ ain’t half as tough as where you been.”
For all Jackie’s talent, Paige was the trailblazer, and he and his compatriots of the first generation of black baseball stars were the very face of the daring, jive-talking, crowd-pleasing style of Negro League play that came to the big leagues and white fans. The great paradox is that the success of the Negro Leagues led by Satchel in drawing fans actually delayed integration, as the white owners wanted that rental income.
Paige took Jackie’s signing personally: “Signing Jackie like they did still hurt me deep down. I’d been the guy who’d started all that big talk about letting us in the big time. I’d been the one who’d opened up the major league parks to colored teams. I’d been the one who the white boys wanted to go barnstorming against.”
Despite his feelings, Paige said of Robinson, “He’s the greatest colored player I’ve ever seen.”
There were better players than Jackie: Monte Irvin was one. Josh Gibson thought he should be first. The truth is simply that Satchel Paige could not be the first black man in white baseball at that late date in his career, even if he was the best known. He was older and making more than almost any white player, and he would not have gone to the minor leagues for a year as Jackie did. Jackie had the temperament and character, and in the end he wanted that culturally important job. Jackie was a staunch visionary; Paige a veteran showman.
When everybody’s calling you ageless, you got time for those comebacks.
—Satchel Paige
In 1948 at the age of fortysomething, he finally got the call from maverick owner Bill Veeck, and a year after Robinson made the Brooklyn Dodgers, Paige became a big leaguer.
Brought out to the park to audition for Veeck and manager-shortstop Lou Boudreau, Paige said he felt “numb.” Boudreau asked him if he wanted to loosen up by running. Paige said yes, then remembered he hated running and ran a few yards, then came back. He threw for a few minutes and only missed the plate a couple of times. Boudreau, who won the AL MVP that year, stood in against him and couldn’t do anything. Paige was signed for half a season and given a year’s pay. He was finally in white baseball. Veeck told him, “I’m just sorry you didn’t come up in your prime. You’d have been one of the greatest right-handers baseball has ever known if you had.”
Paige pitched in relief for the Indians a few times, then was asked to start. He threw back-to-back shutouts, and they sold hundreds of thousands of tickets. He went on to a 6–1 record that season, and, most impressively, when the Associated Press writers voted for Rookie of the Year, Paige garnered several votes, which he was quite delighted by, but he said that he “wasn’t sure what year the gentlemen had in mind.” Some papers were horrible, calling it an affront to the game to have an old clown like him, some were exultant; one New York paper called him “a Paul Bunyan in Technicolor.”
After Cleveland he played on the St. Louis Browns and got in the All-Star Game a couple of times. By now he was in his fifties, but he didn’t stop. He caught on with the minor league Marlins in Florida again for Veeck. In 1965, at fifty-nine, hustler and owner of the Kansas City Athletics Charley Finley brought him back for one game. Paige was seated in a rocking chair in the bullpen and attended by a “nurse,” but he still threw three big-league scoreless innings. They brought him out for the fourth, so he could take a bow. The crowd gave him a standing ovation as he walked off the mound. Paige always pleased the crowd. He is still out there inspiring us and making us love baseball.
MONUMENTS AND WEEPING
The first professional Major League white team Paige played for, not a segregated team, was the Cleveland Indians of 1948. They also won the World Series. (The last time they did that little thing.)
Progressive Field in Cleveland has a monument park out back, and you may go there and stand in breathless wonder in front of his plaque or weep quietly as some sentimental Smartest Book types have done. For Satchel Paige put on a brave face in a bad situation and triumphed. With wit and humor.
Ted Williams, a baller who was nobody’s sissy, had this to say when he was placed in the Hall of Fame: “The other day Willie Mays hit his five hundred and twenty-second home run. He has gone past me, and he’s pushing, and I say to him, ‘Go get ’em, Willie.’ Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. I hope that one day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.”
Williams played on the Boston Red Sox for twenty-one years with breaks for two wars as a marine pilot. He is considered by many to be the greatest hitter of all time. He also played on a team that was the very last to integrate in 1959, a full twelve years after Jackie Robinson. Though the Boston Celtics basketball team was the first to field an all-black lineup and hire a black coach. The Sox owner Tom Yawkey just was not into it. In 1966, when Teddy Ballgame was elected to the Hall of Fame, it was only three years after the March for Jobs and Freedom on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, not that long after the march from Selma to Montgomery and the Watts riots. No white ballplayer had ever seized the day the way Ted did during his induction to the Hall. His speech lit a fire under baseball’s collective ass, and within five years they started a special panel and put Paige and Gibson in the Hall.
When Paige was inducted, he got on the stand in his spectacles and his suit and said, “The only change is that baseball’s turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal.”
Father Time takes us all. It took Satchel Paige and it’ll take me.
—Bill “Spaceman” Lee
Paige was contemplative, and he philosophized on many topics. He even had a John Lennon–like quote about faith: “Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.” Then there is his dread of running: “I don’t generally like running. I believe in training by rising gently up and down from the bench.”
One of his more famous thoughts is, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” The question of age came up throughout Paige’s career, and he would often reply, “I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a hundred times: I’m forty-four.” His mother, Lula, told a reporter that he was fifty-five rather than fifty-three, saying she knew this because she wrote it down in her Bible. Paige wrote, “Seems like Mom’s Bible would know, but she ain’t ever shown me the Bible. Anyway, she was in her nineties when she told the reporter that, and sometimes she tended to forget things.”
Paige really quit the road only when he was in his sixties. As an actual old man he toured with the Indianapolis Clowns, who had featured Women players and a midget. He was the one wearing spectacles dispensing wisdom from the back of the bus and pitching an inning or two for disbelieving fans who thought he had passed. He then went back as a special coach to the Atlanta Braves, so he could get his pension.
Writer Richard Donovan printed a profile in Collier’s magazine called “The Fabulous Satchel Paige.” This brought even more notoriety to our hero. It was 1953, and Paige had outlasted Ruth, Dizzy, and Bob “Rapid Robert” Feller. The best part of the rules is he followed so few of them.
Paige never said these things in this particular order, but when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. These are, in fact, on his family tombstone in Kansas City:
1. Avoid fried meats that angry up the blood.
2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful.
5. Avoid running at all times.