SATCHEL
Even after all these years, I can still picture him in my mind, a gangly, grizzled old man making his way in from the bullpen in right field, moving slowly, oh so slowly, toward the pitcher’s mound.
The setting was Red Wing Stadium, home of the Rochester Red Wings, a St. Louis Cardinals farm club in the International League. I had gone there to see the Wings take on the Miami Marlins who had signed Satchel Paige to a minor league contract. The year was 1957, or was it ‘58? I was 14 at the time, about to start high school. Satchel was 58 or 59, maybe 60. When it came to age, no one was ever sure how old Paige was.
I’m now 75, and though 62 years have passed, I still recall the day I saw him throw a baseball.
He toes the rubber and looks toward the plate — as if looking backward in time, back to when players like him weren’t permitted to play in the major leagues, back to a time when he may have been the best pitcher on the face of the earth.
In truth, I didn’t fully appreciate what I was witnessing. But I do now, thanks to Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, one of the best baseball books I’ve ever read.
Written by Larry Tye in 2009, Satchel is the stirring account of the child born to a poor Alabama washerwoman, the boy who earned his nickname from his enterprising work as a railroad porter, and the young man who took up baseball on the streets and in reform school before becoming the superstar hurler of the Negro Leagues.
It’s a look back in time when segregation was a way of life and civil rights was a faint blip on the horizon. The author does a wonderful job capturing what that era was like when blacks were lynched, when separate facilities for the races were in vogue and what Satchel and so many others had to endure as they struggled to make a living.
They played on crummy fields, ate lousy food, stayed in crappy hotels and got paid peanuts, knowing all the while they were just as good as their white counterparts in the majors but resigned to the probability they would never have the opportunity to prove it.
Which brings me to the part of the book I liked best. Satchel was barnstorming in California when he got the news he had been anticipating for two decades. Brooklyn Dodgers president Branch Rickey had just signed a Negro to a big-league contract. It was, of course, Jackie Robinson.
Paige was devastated. Nearly everyone had assumed that he would be the one to break baseball’s color barrier, not Robinson.
Satchel, however, handled the signing with class. “They didn’t make a mistake with Robinson,” he said. “They couldn’t have picked a better man.” But the words ate at him even as he uttered them, the author says. Other seasoned Negro Leaguers were resentful as well. Robinson, they complained, “had never served his time in the sandlots and barnyards, eating dust and fending off slurs. He had not proven himself against the best of white baseball the way Satchel had.
Nevertheless, Satchel tried to be philosophical. He understood that he was aging and old-school, a specter from the past, while the 26-year-old Robinson was a college boy and army veteran. Or, as the author put it, “Jackie had the table manners whites liked.”
None of this should take away from Jackie’s accomplishments. During his one season in the Negro Leagues where he was a teammate of Satchel’s, he led the Kansas City Monarchs with a .345 batting average. And when he was called up to the Dodgers, he hit .292 and was named Rookie of the Year. In the years that followed, he became an icon.
But it was Satchel who, years earlier, proved that white fans as well as black would come to see great ballplayers, no matter what their color. In a memoir, Satchel wrote, ‘I’d been the guy who started all that big talk about letting us in the big time. I’d been the one everyone said should be in the majors.” To be denied that chance hurt as badly as “when somebody you loves dies or something dies inside you.”
According to the author, that sense of having been wronged never left him. Nor did the fear of being forgotten. “He just wanted to be remembered,” Tye says. “If Jackie Robinson was the father of equal opportunity in baseball, surely Satchel Paige was the grandfather.” Although Satchel had not gone to war over every racial slight, he had stood up. He refused to play in a town unless it supplied food and lodging to him and his teammates, “a defiance for which young civil rights workers would get arrested and lionized a generation later.”
One cannot read Satchel without feeling a few pangs of remorse and sadness. There were so many great black players who never got a chance, guys like Fleetwood Walker, Rube Foster and Josh Gibson. Then again, as Buck O’Neil said, “Don’t feel sorry for us. Feel sorry for yourselves since you never got to see us play.”
White fans finally did get their opportunity, first with Robinson, then Larry Doby who played for Cleveland, and then Satchel who joined Doby in 1948.
Though well past his prime at 42 years of age, Paige compiled a 6–1 record for the Indians and a 2.48 era. He was released the following year with a 4–7 record.
In 1951, he signed with the St. Louis Browns, going 3–4, 12–10 and 3–9 over three seasons. The stats are misleading, however. In 1952, he led the American League in relief innings pitched and relief wins, this while he was 45 years old. He also pitched a 12-inning 1–0 shutout against the Tigers. The following year, with the Browns 46 games behind the Yankees, New York manager Casey Stengel selected Paige for his All-Star team. Paige was 47 years old!
In 1965, after a 12-year hiatus from the majors, Kansas City owner Charles Finley signed Paige to a contract and announced the aging pitcher would take the mound against the Red Sox. Yes, it was a publicity stunt, a gimmick, but it was no joke to Paige who pitched three shutout innings and gave up only one hit. One of Satchel’s teammates on the A’s, Ed Charles, said the veteran fireballer was throwing 86–88 miles per hour with excellent control and location.
“He proceeded to go out on the mound and shove the ball right up their you know what,” Charles said.
How good was he? Joe DiMaggio said Paige was the toughest pitcher he ever faced.
Ted Williams, during his induction into the Hall of Fame in 1966, expressed hope that Paige would also soon be inducted as a symbol of “the great Negro players who are not here.”
Six years later, the Hall finally opened its doors. Sort of. It would let in one black a year based on his record in the Negro Leagues starting with Paige, but it would be to a wing separate from other honorees. “I’m proud to be wherever they put me,” Paige said through tightened lips. Others like Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times, were more outspoken. “This notion of Jim Crow in Baseball’s Heaven is appalling. What is this — 1840? Either let him in the front of the Hall — or move the damn thing to Mississippi.”
The slight was eventually corrected; that “separate wing” no longer exists.
Reading everything author Larry Tye has put together makes me feel doubly fortunate that I saw Satchel Paige in person. Back when both he and I were a little younger and he was pitching for the Miami Marlins against my team, the Rochester Red Wings.
Paige was magnificent that day. He shut us out 4–0. But there’s something else that sticks in my memory as much as the score. It’s what Satchel was sitting in before the game started.
It was a rocking chair.
