Satchel Paige
Leroy Robert "Satchel" Paige (born July 7, 1906 in Mobile; died June 8, 1982 in Kansas City, Missouri) was one of the greatest pitchers in baseball. He won more games in his three seasons with the Birmingham Black Barons than any other pitcher. He went on to play in the Major Leagues and was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971.
Early years
Paige was born the seventh child of twelve (including a set of twins) to John Page, a gardener, and Lula Coleman Page, a domestic worker, in the "South Bay" area of Mobile. His birth date has been the subject of conflicting reports from his mother and others.
Satchel, his siblings and his mother changed the spelling of their name from Page to Paige sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, reportedly to distance themselves from John Page.
Paige got his nickname "Satchel" from a friend and next door neighbor, Wilber Hines. The two would go down to the Louisville and Nashville Railroad station and carry bags for the passengers for money. Paige got caught trying to steal one of the bags that he was carrying and Hines gave him the nickname.
On July 24, 1918, Paige was sent to the Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs for shoplifting and truancy from Councill School. There he developed his pitching skills under the guidance of Edward Byrd. It was Byrd that taught Paige how to kick his front foot high and to release the ball at the last possible instant. After his release, shortly before Christmas of 1923, Paige joined the semi-pro Mobile Tigers where his brother Wilson was already playing. Also on the team were future Negro League stars Ted Radcliffe and Bobby Robinson.
Pitching later for the semi-pro team named the "Down the Bay Boys", Paige got into a jam in the ninth inning of a 1-0 ballgame. Angry at himself, he stomped around the mound, kicking up dirt. The fans started booing him, so he decided that “somebody was going to have to pay for that.” He called in his outfielders and had them squat in the infield. With the fans and his own teammates howling, he worked his way out of the jam and made a name for himself.
Negro Leagues
The early years
A former friend from Mobile, Alex Herman, was a player/manager for the Chattanooga Black Lookouts of the Negro Southern League. He discovered Paige and wanted to sign him to a $50 per month contract. Lula Paige didn’t want any part of it until Herman promised to send her a stipend extracted from Satchel’s salary.
Paige was used sparingly in 1926; on June 22 he got the starting job against the Albany Giants and ended up giving up 13 runs in the loss. It was during a game against the Memphis Red Sox that Bill “Plunk” Drake taught Paige the hesitation pitch that Paige would later make famous. For the 1927 season, Paige was given a raise to $200 per month and a new Ford Model-A roadster. Nevertheless, after just a few games, Paige abandoned the Lookouts for the $276 per month the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro National League were willing to pay.
Pitching for the Black Barons, Paige was wild and awkward and didn’t want to take advice on how to pitch from his manager, Bill Gatewood. During a game on June 27, 1927, against Cool Papa Bell’s St. Louis Stars, Paige incited a riot by beaning three consecutive Stars players. Finally Paige accepted help with his mechanics from Sam Streeter and Harry Salmon. He finished the season 8-3 with 80 strikeouts and 19 walks in 93 innings.
Over the next 2 seasons, Paige went 23-25 while setting the Negro League single season strikeout record in 1929 with 184 including the then record of 17 in one game against the Detroit Stars. Due to his increased earning potential, Barons owner R. T. Jackson would “rent” Paige out to other ball clubs for a game or two to draw a decent crowd, with both Jackson and Paige taking a cut.
Cuba
In winter 1929, Abel Linares offered Paige an astounding $100 per game to play for his Santa Clara team in Cuba alongside future Hall of Famer Martin Dihigo.
Gambling on baseball games in Cuba was such a huge pastime that players were not allowed to drink alcohol, so they could stay ready to play. Paige – homesick for carousing, hating the food, despising the constant inspections and being thoroughly baffled by the language – stayed on the island for 11 games. He ended up going 5-6 and almost got himself killed when the mayor of a small hamlet asked him, in Spanish, if he had intentionally lost a particular game. Paige, not understanding a word the man said, nodded and smiled, thinking the guy was fawning over him. Paige took his $1100 and left on a steamship out of Havana.
When Paige returned to the United States, he and Jackson revived their practice of renting Paige out to various teams. In the spring of 1930, Jackson leased him to the American Negro League champions, the Baltimore Black Sox, led by bow-legged third baseman Jud “Boojum” Wilson. Paige, being from the south, found that he was an outsider on the Black Sox and his teammates considered him a hick. Frank Warfield, the player/manager of the Black Sox, made sure that Paige knew he was the number two pitcher behind Lamon Yokelev, and that didn’t sit well with Paige.
Paige returned to Birmingham for a few games and then was shipped to the Chicago American Giants of the NNL for a home-and-home series with the Houston Black Buffaloes of the Texas-Oklahoma League. Paige won one and lost one in the series and then returned to Birmingham.
By the spring of 1931 the Depression was taking its toll on the Negro Leagues. No one team could afford Paige. Tom Wilson of the Nashville Elite Giants in the Negro Southern League thought he could. Wilson then moved the team to Cleveland, as the Cleveland Cubs. By the end of 1931 the Cubs moved back to Nashville.
Pittsburgh Crawfords
In June of 1931, the Crawford Colored Giants, an independent club owned by Pittsburgh underworld figure Gus Greenlee, made Paige an offer of $250 a month. On August 6, Paige made his Crawford debut against their hometown rivals, the Homestead Grays. Paige had 6 strikeouts and no walks in 5 innings of relief to get the win.
In September, Paige joined a Negro all-star team, the Philadelphia Giants, to play in the California Winter League.
In 1932, Greenlee stole Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and Ted Radcliffe away from the Homestead Grays to assemble one of the finest baseball clubs in history. Crawford opened up the season on April 30 in their newly build stadium, Greenlee Field, the first black-owned stadium in the country. Paige ended up losing to the New York Black Yankees in a tight one but got even with them by beating them twice that season, including Paige’s first Negro League no-hitter on July 16.
By the end of the season, Greenlee had signed to contracts Cool Papa Bell, John Henry Russell, Leroy Matlock, Jake Stephens, ”Boojum” Wilson, Jimmie Crutchfield, Ted Page, Judy Johnson and Rap Dixon. With Crawford holding, for now, five future Hall of Famers, there was no doubt who the true “Black Yankees” were.
In 1933, Paige, snubbed by other Negro League players and fans when he wasn’t selected for the first ever East-West All Star Game, ended up going 6-6 for the season.
On July 4, 1934, Paige threw another no-hitter, this time against the Homestead Grays. Only a first inning walk to future Hall of Famer Buck Leonard, and an error in the 4th inning, prevented Paige from chalking up a perfect game. Leonard, unnerved by the rising swoop of the ball, repeatedly asked the umpire to check the ball for scuffing. When the umpire removed one ball from play, Paige said, “You may as well thrown ‘em all out ‘cause they’re all gonna jump like that.”
To head off an attempt by Paige to jump to the Kansas City Monarchs, Greenlee leased Paige to J. Leslie Wilkinson, owner of the Monarchs, for use on his Colored House of David during The Denver Post’s “Little World Series” baseball tournament. Paige won three games in five days while striking out 14, 18 and 12 in each game. During the East-West All Star game of 1934, Paige – who this time wasn’t denied by fans – came in during the sixth inning with the score tied at 0-0 with a man on second, and proceeded to strike out Alec Radcliffe and retire Turkey Stearnes and Mule Suttles on soft fly balls. The East scored one run in the top of the eighth and Paige did the rest by shutting down the West’s offense.
Towards the end of the 1934 season, Paige accepted an offer from Neil Orr Churchill’s semi-pro team in Bismarck, North Dakota of $400 and a late model Chrysler straight off of Churchill’s lot for just one month’s work. There, he picked up the nickname Long Rifle from local Sioux Indians.
On October 26, 1934, Paige married his longtime sweetheart Janet Howard. During the wedding reception, Greenlee – who paid for the reception – had Paige sign a new long-term contract for the same $250 that he’d been making. On his honeymoon in Las Vegas, which Greenlee also paid for, Paige pitched for Tom Wilson’s Philadelphia Giants in the California Winter League. Paige did particularly well against Dizzy Dean’s all-star team. Later, when Dean was a sports columnist for the Chicago Tribune, he would call Paige the pitcher with the best stuff he’d ever seen.
Paige ended up going 13-3 for the Crawfords for the season and 31-4 if you include all the games he pitched during 1934.
On March 3, 1935, Paige jumped teams again, this time from the Giants to another team in the CWL, the El Paso Mexicans. When Paige returned to Pittsburgh, after going 17-2 in the CWL, he got into a contract dispute with Greenlee and decided to return to Bismarck for the same $400 per month and late model used car that he got before while his new bride stayed in Pittsburgh. After having a very good year in which they won the Denver Post baseball tournament, Paige was run out of town when it became known that he was sleeping with several white women.
DiMaggio and Feller
Paige could not return to the NNL because he was banned from the league for the 1935 season by Greenlee when he jumped to the Bismarck team. Paige turned to J. Leslie Wilkinson and the Kansas City Monarchs. Wilkinson, risking the wrath of Greenlee, was elated to bring Paige aboard. Paige stayed with the Monarchs through the end of the year. He got an offer to front his own team, the Satchel Paige All-Stars, from Johnny Burton, a northern California promoter who needed a team to play against an all-star squad composed of big leaguers out of the Bay Area.
On February 7, 1936, Joe DiMaggio was making his last stop as a minor leaguer before joining the New York Yankees, and he was going to have to face baseball’s best pitcher, Satchel Paige. DiMaggio ended up going 1-4 with the game winning RBI in the bottom of the tenth. A Yankee scout watching the game wired the big club that day a report which read, “DIMAGGIO EVERYTHING WE’D HOPED HE’D BE: HIT SATCH ONE FOR FOUR.”
Paige, at the demand of his wife, returned to Pittsburgh where Greenlee acquiesced to Paige’s salary demands and gave him a $600 per month contract, by far the highest in the Negro Leagues. In order to get Wilkinson not to sign Paige again, Greenlee agreed that the NNL would recognize a competing league the following season, to be made up of Midwest teams and overseen by Wilkinson. That would lead to the renewing of the Negro League World Series, which hadn’t been played since 1927.
Paige ended up going 7-2 with three shutouts, but things were getting bad for him at home. At the end of the season, Tom Wilson, owner of the Washington Elites, assembled an all-star team comprised of Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Leroy Matlock, Buck Leonard, Felton Snow, Wild Bill Wright and Sammy Hughes, barnstorming through the Midwest. They swept through the Denver Post tournament in seven straight games, Paige winning three of them by the scores of 7-1, 12-1 and 7-0 with 18 strikeouts in the title game against an over matched semi-pro team from Borger, Texas. During another series against a team of big leaguers led by Rogers Hornsby, Paige won a pitching duel with a 17-year-old phenom by the name of Bob Feller.
Dominican Republic
During a 1937 swing through New Orleans by the Crawfords, Paige was approached by Dr. José Enrique Aybar, dean of the University of Santo Domingo, deputy of the Dominican Republic’s national congress and director of Los Dragones, a baseball team operated by Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic. Aybar hired Paige to act as an agent for Trujillo in recruiting other Negro League players to play for Los Dragones. Aybar gave Paige $30,000 to hire as many players as he could. Paige ended up bringing eight other players when he jumped to Los Dragones for their eight week season, including Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Leroy Matlock, Sam Bankhead, Harry Williams and Herman Andrews. Paige had a league best 8-10 record and Los Dragones finished the season in first place with an overall record of 18-13. After Los Dragones beat San Pedro de Macorís in the title series 4 games to 3 by coming from a 3 games to 0 deficit, all the players (Paige later than the rest) returned to the states.
Having little choice because they were all banned from the NNL, the returning players formed Trujillo’s All-Stars and barnstormed around the Midwest. J. Leslie Wilkinson got around the ban by having promoter Ray Dean schedule House of David games with the All-Stars and then he used his influence to get them entered into the Denver Post tournament. The rift between him and the rest of the players was never more evident than when Paige didn’t show up for the first six games of the tournament, but did show up for the final, which the winning pitcher would receive a $1,000 bonus. His team ended up losing to a semi-pro team from Oklahoma. It was a double-elimination tournament – necessitating another game between the same two teams – suspicion persisted that Paige’s teammates threw the game so he wouldn’t get the winning pitcher’s bonus.
Due to his ongoing dispute over salary with Paige, Greenlee sold his contract to the Newark Eagles for $5,000. Paige was interested in playing for the Eagles, not so much for the money, but for one of the owners, Effa Manley. Rumor around the Negro League was that she would have an affair with the best players, and Paige thought that he qualified. When Manley rejected his offer, Paige, having learned about an injunction that wouldn’t allow him to play for any other team in New York or New Jersey, went to play in Mexico.
Mexico
Jorge Pasquel, a Mexican beer distributor, and his four brothers wanted to compete with the major leagues. Their plan to do that was to hire the best Negro League players who were ignored by the big leagues, then raid big league teams and field integrated clubs in the name of international baseball. With this goal, they hired Paige for an astounding fee of $2,000 per month, not to play for the Pasquels’ Vera Cruz team, but to play for the moribund Agrario club of Mexico City, to create a rivalry for Club Azules, a powerhouse bunch led by Martin Dihigo. Back in the states, Greenlee, out $5,000, declared Paige “banned forever from baseball.”
Three games into the season, Paige’s arm went dead. He could barely lift his arm, much less pitch. In the final game of the season, Paige was matched up against Dihigo. Paige relied on throwing junkballs while Dihigo was throwing blistering fastballs. Through six innings, Paige threw from every angle from overhead to crossfire, even underhanded. He was able to hit the corners of the plate for strikes and the batters, always wary of his fastball, couldn’t dig in properly and take advantage of his lack of velocity. Finally in the seventh, his arm gave out completely. With the game scoreless, Paige gave up a hit and two walks. Rearing back to throw a fast ball, he uncorked a wild pitch that resulted in a run scoring. He managed to retire the side by going back to throwing junkballs.
Paige was removed for a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the inning, and Agrario tied it up against Dihigo, taking Paige off the hook for the loss. Dihigo ended up winning the game with a two-run homer in the ninth, but the flood gates were open as Negro League players streamed into Mexico, again forsaking their teams. Paige returned to Pittsburgh a broken man.
Kansas City Monarchs
Having burned a number of bridges behind him in the States, only one ballclub owner was willing to give Paige a chance to play ball again; J.L. Wilkinson of the Monarchs. Wilkinson built a team around Paige called the Travelers, a roving division of the Monarchs.
Managed by fellow Birminghamian Newt Joseph, the team included Big Train Jackson, George Giles and John Marcum, but it was mostly full of Monarch wannabees and has-beens. Paige would get a percentage of the gate receipts for showing up and throwing just a couple of innings, relying on junkballs. On September 22, 1939 in the first game of a double-header against the powerful Chicago American Giants, Paige won a 1-0 game, striking out 10 men in the seven innings before the game was called on account of darkness. After pitching non-stop for over a decade, the seven months since his last pitching game in Mexico gave his arm a chance to heal. In the process, Paige became a better pitcher, utilizing control, finesse and even trickery.
To get his arm in shape, Paige spent the winter playing for the Guayama Brujos in Puerto Rico where he went 19-3 with a 1.93 ERA and a league high 208 strikeouts. Paige won two games in the playoff finals against the San Juan Senadores and won the league’s most valuable player award.
Paige returned to the Travelers for the 1940 season. During the latter part of the season he was promoted to the Monarchs. On September 12, Paige made his debut with the Monarchs against the American Giants. He went all five innings and would have gone all nine, but the game was called by darkness. The Monarchs won 9-3, and Paige struck out 10.
Because the Monarch’s season didn’t begin until July, Paige, with Wilkinson’s permission, bounced between his All-Star team (once named the “Travelers’) and NNL teams that needed him to sell out their parks. The New York Black Yankees were the first team to take advantage of Paige’s rebirth. While pitching for the Black Yankees, Life magazine ran a feature pictorial of him. In 1941 Wilkinson purchased a DC-3 airplane just to ferry Paige around to his outside appearances.
On August 1, 1941, Paige made his first return to the East-West All Star Game in five years, collecting 305,311 votes, 40,000 more than the next highest player, Buck Leonard. Due to a minor injury to his left arm when he was hit by a pitch on July 23, 1941, he did not start the game, but because of his presence, 50,256 people packed Comiskey Park. Paige came in for the start of the eighth inning when the game was well in hand for the east 8-1. The only hit he gave up was a slow roller to the NNL’s new starting catcher, the Baltimore Elite Giants’ Roy Campanella.
On October 5, 1941, Wilkinson booked a game in Sportsman's Park between the Satchel Paige All-Stars and the Bob Feller All-Stars. The Fellers won the game 4-3 with St. Louis Cardinals rookie Stan Musial hitting a Paige fastball over the right field pavilion roof. After the season was over, Paige once again played in the California Winter League, this time he pitched against a team that had Jimmie Foxx and, coming off his .406 season, Ted Williams.
Janet Paige finally caught up to Paige when she had him served with divorce papers while he was walking onto the field during a game at Wrigley Field. At his court date on August 4, 1943, Paige’s divorce was finalized with a one-time payment of $1,500 plus $300 for attorney’s fees granted to Janet.
With America’s entrance into World War II, Paige committed himself to pitching in frequent exhibitions to sell war bonds and raise money for war-related charities. One such game was on May 24 at Wrigley Field against the Dizzy Dean All-Stars. The game, which was played to raise money for the Navy Relief Fund, was the first time a colored team ever played at Wrigley. With many of the major league’s best players in the service, including DiMaggio and Ted Williams, Paige, whose income was nearly $40,000, was easily the highest paid athlete in the world.
In the 1942 Negro League World Series, Game 2, with two on and two out and the Monarchs beating the Grays 2-0 under the lights at Griffith Stadium, Paige gave up a hit to Jerry Benjamin. Paige then intentionally walked the next two batters, Howard Easterling and Buck Leonard, so that he could pitch to the most feared hitter in all of baseball, Josh Gibson. Gibson ended up striking out on three straight pitches. The Monarchs ended up sweeping the series against the Grays with Paige winning the last three games (the one game that the Grays did win was voided because they used four illegal players.)
Integration in baseball
When Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, a teammate of Paige, Paige realized that it was for the better that he himself wasn’t the first black in major league baseball. Robinson started in the minors, an insult that Paige would not have tolerated. By integrating baseball in the minor leagues first, the white major league players got the chance to “get used to” the idea of playing along side black players. Understanding that, Paige said in his autobiography that, “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.” Paige, and all other black players, knew that quibbling about the choice of the first black player in the major leagues would do nothing productive, so, despite his inner feelings, Paige said of Robinson, “He’s the greatest colored player I’ve ever seen.”
After losing two of the first four games of the 1946 Negro League World Series, and not showing up at all for the last three games of the series, Paige and Bob Feller started barnstorming across the United States with their respective All-Star teams. The tour helped revive Paige’s reputation, which had languished since the 1942 Negro League World Series.
On October 12, 1947 in Hays, Kansas, Paige married his longtime girlfriend Lahoma Brown in a civil ceremony.
Finally, on July 7, 1948, with his Cleveland Indians in a pennant race and in desperate need of pitching, Indians owner Bill Veeck brought Paige in to try out with Indians player/manager Lou Boudreau. On that same day, Paige signed his first major league contract, for $40,000 for the three months remaining in the season, becoming the first Negro pitcher in the American League and the seventh Negro big leaguer overall.
Major Leagues
Cleveland Indians
On July 9, 1948, with the St. Louis Browns beating the Indians 4-1 in the bottom of the fourth inning, Boudreau pulled his starting pitcher, Bob Lemon, and sent Paige in. Paige, not knowing the signs and not wanting to cross his catcher up, didn’t put too much on his first pitch, which Chuck Stevens lined into left field. Gerry Priddy bunted Stevens over to second. Up next was Whitey Platt, and Paige had had enough. He threw an overhand server for a strike and one sidearm for another strike. Paige then threw his Hesitation Pitch which put Platt in such a funk that he threw his bat forty feet up the third base line. Browns manager Zack Taylor bolted from the dugout to talk to umpire Bill McGowan about the pitch, claiming it was a balk, but McGowan let it stand as a strike. Paige then got Al Zarilla to fly out to end the inning. The following inning he gave up a leadoff single, but with his catcher having simplified his signals, Paige got the next batter to hit into a double play, followed by a pop fly. Larry Doby pinch hit for Paige the following inning.
Paige got his first big league victory on July 15, 1948, the night after he pitched in an exhibition game against the Brooklyn Dodgers in front of 65,000 people in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. It came at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. The Indians were up 5-3 and the bases were loaded in the sixth inning of the second game of a double header. He got Eddie Joost to fly out to end the inning, but gave up two runs the next inning when Ferris Fain doubled and Hank Majeski hit a home run. Paige buckled down and gave up only one more hit the rest of the game, getting five of the next six outs on fly balls. Larry Doby and Ken Keltner hit home runs in the ninth to give the Indians an 8-5 victory.
Longtime Chicago Cubs broadcaster Jack Brickhouse once said with amusement that Paige "threw a lot of pitches that were not quite 'legal' and not quite 'illegal'".
American League President Will Harridge eventually ruled the Hesitation Pitch definitely illegal and if thrown again it would result in a balk. Paige said, “I guess Mr. Harridge didn’t want me to show up those boys who were young enough to be my sons.”
On August 3, 1948, with the Indians one game behind the Athletics, Boudreau started Paige against the Washington Senators in Cleveland. The 72,562 people that saw the game set a new attendance record for a major league night game. Nervous, Paige walked two of the first three batters and then gave up a triple to Bud Stewart to fall behind 2-0. By the time he came out in the seventh, the Indians were up 4-2 and held on to give him his second victory.
His next start was at Comiskey Park in Chicago. 51,013 people paid to see the game, but many thousands more stormed the turnstiles and crashed into the park, overwhelming the few dozen ticket-takers. Paige went the distance, shutting out the White Sox 5-0, debunking the assumption that nine innings of pitching was now beyond his capabilities.
The Indians were in a heated pennant race on August 20, 1948. Coming into the game against the White Sox, Bob Lemon, Gene Bearden and Sam Zoldak had thrown shutouts to run up a thirty-inning scoreless streak, eleven shy of the big league record. 201,829 people had come to see his last three starts. For this game in Cleveland, 78,382 people came to see Paige, a full 6,000 more people than when he last broke the night attendance record. Paige went the distance, giving up two singles and one double for his second consecutive three hit shutout. At that point in the season, Paige was 5-1 with an astoundingly low 1.33 ERA. He made one appearance in the 1948 World Series. He pitched for two-thirds of an inning in Game 2 while the Indians were trailing the Boston Braves, giving up a sacrifice fly to Warren Spahn, got called for a balk and struck out Tommy Holmes. The Indians ended up winning the series in six games. Paige ended the year with a 6-1 record with a 2.48 ERA, 45 strikeouts, 2 shutouts and 2 base hits.
The year 1949 wasn’t nearly as good for Paige as 1948. He ended the season with a 4-7 record and was 1-3 in his starts with a 3.04 ERA. After the season, with Veeck selling the team to pay for his divorce, the Indians gave Paige his unconditional release.
St Louis Browns
Paige, penniless, returned to barnstorming after being released from the Indians. In 1950, he signed with the Philadelphia Stars in the Eastern Division of the Negro American League for $800 per game.
When Veeck bought an eighty percent interest in the St. Louis Browns, the first thing he did was sign Paige. In his first game back in the major leagues, on July 18, 1950, against the Washington Senators. Paige pitched six innings of shutout baseball, but was roughed up in the seventh, giving up three runs. He ended the season with a 3-4 record and a 4.79 ERA.
In 1952, Rogers Hornsby, allegedly a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, took over as manager of the Browns. Despite his history of racism, Hornsby was less hesitant to use Paige than Boudreau was four years before. Paige was so effective that when Hornsby was fired by Veeck, his successor Marty Marion seemed not to want to risk going more than three games without using Paige in some form. By July 4, with Paige having worked in 25 games, Casey Stengel named him to the American League All-Star team, making him the first black pitcher on an AL All-Star team. The All-Star game was cut short after five innings due to rain and Paige never got in. Stengel resolved to name him to the team the following year. Paige finished the year 12-10 with a 3.07 ERA for a team that lost ninety games.
Stengel kept to his word and named Paige to the 1953 All-Star team despite Paige not having a very good year. He got in the game in the eighth inning. First Paige got Gil Hodges to line out, then after Roy Campanella singled up the middle, Eddie Mathews popped out. He then walked Duke Snider and Enos Slaughter lined a hit to center to score Campanella. National League pitcher Murry Dickson drove in Snider, but was thrown out at second base trying to stretch the hit into a double. Paige ended the year with a disappointing 3-9 record, but a respectable 3.53 ERA. Paige was released after the season when Veeck once again had to sell.
Paige once again returned to barnstorming with Abe Saperstein. They formed a baseball version of Saperstein’s Harlem Globetrotters. Paige then joined the real Globetrotters when he joined one of their most popular “reams” – the “baseball routine.” Paige would “pitch” the basketball to Goose Tatum, who would “bat” the ball with his arms, run around the “bases” and slide “home” safely. Although he was making a decent living, Paige grew tired of the constant travel. His family had grown with the birth of his fourth child and first son, Robert Leroy.
Paige then signed for $300 a month and a percentage of the gate to play for the Monarchs again. Then, on August 14, 1955, Paige signed a contract with the Greensboro Patriots of the Carolina League. He was scheduled to pitch at home three days later against the Philadelphia Phillies farm team, the Reidsville Luckies, but before he could suit up, Phillies farm director Eddie Collins wired George Trautman, president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, to protest Paige’s appearance. Trautman, dealing with the integration of southern baseball against a Jim Crow backdrop, ruled that the signing was invalid, but the Greensboro team reminded him that the Carolina League had already approved the contract. Trautman then ruled that Greensboro could only use Paige in exhibition games. Unfortunately, Greensboro had already scheduled Paige to pitch in a regular season game which was sold out in advance and couldn’t change it to an exhibition. In the end, the game was canceled when Hurricane Diane hit the Carolinas.
Bill Veeck once again came to Paige’s rescue when, after taking control of the Phillies' triple-A farm team, the Miami Marlins of the International League, he signed Paige to a contract for $15,000 and a percentage of the gate. Marlins manager Don Osborn didn’t want Paige and said that he would only use him in exhibition games. Veeck made a deal with Osborn that he could line up his best nine hitters, rotating them in from their positions in the field, and Veeck agreed to pay ten dollars to any of them who get a clean hit off of Paige. Paige retired all nine and Osborn agreed to make Paige a roster player. In Paige’s first game as a Marlin, he pitched a complete-game, four hit, shutout. Osborn, a former minor league pitcher, taught Paige the proper way to throw a curveball, which allowed Paige to tear through the International League. Paige finished the season 11-4 with an ERA of 1.86 with 79 strikeouts and only 28 walks. This time, when Veeck left the team, Paige was allowed to stay on, for two more years.
In 1957 the Marlins finished in sixth place, but Paige had a 10-8 record with 76 strikeouts versus 11 walks and 2.42 ERA. The following year, Osborn was replaced as manager by Kerby Farrell who wasn’t as forgiving when it came to Paige missing curfews or workouts. He was fined several times throughout the year and finished 10-10, saying that he would not return to Miami the following season.
After the season ended, Paige went to Durango, Mexico to appear in a United Artist] movie, The Wonderful Country, starring Robert Mitchum and Julie London. Paige played Tobe Sutton, a hard-bitten Union army cavalry sergeant of a segregated black unit. He was paid $10,000 to be in it, and the movie became the pride of his life.
Paige was in and out of baseball, pitching sporadically, over the next decade.
Post-playing career
Late in 1960 Paige began collaborating with writer David Lipman on his autobiography, which was to be published by Doubleday in April 1962. It was so successful that Doubleday issued three printings.
At the age of 56, in 1961 Paige signed on with the Triple-A Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast League, pitching twenty-five innings, striking out 19 and giving up 18 earned runs. He failed to record a single decision in his stint with the Beavers.
In 1965, Kansas City Athletics owner Charlie Finley signed Paige, 59 at the time, for one game. On September 25, against the Boston Red Sox, Finley invited several Negro League veterans including Cool Papa Bell to be introduced before the game. Paige was in the bullpen, sitting on a rocking chair, being served coffee by a “nurse” between innings. He started the game by getting Jim Gosger out on a pop foul. The next man, Dalton Jones, reached first and went to second on an infield error, but was thrown out trying to reach third on a pitch in the dirt. Carl Yastrzemski doubled and Tony Conigliaro hit a fly ball to end the inning. The next six batters went down in order, including a strikeout of Bill Monbouquette. In the fourth inning, Paige took the mound, to be removed according to plan by Haywood Sullivan. He walked off to a boisterous ovation despite the small crowd of 9,000. The lights dimmed and, led by the PA announcer, the fans lit matches and cigarette lighters while singing “The Old Gray Mare.”
In 1966, Paige pitched in his last game, getting some measure of revenge when he pitched for the Carolina League’s Peninsula Pilots of Hampton, Virginia, against the very same Greensboro Patriots who had been forced to release him before his first pitch back in 1955. Paige gave up two runs in the first, threw a scoreless second and then left, never to return as a player in organized baseball again.
Also in 1966 Paige pitched for the semipro Anchorage Earthquakers, a team that barnstormed through Canada. In 1967 Paige appeared with the Globetrotters in Chicago and lowered himself to play with the Indianapolis Clowns for $1,000 a month.
In 1968 Paige assumed the position of deputy sheriff in Kansas City, with the understanding that he need not bother to actually come to work in the sheriff’s office. The purpose of the charade was to set up Paige with political credentials. Soon after, he was running for a Missouri state assembly seat with the support of the local Democratic club. Candidate Paige never gave a speech, and was never taken seriously. Paige lost the election in a landslide.
In August of 1969, the owner of the Atlanta Braves, William Bartholomay, signed Paige to a contract running through the 1969 season – supposedly as a pitching coach, but actually to raise some fan interest in the club’s new hometown at the same time that he was meeting Paige’s pension requirements. Paige did most of his coaching from his living room in Kansas City.
Hall of Fame
Bowie Kuhn replaced Colonel Spike Eckert as the Commissioner of Baseball in 1969. In the wake of Ted Williams' 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech urging induction of Negro Leaguers, and on the recommendation of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Kuhn empowered a ten-man committee to sift through hundreds of names and nominate the first group of four Negro League players to go to the Hall of Fame. Because Paige pitched in Greensboro in 1966, he would not have been eligible for enshrinement until 1971, as players have to be out of professional baseball for at least five years before they can be elected. All of the men on the committee agreed that Paige had to be the first Negro league player to get elected, so this gave Kuhn plenty of time to create some sort of Negro league branch in the Hall of Fame. On February 9, 1971 Kuhn announced that Paige would be the first member of the Negro wing of the Hall of Fame. Because many in the press saw the suggestion of a "Negro wing" as separate-but-equal and blasted major league baseball for the idea, by the time that Paige’s induction came around on August 9, Kuhn convinced the owners and the private trust of the Hall of Fame that there should be no separate wing after all. It was decided that all who had been chosen and all who would be chosen would get their plaques in the “regular” section of the Hall of Fame.
On May 31, 1981, a made-for-television movie titled Don’t Look Back, starring Alex Thiell as Paige and Beverly Todd as Lahoma aired. Paige was paid $10,000 for his story and technical advice. In the spring of 1981 Paige was made vice president of the Triple-A Springfield Redbirds of the American Association, but this was in title only. In August, with great difficulty because of health problems, he attended a reunion of Negro League players held in Ashland, Kentucky]that paid special tribute to him and Cool Papa Bell. Attending the reunion were Willie Mays, Buck Leonard, Monte Irvin, Judy Johnson, Chet Brewer, Gene Benson, Bob Feller and Happy Chandler.
During a power failure on June 8, 1982, Paige died of a heart attack at his home in Kansas City, a mere month before his 76th birthday. He is buried on Paige Island in the Forest Hill Memorial Park Cemetery in Kansas City.
In 1996, Paige was played by Delroy Lindo]in the made-for-cable film Soul of the Game, which also starred Mykelti Williamson as Josh Gibson, Blair Underwood as Jackie Robinson, Edward Herrmann as Branch Rickey and Jerry Hardin as Commissioner Happy Chandler.
In 1999, he ranked Number 19 on The Sporting News list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players, and was nominated as a finalist for the Major League Baseball All-Century Team.
"Rules for Staying Young"
Paige's rules originally appeared in the June 13, 1953 issue of Collier's. The version below is taken from his autobiography Maybe I'll Pitch Forever (as told to David Lipman, 1962):
- Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.
- If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
- Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
- Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society -- the social ramble ain't restful.
- Avoid running at all times.
- And don't look back -- something might be gaining on you.
References
- "Satchel Paige." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 13 Apr 2006, 21:37 UTC. 15 Apr 2006, 04:49 [1].
- Mark Ribowsky (1994). Don't Look Back : Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80963-X.
- Satchel Paige, David Lipman (1993). Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0803287321.
- David Pietrusza, Matthew Silverman & Michael Gershman, ed. (2000). Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia. Total/Sports Illustrated.
- Tye, Larry (2009) Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend. New York: Random House. ISBN 1400066514
External links
- Satchel Paige official website
- Paige's entry in the Baseball Hall of Fame
- Paige profile at The Baseball Page archived March 5, 2016
- A Biography of Leroy Satchel Paige at Agilewriter.com archived July 23, 2014
- Negro League Baseball Players Association