Five Years of Freedom to Learn How to Pitch

Satchel Paige

In 1906, the year Leroy Robert Paige was born, his hometown of Mobile, Alabama, legally segregated restaurants, saloons, hotels, even cemeteries. Leroy, who was Black, went to work at six years old collecting and cashing in pop bottles. Later, he delivered ice and then began shining shoes and carrying bags for passengers arriving at the train station. This stint as a porter gave him the nickname “Satchel.”

By the time he was twelve, he was in the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers, serving five years for stealing. He played baseball there, learning the fundamentals of pitching from a devoted coach.

Satchel Paige, who was a lean and lanky six-footer with big hands, developed a style that combined a windmill motion, a high kick, and a bullwhip delivery. His pitches were deadly accurate and always fast. “You might say I traded five years of freedom to learn how to pitch.”

Last week, Major League Baseball incorporated Negro League players into its record books. Josh Gibson, who once achieved a single-season batting average of .466, was newly recognized as the most skilled hitter in the game’s history. Satchel Paige was added to the list of pitchers with the lowest earned run average — he chalked up an E.R.A. of 1.01 in 1944 — he was thirty-eight years old at the time.

Statistics are treasured by baseball fans. Because the Negro Leagues, where Paige played almost his entire career, didn’t always keep meticulous records, he compiled his own. He said he pitched in 2,500 games, winning about 2,000 of them, four times as many as Cy Young. Once, playing major-leaguers in a barnstorming game, he struck out twenty-two batters in one game. He pitched, he said, at least twenty no-hitters.

Paige pitched for many teams, always looking for a bigger paycheck. He played winter ball in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, barnstormed in the off-season, drew crowds everywhere. The team he became most associated with was the Kansas City Monarchs, where he played from 1940 to 1947. In 1945, a young rookie named Jackie Robinson broke in with the Monarchs. Satchel Paige had hoped to integrate the major leagues himself, but it was Robinson who got the chance to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

Paige did make it to the big leagues a year later. He debuted with the Cleveland Indians, pitching his first game on his forty-second birthday. He achieved the second best E.R.A. in the majors that year and helped his team win the American League pennant. Two more years with the Indians and three with the St. Louis Browns left fans wishing they had seen him in his prime.

Satchel Paige always approached the game with a sense of lightness and sly humor. He had names for his pitches, the “Bat Dodger,” “Thoughtful Stuff,” and the “Midnight Creeper.” He claimed he kept his pitching arm in shape with an ointment that combined rattlesnake venom and gunpowder, which he got from Sioux elders. “It’s real fine oil,” he said, “the best.”

In 1965, Paige pitched one game for the Kansas City Athletics. He struck out one and allowed one hit. He received a standing ovation when he walked off the field. He was fifty-nine years old. “Don't look back,” he frequently quipped, “something might be gaining on you.”

Joe DiMaggio, who faced Paige in a 1936 exhibition game, said he was the greatest pitcher he ever batted against.

In 1971, Paige was the first veteran of the Negro Leagues to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. A statue of Paige erected outside the Hall in 2006 serves as a monument to all the brilliant players who were kept out of the major leagues by racial bigotry.

Many are asking these days how Americans can come together. We can start by realizing that that fans as well as players were robbed by the cruel barriers that prevented humans of consummate skill from competing. Perhaps then the baseball diamond can become one place to begin the healing.