Jeffrey Keeten's Reviews > Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend

"Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching."

---Satchel Paige


Notice that Satchel's name is misspelled.

When I was twelve, my Dad found a handful of his Topps baseball cards from the 1950s and gave them to me. Among the cool player’s names were Bob Feller, Yogi Berra, and a lanky black man named Satchel Paige. I pondered on the name Satchel and the name Yogi. How does a guy get a name like Satchel or for that matter Yogi? Later while in college, I was amused to hear that Woody Allen, as a tribute to the great ball player, named his son Satchel Ronan O’Sullivan Farrow, although calling Ronan Woody’s child is a bit of a stretch. I’m of the opinion, shared by many others, that he is actually Frank Sinatra’s son. Ronan doesn’t go by Satchel, which could be because he doesn’t like it, or it could be because he has some issues with his “father.” I hope he understands that he was named after a baseball legend.

It wasn’t until I read this book that some possibilities for the origins of Leroy Page evolving into Satchel Paige became known to me. (He added an i to his last name because he thought it added some panache.) As a boy, Leroy worked at the train station in Mobile, Alabama, carrying satchels for passengers. One story is that he designed a pole that would go over his shoulders that allowed him to carry more satchels at one time and, therefore, make more money. That is the sanitized story. The other story is that he was light fingered and quick enough to “liberate” satchels from passengers. I tend to lean towards the later since it was only a few years later that he found himself at reformatory school. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. He traded five years of his life to learn how to play baseball.

Satchel was an enigma.

Nearly every time he was asked for his birth date, whether by reporters or for official documents, he gave a different date, usually a date that made him younger than his actual age. Later when asked about his marriage date, he did the same thing, slinging a different date out there each time. It was as if he were trying to keep anything real to be known about Leroy safely tucked in the shadows of the larger than life Satchel.

He was a phenom.

He’d have to be coming from Mobile, Alabama, and having the wrong tint in the wrong time. He was told by owners and managers his whole life, ”If only you were white.” He was a superstar for the Negro leagues. His fastball was nearly unhittable until he hurt his arm in the late 1930s. The great Joe DiMaggio had a chance to bat against him and said he was "the best and fastest pitcher I've ever faced." He became the star that fans attending Negro games most wanted to see. He was a showman. He embellished, bragged, and most importantly delivered. Modesty was not a word he was very familiar with.



Satchel played wherever someone would pay him to play. He skipped out on contracts when he got better offers. He went to other countries to play if the offer was too irresistible. Given the fact that he spent money as fast as he could make it, he was forced to keep hustling. He made a better living than most white major leaguers by barnstorming across the country. He put his black All-stars up against some of the best of the major leaguers in exhibition games. The crowds came out to see this crazy, spaghetti legged pitcher with size fourteen feet pitch. He would raise his front foot so far into the air before he pitched that, as one player put it, “he temporarily blotted out the sun.”

As innings of pitching mounted (everyone wanted to see Satchel pitch every game), he developed some arm saving pitches that also resulted in some embarrassing swings from big leaguers. ”I got bloopers, loopers, and droopers. I got a jump ball, a be ball, a screw ball, a wobbly ball, a whispy-dispy-do, a hurry-up ball, a nothin’ ball and a bat dodger.”

If the world was a fair place, he would have been the first black to integrate into major league baseball, and though he supported Jackie Robinson publicly, privately he was hurt. He understood that he was ”old-school, while the twenty-six-year-old Robinson was a college boy and army veteran who the owner felt could bear the ruthless scrutiny of being first.”

Nobody did more to advance the idea that black men could compete on the same diamond equally with white men as Satchel Paige. He proved it every time he put on his cleats and toed the mound. Black people came to see him pitch in droves, but so did white people.


The Dapper Satchel Paige.

Another reason why Satchel may not have been the best choice to be first was the fact that he was a notorious womanizer. Single women, married women, black women, and white women flocked to him in whatever city he played in, and he enjoyed their company. He used to leave tickets at the box office of every game for “Mrs. Paige” and it tickled the other players that every day a different woman picked those tickets up. He was a man who enjoyed good food, women, music, fine clothes, and burned through a pile of money in the process. Though white players were enjoying the same benefits, a black man, especially the first integrated ball player, would have made fans uncomfortable that he was being seen with white women. Not to mention the very real possibility that some morons in some states would be looking for him with a rope.

He did finally make the major leagues as a 42 year old rookie for the Cleveland Indians. To this day he is still the oldest rookie ever in major league baseball. At age 59, he was hired for one game for the Boston Red Sox as a stunt to raise attendance. A crowd packed the stadium, and ”he needed twenty-eight tosses to get nine outs. He struck out one and walked none over three innings. Batters popped up his pitches and tapped meek grounders. The only base hit was a double by Carl Yastrzemski.” He was stripping down in the locker room when a player came down to tell him he had to come back out. The darkened stadium was filled with lit matches and lighters as the audience serenaded him with The Old Gray Mare.


I really love this picture of Satchel Paige. He is a tired warrior.

One interesting thing that no one could have anticipated with the integration of baseball was that only the very best black players were given spots on teams. Average players were more likely to be white. The end result was that, as the Negro leagues shut down, there were fewer black men making a living playing baseball.

Satchel called for integration of baseball for decades before Jackie Robinson was even playing. He proved every year that men of color could play the game as well as white men. He endured racism as he travelled across this country, entertaining black and white fans of the game. Sometimes hotels who would host blacks could not be found. Sometimes only dives could be found where regularly the whole team slept in one room. The players learned to sleep with newspapers under them to keep the bugs from nesting with them. (The rustling of his natural movements while sleeping would scare the bugs back into the walls.) Sometimes finding food was difficult because no one would serve the black players; some who would had them stand back in the kitchen to eat.

Satchel was a shrewd negotiator in an age when most players were just glad to have a job. He knew his value and asked for it. He was the first black man to pitch in a World Series game. He was a man of firsts, and if he had been able to play in his prime in the major leagues, the Cy Young award might very well be called the Satchel Paige award.

It was odd for me to be reaching back in time to the child I was in 1979 when I first held a Satchel Paige baseball card. I’ve been curious about the man for thirty-seven years. He has cropped up here and there in other books I’ve read. I’m not sure why it has taken me this long to give the man a voice in my head. Whatever inkling I had of who he was when I first learned his name, it was nothing compared to the man that I’ve met while reading this book.

”Leroy became Satchel. And Satchel became a legend.”

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