The 42-Year-Old Rookie




Drawing on exclusive interviews with family and friends, Mr. Spivey offers a detailed portrayal of Paige's early life. The sixth child of a dockworker and a washerwoman, he grew up poor in Mobile, Ala. By his own account, he was called "Satchel" because he made small change carrying passengers' luggage at the Mobile train station, although one of his childhood friends later claimed that he had earned the nickname by stealing bags. Whatever the truth, it was persistent truancy and a single, minor shoplifting incident that landed the 12-year-old Leroy in the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers for six years.

Satchel Paige demonstrating his 'cannon ball' as a member of the New York Black Yankees, 1941. ENLARGE
Satchel Paige demonstrating his 'cannon ball' as a member of the New York Black Yankees, 1941. Getty Images

His pitching arm had been honed by years of throwing rocks at birds, animals and other kids, but it was at the school that he picked up a formal education in baseball. Shortly after being released in his late teens, Paige joined the local semipro black club, the Mobile Tigers. He swiftly climbed the ladder of segregated baseball, making it to the Negro majors by the age of 20. He practiced his control by throwing through knotholes and perfected an almost imperceptible hitch in his motion that threw off the hitter's timing. By 1929 he had become a truly devastating pitcher, setting the all-time Negro-league mark for strikeouts in a season.

Paige spent most of his best years with two of the imperial teams of black baseball, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Kansas City Monarchs. Like most African-American stars of the time, however, he played year-round, wintering in California and the Caribbean. He went anywhere that promised a paycheck: One harrowing summer he pitched in the Dominican Republic for a team owned by the dictator Rafael Trujillo. In the U.S., he put up with the conditions faced by all black ballplayers—rickety buses, bedbug-infested flophouses, restaurants and hotels that refused to serve him. In Bismarck, N.D., Paige and his wife lived in a boxcar for months because no one in town was willing to rent to them.

Despite these indignities, it would be a mistake to think that Paige labored in obscurity—he was a star, a public figure, the most famous denizen of the black baseball universe. He began to draw the attention of the mainstream press in the 1930s with his dominant performances against major leaguers in exhibition games and the California Winter League, and his celebrity eventually outgrew the Negro leagues themselves. By the 1940s, if his barnstorming income is included, Satchel Paige was making as much money from baseball in a year as the highest-earning white superstars (Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Bob Feller).

'If You Were Only White'

By Donald Spivey

Missouri, 347 pages, $29.95

How good was he? There were no radar guns to measure Paige's fastball in the 1920s and 1930s, and Negro-league statistics have been notoriously difficult to put together. Mr. Spivey does not attempt a sabermetric analysis. But he does note that, on barnstorming tours featuring teams of black and white all-stars, Paige faced the likes of Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller and proved himself their equal, if not their superior. Once the color line was breached, African-Americans won six out of 12 Rookie of the Year awards, making it clear how much talent had been kept out by segregation.

Paige nearly won the award himself in 1948, though he objected that, having been a professional for 20 years, he was "hardly a rookie." He was slightly out of place in the new generation of young players who formed the vanguard of integration. He was no outspoken champion of civil rights like, say, Jackie Robinson. But, as Mr. Spivey shows, Paige was more of a "race man" than he is usually given credit for. He contributed to the Scottsboro Boys' defense fund; supported the NAACP; and earned himself an FBI file by speaking out against the major leagues' policy of discrimination and receiving favorable mentions from communists such as Lester Rodney, a sportswriter for the Daily Worker.

Paige may have paved the way for Robinson and then beaten him to a world championship, but the championship was something of an anticlimax for Paige, who pitched only two-thirds of an inning during the 1948 Series. His true vindication would come with his induction into the Hall of Fame in 1971, and his brief major league career had little to do with that. He had built his reputation on the wrong side of the color line, even as his every success made that color line less tenable. Progress, he knew, would destroy the world that had made him a star.

—Mr. Ashwill writes the blog "Agate Type: Adventures in Baseball Archeology."

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