Satchel Paige

Baseball Player

• Born: July 7, 1906
• Place of Birth: Mobile, Alabama
• Died: June 8, 1982
• Place of Death: Kansas City, Missouri

Satchel Paige is widely considered one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history. He enjoyed decades of dominance in the Negro Leagues before entering Major League Baseball (MLB) in 1948, where he became the first Black pitcher in the American League (AL). His skills and entertaining style on and off the field are legendary.

Early Life

Satchel Paige was born Leroy Robert Page in Mobile, Alabama, the seventh of twelve children. His father, John, was a gardener, and his mother, Lula, was a domestic worker. When he was born, the family name was spelled Page; his mother changed the spelling to Paige during the early 1920s, soon after his father died. Paige began working at a young age, carrying luggage for train passengers. This job is thought to have gained him the moniker “Satchel.”

When he was twelve, Paige was arrested for shoplifting and sentenced to the state reform school known as the Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs, Alabama. He stayed there until he turned eighteen, attending classes and doing chores assigned by the school authorities. He also played baseball and learned to pitch under the tutelage of Edward Byrd. He was dismissed from reform school in 1923, six months before the end of his sentence.

After his release, Paige went back to Mobile and played baseball for several semiprofessional teams, including the Mobile Tigers and the Down the Bay Boys. His brother Wilson also pitched for the Tigers. Paige became a professional pitcher in 1926. His first team was the Chattanooga White Sox of the Negro Southern League. Paige was reportedly paid $250 a month for the 1926 season.

Coaches, players, and the local sports media quickly realized that Paige was a special talent. In 1927, his contract was sold to the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro Leagues’ major league, known as the Negro National League. Although record keeping was very inconsistent in the Negro Leagues, by all measures Paige quickly emerged as a dominant pitcher. According to the Negro League statistics that were officially added to MLB records in 2024, Paige finished the 1927 season with a 7-2 record and a 2.39 earned run average (ERA). He then went 11-4 with a 2.32 ERA in 1928 and 11-9 with a 3.68 ERA in 1929 with the Black Barons, leading the league in strikeouts both years.

Life’s Work

As Paige’s pitching abilities gained renown, he, like many Negro Leagues stars, played for an array of teams. (Although this boosted his profile, it also further blurred his statistical records, especially as exhibition and barnstorming games were even less consistently recorded than regular Negro Leagues games.) After a short stint playing for a team in Cuba, he was leased to the Baltimore Black Sox. However, he did not like his situation and went back to Birmingham for the rest of the 1930 season. In 1931, after the Black Barons closed down operations amid the Great Depression, Paige was hired by Tom Wilson, owner of the Cleveland Cubs (previously the Nashville Elite Giants). Cleveland was the first city in which Paige had played that also had a Major League Baseball (MLB) team. There, Paige made his first known comments to the press denouncing the MLB’s segregation.

In June 1931, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, businessman Gus Greenlee offered Paige $250 a month to play for his team, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, which was at the time an independent club as the Negro National League and other top African American leagues collapsed due to the Depression. In his first outing for Pittsburgh, against the Homestead Grays, Paige pitched five innings of scoreless relief, striking out six. After the Crawfords’ season was over, Paige went to play for Wilson’s All-Star team in the California Winter League. The next season, Paige was back with the Crawfords, which had improved after Greenlee recruited three of the rival Grays' best players, including Josh Gibson. A new version of the Negro National League was organized for the 1933 season, in which Paige continued to excel with the Crawfords. However, he also occasionally left Greenlee's team to play for other clubs, including an integrated semipro team in Bismarck, North Dakota.

In 1934, Paige was appointed to his first East-West All-Star Game, a prominent showcase of Negro Leagues talent organized by Greenlee. He came into the game in the sixth inning with a man on base. After recording a strikeout, he held the opposing team scoreless and got the win. In the fall of 1934, MLB star pitcher Dizzy Dean—who had won thirty games that year—faced Paige in a California Winter League game. Paige won, 1-0. Future major-league team owner Bill Veeck saw the game and stated afterward that it was the best pitching contest he had ever seen. Paige and Dean battled in barnstorming contests a few more times until 1945. After Dean retired from baseball, he called Paige the best pitcher he had ever seen.

Paige returned to the Crawfords briefly but left again in 1935 when Greenlee refused to pay his salary. He went back to Bismarck for the summer. When he tried to return to the Crawfords in September, he was told that he had been banned from the Negro National League for going to Bismarck. This was not the last time that Paige faced disciplinary action. In the winter of 1935-1936, Paige teamed up with a promoter and barnstormed the warmer parts of the United States with a team called the Satchel Paige All-Stars. He returned to the Crawfords for the 1936 season, then went to the Dominican Republic to play in 1937. When he returned in 1938, his rights were sold to the Newark Eagles. Paige refused to go to Newark, drawing a lifetime suspension from the Negro Leagues. He ended up playing in Mexico that year.

After sustaining an arm injury, Paige struggled to find work. In 1939 he joined the Kansas City Travelers, the equivalent of a farm team for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League (NAL). The team’s owner, J. L. Wilkinson, was the only baseball owner willing to give Paige a chance and built a team around the pitcher. Eventually, his arm healed and he regained his dominant form. At the end of the 1939 season, Paige went to Puerto Rico to play. He returned to Kansas City in 1940 to play for the Travelers and was promoted to the Monarchs in the latter half of the season.

The 1941 Monarchs season did not begin until July, so Paige traveled with his barnstorming team and pitched for various Negro League teams that used his name to sell tickets. He then officially went 7–0 with a 2.06 ERA for the Monarchs in 1941, helping them win the NAL pennant. The Monarchs repeated as league champions in 1942, and went on to win the 1942 Negro World Series against the Homestead Grays. Paige's strikeout of Josh Gibson with the bases loaded in game two of that series would go on to be mythologized as one of the best-known highlights of his pitching career.

Meanwhile, after the United States entered World War II, Paige pitched in several high-profile exhibition games to help sell war bonds. During this period, he also played on Negro League All-Star teams that played teams composed of MLB players. As one of baseball's biggest stars in the 1940s, he reportedly earned around forty thousand dollars a year, which made him possibly the highest-paid athlete in the world. Paige continued to play with the Monarchs through the mid-1940s, while still barnstorming regularly. Though his official statistics remained haphazard, he claimed to keep personal records of every game he played, which he would ultimately count at over 2,500.

In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the longstanding color barrier in professional baseball, opening the way for other Negro Leagues stars to enter the MLB. In 1948, Paige signed with the Cleveland Indians and became the first Black pitcher in the American League (AL). At forty-two years old, he also set a record for oldest MLB debut. He finished the 1948 regular season with a 6-1 record and a 2.48 ERA, helping Cleveland win the AL pennant. The team went on to win the World Series against the Boston Braves, although Paige only made one brief appearance in the series.

Paige was not as successful in 1949, and he left Cleveland at the end of the season. After not pitching for a major-league team in 1950, he came back to pitch for the St. Louis Browns from 1951 to 1953. During games he was pitching, he would famously sit in the dugout in a rocking chair.

By the 1950s, Paige had become a celebrity known far beyond the baseball world. He continued to pitch on barnstorming tours and in various minor leagues. He appeared in the film The Wonderful Country in 1959 alongside Robert Mitchum and Julie London. His autobiography, Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever, was published in 1962. Along with many stories about his baseball and personal exploits, the book includes his “Five Rules for Staying Young,” which include the admonition “Don’t look back—someone might be gaining on you.” The issue of racism, both on and off the field, is an underlying theme of the text. In 1965, Paige pitched three innings in a special appearance for the American League team the Kansas City Athletics, setting a record at age fifty-nine as the oldest player in MLB history. He did not give up a run.

Paige was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971. He died of a heart attack June 8, 1982, in Kansas City, Missouri.

Significance

Paige was one of the greatest baseball pitchers in history. While many of his legendary accomplishments, such as his propensity to tell his fielders to sit down before promptly striking out the side, are shrouded in mythmaking, he was undoubtedly a dominant athlete. When Negro Leagues statistics were officially added to the MLB record books in 2024, his 1.01 ERA with the 1944 Monarchs was recognized as the third-best single-season mark ever.

Meanwhile, Paige's insistence that athletes should be judged on their abilities, not on the color of their skin, and his willingness to state his position were rare during the years he played baseball. His talent and charisma made many White players and fans reconsider their prejudices. Paige was an ambassador for the game of baseball, a larger-than-life celebrity, and a convincing opponent of racial segregation whose actions on the field spoke even louder than his words.

Bibliography

Kelly, Matt. "Satchel Paige: A Legendary Talent That's Hard to Fathom." MLB, www.mlb.com/history/negro-leagues/players/satchel-paige. Accessed 25 June 2024.

Paige, Satchel, and David Lipman. Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever. 1962. Reprint. University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

"Satchel Paige." Baseball Reference, www.baseball-reference.com/players/p/paigesa01.shtml. Accessed 25 June 2024.

"Satchel Paige." National Baseball Hall of Fame, baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/paige-satchel. Accessed 25 June 2024.

Strum, James, and Rich Tommaso. Striking Out Jim Crow. Hyperion Books, 1991.

Tye, Larry. Satchel Paige:The Life and Times of an American Legend. Random House, 2009.