Don't Look Back

On this day in 1956, 57,000* people crowded into the Orange Bowl in Miami to watch a AAA minor-league baseball game between the Miami Marlins and Columbus (Ohio) Jets.  It was the largest crowd* in minor-league history.  Why were they there?  To see fifty year old Satchel Paige pitch.  He won 6-2, pitching into the 8th inning and hitting a three-run double.

But why Satchel Paige?

Satchel Paige's story encompasses the story of race in America in the 20th century.  A man excluded from major league baseball during the prime of his career became in his later years a much beloved figure, a continuing marvel to ball fans and an inspiration to the older demographic.

As MB Roberts noted on ESPN.com:

"If more is better, then Satchel Paige was the best.
He threw more pitches for more fans in more places for more seasons than anyone else did. Black or white. Then or now.

	Satchel Paige amazed barnstorming white major leaguers with his array of pitches.

He threw mostly strikes. He was charismatic. And like the pink, drum-banging bunny who came along later, he just kept going and going and going."

Satchel was born in 1906 (though he liked to play games with reporters about his birth date) and became a star pitcher in the Negro League in the 1920s and 1930s with the Kansas City Monarchs.  Major league baseball had been segregated since 1887 when Cap Anson, the star player and manager of the Chicago White Sox, made it clear he would not allow his team to take the field to play any team with black players.  Despite some efforts over the years by people like John McGraw (manager of the New York Giants) the color bar remained in place.


Some said Satchel was the best pitcher in the Negro Leagues but even those who disagreed thought he was the biggest character in the game.  Paige became known for his great fastball and outstanding control.  Then in the late 1930s he hurt his arm and couldn't pitch for a year.  When he came back his fastball was gone.  It didn't matter.  Satchel entertained fans with many different pitches and deliveries and pulled stunts like walking the bases full, having his fielders sit down and then striking out the side. He developed trick pitches like the "Hesitation" pitch where his delivery almost completely stopped in the midst of throwing.  He very consciously played the showman role, cultivating the press and coming up with catchy sayings of which the best known is "don't look back, something may be gaining on you".

The Negro League teams did not play a regular schedule, interspersing irregularly scheduled league games with exhibitions and with teams sometimes dissolving in mid-season.  Satchel often jumped leagues and teams and was such a big gate attraction (for both white and black fans) that he would often appear in games, pitch three innings, receive a high percentage of the gate revenue and then leave to drive on to the next town.

During the 1930s and early 1940s he often teamed up for barnstorming tours with Dizzy Dean, the St Louis Cardinals pitcher who was as big a character as Satchel.  Branch Rickey, General Manager of the Cardinals (and who later signed Jackie Robinson), once said of Dizzy:

"I'm a man of some intelligence. I've had some education, passed the bar, practiced law. I've been a teacher and I deal with men of substance; statesmen, business leaders, the clergy... So why do I spend my time arguing with Dizzy Dean?"

Satch and Dizzy would tour leading teams of white and black ballplayers who played against each other.  Dean, raised in Arkansas, treated the black ballplayers with respect and was admired by them.  Dizzy was quoted as saying:

"If Satch and I were pitching on the same team, we would clinch the pennant by July fourth and go fishing until World Series time."

In the 1940s, Paige barnstormed with Bob Feller, the great Cleveland Indians pitcher.  Feller was a much gruffer character than Dean but the Paige/Feller tours drew huge crowds nationwide and made both of them a lot of money.  The story of the barnstorming tours is well-told in Timothy Gay's Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert (2010).

The color barrier was finally broken when Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson at the end of 1945 (Robinson made his major league debut in 1947).  Paige was very disappointed that he was not the first black player signed.  He was to have his chance in  July 1948, when Bill Veeck of the Cleveland Indians signed Paige who, at 42, became the oldest rookie in major league history.  The signing was widely derided as a stunt by the baseball establishment (Veeck was definitely not part of the establishment) but Paige went 6-1 with the Indians that year who went on to win the World Series.  On August 20 of that season, Satch beat the White Sox 1-0 in front of 78,382 Indians fans which is still the attendance record for a night major league baseball game.  And Satchel did stir up controversy as the league banned his Hesitation pitch, calling it an illegal balk move.  He ended up pitching in the majors through the 1953 season.

Bill Veeck became the owner of the Miami Marlins and knew that signing Satchel would boost attendance.  In 1956 he reached an agreement with Paige under which he would be paid $15,000 a year plus a percentage of the gate (a very good deal for the time).  In his first game, Satchel pitched a 4-hit shutout and over three years won 31 games with an ERA of 2.73.

The Orange Bowl game was a special event with proceeds going to charity and a pregame concert starring Cab Calloway (below doing his most famous song Minnie The Moocher, which he later reprised in The Blue Brothers movie more than 45 years after recording the original)

Even after he left the Marlins it was not the end of Satch's pitching career.  In 1965, Charlie Finley, owner of the Kansas City Athletics enticed Satchel back to pitch three innings against the Boston Red Sox.  At 59, Satchel became the oldest pitcher in major league history, shutting out the Sox on one hit over the three innings!

Because most of Satch's career was before blacks could play in the majors he was not eligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame as the rules stood in the 1960s.

It was Ted Williams who first brought this issue to public view and challenged the baseball establishment during his 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech:

"Inside this building are plaques dedicated to baseball men of all generations and I’m privileged to join them. Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel, not just to be as good as someone else but to be better than someone else. This is the nature of man and the name of the game and I’ve always been a lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, to have struck out or to have hit a tape measure home run. And I hope that someday the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the great Negro players that are not here only because they were not given a chance."

After several years of messing around (baseball is very good at that) it was finally agreed that Negro league players would be eligible for full membership in the Hall of Fame.  In 1971, Satchel Paige became the first Negro League player inducted into the Hall.

An excerpt from his speech:

"And these fellows here today that they wanted to run both of us out of town in 1948 when he got me to the Cleveland Indians. They say, “You could have got anybody but Satchel, he’s too old to vote.” Well, Mr. Veeck, I got you off the hook today. And what I mean, Mr. Bill Veeck, he’s here today, I won’t ask him to stand up because I know he’s tired, he had a rough time getting here to see the one who was fixing to get run out of Cleveland if I didn’t do good and I finally as they say, killed the grass around there for a couple of weeks and got in condition. I hadn’t played that year and I helped them out to win the World Champion series that year. Bob Feller, he’s here too. And just before that I had played a game out in Los Angeles and we had broke Wrigley Field down and they had asked Bob, they say, “Bob, how is Satchel?” And he said, “If he was about 20 years younger he could make the big leagues.” The next year I was up there with Bob. That was in 1948."

 
 
* Also reported as 51,713 people which would make it the 2nd largest crowd in minor league baseball history.  There's a lot of things associated with Satchel Paige that are uncertain.