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PAIGE, SATCHEL 19O6-1982

BASEBALL PLAYER

Born Thirty Years Too Early

LeRoy Robert "Satchel" Paige was the greatest pitcher of the 1930s. White and black players of the era alike attested to that fact. No player since Babe Ruth was a bigger box-office draw, and Paige was every bit a showman, a man who would clear the field and pitch to batters with no one behind him. Yet, because of the racist policy of baseball, Paige had to wait until he was forty-two years old, in 1948, to become the first African American to pitch in the big leagues, though he frequently played with and against white players in off-season barnstorming tours, including such admirers as Joe DiMaggio and Dizzy Dean.

Pitching Everywhere

Paige was known widely not only for his durability and blazing, buzzing "Bee Ball" but also because he pitched wherever he could draw an audience throughout the year. He began his career in 1929 in semipro ball with the Mobile Tigers and played for Chattanooga, Birmingham, Baltimore, Nashville, and Cleveland before hooking up in 1932 with the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the greatest black team of the era. Seeking more money, he played for an integrated semipro team in Bismarck, North Dakota, in 1935 and was briefly banned from the Negro National League for breaking his contract, but he returned to the Crawfords the next year. He pitched for dictator Rafael Trujillo's ball club, Trujillo's Stars, in the Dominican Republic in 1937 and then headed to the Mexico League in 1938, However, he developed arm trouble and returned home.

Don't Look Back

Paige signed on with the Kansas City Monarchs in 1939 and gradually rehabilitated his arm. For the next eight years he dominated Negro League baseball, winning in 1942 three of four straight victories in the first Negro Leagues World Series since 1927. By 1948, the year after Jackie Robinson had become the first black to play Major League Baseball, the Negro Leagues were all but dead, and Paige was recruited to pitch for Bill Veeck's Cleveland Indians. His major-league career had some shining moments (he made the All-Star team at age forty-six for the Saint Louis Browns in 1951), but it was more a testimony to what ought to have been. Paige later pitched three innings for the Kansas City A's in 1965 when he was fifty-nine years old, He rounded out his long career by playing for the Indianapolis Clowns, the last of the old barnstorming clubs. In 1971 he was belatedly elected to Baseball's Hall of Fame.