The definitive biography of Satchel Paige, an all-American story of struggle and triumph about the greatest pitcher to ever throw a baseball

In his hometown streets of Mobile, Alabama, Satchel Paige fired rocks with enough power and precision to bring down a bird or a rival gang member. In the Negro Leagues he fine-tuned a pitch so fast that catchers complained it set their mitts on fire. After a young Joe DiMaggio managed a scratch single off of him, a Yankees scout wired his bosses, “DiMaggio all we hoped he’d be. Hit Satch one for four.”

But racial discrimination kept the Yankees and every other big league team from signing Paige until he was forty-two—when he was voted Rookie of the Year. While many dismissed him as a Stepin Fetchit if not an Uncle Tom, this book makes clear that Paige was something else entirely—a quiet subversive, defying Uncle Tom and Jim Crow. He pitched so spectacularly that white writers and fans turned out to watch black baseball. He drew the spotlight first to himself, then to his all-black Kansas City Monarchs, and inevitably to the Monarchs’s rookie second baseman Jackie Robinson.

In the process, Satchel, even more than Jackie, opened the door for African Americans to the national pastime and forever changed his sport and this nation.


From the Hardcover edition.

Chapter One



Coming Alive

"I was no different from any other kid,

only in Mobile I was a nigger kid."

Satchel Paige entered the world as Leroy Robert Page. He was delivered at home into the hands of a midwife, which was more help than most poor families could afford in 1906 in Mobile, Alabama. His mother, Lula, was a washerwoman who already spent her nights worrying how to feed and sustain the four daughters and two sons who had come before. Five more would follow. Leroy's father, John, alternated between the luxuriant lilies in the gardens he tended uptown and the corner stoops on which he liked to loiter, rarely making time to care for his expanding brood. With skin the shade of chestnut and a birthplace in the heartland of the former Confederacy, the newborn's prospects looked woeful. They were about to get worse.

The hurricane that battered Mobile Bay just two months after Leroy's birth started with two days of torrential rains carried in on the back of a driving northeast wind. By the next morning ten-foot-high surges had dispatched oyster and fishing vessels to the bottom of the sea. Tornado-like squalls ripped from their roots southern pines, blew tin roofs off Greek Revival homes, and made it look as if birds were flying backward. At historic Christ Church only the choir loft was left standing. The lucky escaped by fleeing to third-floor attics or climbing tall trees; 150 others were consigned to watery graves. One area hit especially hard was the Negro slum known as Down the Bay, where the Pages lived.

Their home was a four-room shack called a shotgun, because a shot fired through the front door would exit straight out the back. That is the path storm waters took when they burst through Down the Bay's alleys on the way to more fashionable quarters. Rental units like the Pages' were ramshackle and fragile, with no flood walls to protect them from the nearby sea and no electricity to ease their recovery. The Page cottage remained standing but the thin mattresses the children shared and their few furnishings needed airing out. That cleanup would have to wait: Lula's white employers insisted she be at their homes early the next morning to mop up the storm damage. The kids would wait, too, the way they did every day when Mama headed to work, with the older ones watching over baby Leroy and the rest of the young ones.

Leroy's world was being reshaped in another way that would mark him even more profoundly. Mobile historically was a center of the slave trade and the destination for the last slave ship to America, but Alabama's oldest city also was home to more than a thousand blacks who bought or were granted their freedom in the antebellum era. That paradox was consistent with the coastal city's push toward the conservative state of which it was part and its pull to a more tolerant world beyond its shores. For more than two hundred years Mobile had welcomed outsiders--Irish Catholics fleeing the famine, Jewish merchants, Yankees and English, along with legions of Creoles, the free offspring of French or Spanish fathers and chattel mothers--and they in turn challenged inbred thinking on everything from politics to race. The result, during the Reconstruction period, was a blurring of color lines in ways unthinkable in Montgomery, Selma, and most of the rest of Alabama. Jim Crow--the system of segregation named after a cowering slave in an 1820s minstrel show--was there in Mobile, but so was Booker T. Washington's gospel of black self-help. The races were separated on trolleys and in other public settings, but the separation was done by tradition more than law. Blacks not only could vote for officeholders, a few...

 

"Having known Satchel when I was a young ballplayer, I'm reminded of the man who took over the game with both his superior pitching and his dynamic personality. This book is a must-read that captures the essence of one of the greatest legends in baseball history, Satchel Paige."

 

"Knowing Satchel Paige is knowing nobody like him. This is a superb book about an outstanding man."

 

"First, make a list of, say, the five athletes of all time you'd want to invite to the house for a night of beer and nonsense. Second, if you haven't picked Leroy (Satchel) Paige, one of the others has to go. (Good-bye Wilt, Arnie, Whomever.) Third, get up the cash for this book and Satchel's there. Larry Tye delivers him in fine, robust prose, living and breathing, riding the buses and breaking off outrageous curve balls and figuring out the complexities of segregated America. Great stuff."

 

"It takes nothing away from Jackie Robinson to note, as Larry Tye does in this important new book, that Satchel Paige--he of a fastball of historic proportions--is an overlooked pioneer in the integration of baseball, and of America itself. This engaging biography sheds light not only on Paige but on the game and the country he helped change forever."

 

Satchel by Larry Tye
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