KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Could be that Satchel Paige was 42 years old when he made his first American League appearance 75 years ago July 9. Then again, he might have been 52 or some other age altogether after Cleveland owner Bill Veeck purchased his contract from the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues in 1948.
After all, as Paige once said, a goat ate the family Bible with his birth certificate in it. So who’s to say if he actually was born on July 7, 1906?
What we do know is that the “age-old mystery,” as Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick calls it, was part of why few MLB owners were inclined to sign Paige — who is at the epicenter of the latest exhibit at the NLBM:
“Black Aces” celebrates the history of Black and Latino pitchers in the Negro Leagues and majors while speaking to the anguishing matter of what might have been if not for the racism that stained baseball history.
“Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you” was one of Paige’s famous rules for staying young.
But looking back is fundamental to understanding the context of his career, among so many others of the era, and reminding us of the historic baseball consequences of American apartheid.
What inspired the exhibit, Kendrick said, was the enchanting man who perhaps most epitomized the Negro Leagues and something he once said about his peers: “’There were a lot of Satchel Paiges that called the Negro Leagues home.’ ”
Some Negro Leagues players never got the chance
So even as the exhibit tips its cap to the all-too-few 15 Black 20-game winners in major league history, it also pays homage to the many Negro Leagues players who might have done the same given the opportunity.
“What was it like for players who came before me?” Jim “Mudcat” Grant, the first Black 20-game winner in the American League (1965), wrote in “The Black Aces,” his book on the topic. “What might the great Negro Leagues ballplayers have accomplished if they were allowed to compete? What greatness were we deprived of experiencing because of the ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ and Jim Crow laws?”
Greatness in the form of Martin “El Maestro” Dihigo, John Donaldson, Negro Leagues founder Rube Foster, Jose “The Black Diamond” Mendez, Dick “Cannonball” Redding, Bullet Rogan, Hilton Smith … and plenty more.
But the display revolves around the vivid case in point of Paige, who made his home in Kansas City and is buried (as is Buck O’Neil) in Forest Hills Cemetery at a well-worth-visiting monument there known as Paige Island.
Paige died in 1982, 11 years after entering the National Baseball Hall of Fame as the first player honored primarily for his career in the Negro Leagues. He also earned international fame in barnstorming across the United States, Caribbean and Central America and pitching in an estimated 2,500 games, completing 55 no-hitters and performing before crowds estimated at 10 million people, according to The New York Times.
His vast legacy, incidentally, includes the pleasant fact that he was the favorite player of one Pat Mahomes. The longtime major league pitcher so liked to emulate Paige’s stylings that his son, Patrick, became intrigued with such creativity and acknowledges its influence on his own incomparable game.
Imagine, though, if Paige had been able to pitch in the mainstream spotlight before he was in his 40s.
At 40-plus, one way or another, he went 28-33 in five seasons with Cleveland and the St. Louis Browns before capping his career with three fabled shutout innings for the Kansas City Athletics in 1965.
Yes, he twice was an American League All-Star and won 12 games in 1952. But that was only a sliver of what the man with a jaw-dropping array of pitches — and colorful nicknames for them — could have had on his ledger if he hadn’t been denied until 1948.
Satchel Paige was an ageless wonder
Some of the 1948 news reports of Paige being signed focused on the age of the oldest rookie in MLB history. But the ever-looming matter of race remained entwined with his arrival a year after Jackie Robinson emerged as the first Black player in the major leagues of the modern era and Larry Doby (11 weeks later) and three others soon followed.
(Some points of order here: When Buck O’Neil would hear what a shame it was that many Negro Leagues players never got to play against “the best,” he liked to say, “How do you know that I didn’t play against the best?” And in 2020, MLB announced that it would classify Negro Leagues statistics from 1920 to 1948 as “major league.”)
Never mind that Paige’s charisma and flair and barnstorming history against white players before white crowds and knack for making friends everywhere along the way had made him so popular as to in some ways transcend race.
So much so that Kendrick believes Paige would have faced far less hatred as the first Black player than did Robinson, who was no-nonsense and a then-rare college-educated player and lesser-known than Paige. But the inherent volatility of any pitcher — particularly an aging one — being the first increased the risk of a mission that “could not fail,” as Kendrick put it.
Even given Paige’s broad appeal in 1948, The Sporting News among others to object in code wrote that the infinitely popular Paige “would not have drawn a second thought” from Veeck if he’d been white.
To that and other such sentiments, Veeck flipped the script to the heart of the issue: If Paige had been white, he responded, according to Kendrick, he’d have been playing in the major leagues 25 years before.
While publicity no doubt was part of the inspiration of the ingenious Veeck, Paige reinforced that assertion he belonged long before by becoming essential to Cleveland’s World Series triumph. He also repeatedly drew crowds of 70,000-plus in his starts, beginning with 72,434 in first major league start on Aug. 3, 1948.
At one point throwing back-to-back shutouts within 28 straight scoreless innings, Paige went 6-1 with a 2.48 ERA for a team that needed every victory to finish the regular season tied with the Boston Red Sox at 96-58. Cleveland advanced to the World Series with an 8-3 tiebreaker win and went on to beat the Boston Braves in six games.
Paige appeared once in that World Series, in a hit-free bullpen stint the Boston Globe described thusly: “The crowd howled with glee. He had helped (Cleveland) to their pennant and the customers loved him for this as well as his perplexing pitching.”
'Like breaking the sound barrier'
Such milestones, though, didn’t erase the millstone of lingering stigmas and even traumas wrought by racism.
The first Black pitcher in the major leagues was Dan Bankhead, who joined Robinson’s Dodgers in August 1947. He had “electric stuff,” Kendrick said, but grappled with his control for reasons Buck O’Neil believed were deep-seated.
“Dan was scared to death that he was going to hit a white boy with a pitch,” he said in Joe Posnanski’s book, “The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America.”
He added: “He thought there might be some sort of riot if he did it. … Dan was always from Alabama, you know what I mean? He heard all those people calling him names, making those threats, and he was scared. He’d seen Black men get lynched.”
Entrenched biases underscored the dynamics for decades after.
“There was this underlying belief that the Black athlete, just like the Black quarterback, was not smart enough to play that position,” Kendrick said. “I do also think that you had others who felt compelled that if these Black athletes were going to play in the major leagues that they were going to play every day: They weren’t going to work every fourth or fifth game.”
So there remain just 15 Black men among the 839 overall to have won 20 or more major-league games, starting with Don Newcombe in 1951 and bookended by David Price in 2012.
One way to look at the achievement is depicted at the exhibit: “For a pitcher to win 20 games is like breaking the sound barrier, is like an actor winning the Academy Award, like winning eight gold medals, like going around the world in 79 days,” Vida Blue, a three-time 20-game winner, told longtime Bay Area sportswriter Ron Bergman in 1973.
And it’s all the more rare now in the age of specialized roles and reliance on bullpens. Entering this season, there have been only two 20-game winners since Mizzou’s Max Scherzer went 20-7 for Washington in 2016.
“You don’t control your own fate now,” Kendrick said. “As Bob Gibson (a five-time 20-game winner with the Cardinals) once said, ‘If you want to win games, then you take care of the game.’
“I think Gibson would say, ‘I trust me more than I trust those other guys.’ ”
Meanwhile, Black pitchers, and thus opportunities to become 20-game winners, are rare today for an entirely different reason than they were 75 years ago. Far fewer are playing the sport to begin with, studies have long shown, leading to this:
In 1991, MLB rosters were made up of 18% Black players. On opening day 2023, it was 6.2% while 30.2% were Hispanic or Latino.
On balance, those numbers in the report card from the Institute For Diversity And Ethics In Sport is an affirmation that “the path paved” long ago “is becoming a reality for so many more players of color.”
That distinction is a discussion in itself, but it surely does reflect one other reality:
That path for all players of color was forged by so many who didn’t get to properly prosper by it, including the icon whose grave marker quite rightly calls him “a legend in life, an immortal in death.”
