If You Were Only White: The Life of Leroy "Satchel" Paige

Warm-ups: A Prelude

xiii Warm-ups: A Prelude Fans started streaming into the ballpark at nine in the morning for a game that would be played ten hours later. The attendance broke all previous records for a night game with a capacity crowd of 72,434. Concessionaires started running out of food and beverages before the game started. The home team was in a tight pennant race, but that was not the ultimate factor that had driven attendance to new heights. No. The big attraction that had the turnstiles spinning nonstop was the announcement days earlier that the man now standing on the mound would be the starting pitcher for the game. There he stood for the Cleveland Indians against the Washington Nationals before a jam-packed stadium on the hot and humid evening of August 3, 1948. He cast an unmistakable silhouette from every angle in the ballpark with the white ball in his hand and his cap shading his eyes from the glare of the spotlights and the hundreds of camera flashes that popped like mini fireworks. The umpires bowed to the moment and gave extra time for the picture taking and for the ear-shattering cheering to die down. The cheering , however, remained steady and then exploded with even greater ferocity when Cleveland announcer Jack Graney, high-pitched voice and all, further punctuated the moment with the simple but pregnant phrase: “Pitching for Cleveland: Satchel Paige!” It was a pinnacle moment in Paige’s life. He was there—finally—in Major League Baseball after decades of beating the bushes barnstorming, playing scheduled and pickup games in every nook and cranny throughout the country , his travel averaging some years as many as fifty thousand miles. At age forty-two, when most players were long since retired, washed up, or considered over the hill, there he stood, taking on all the pressure of the world in his xiv Warm-ups pathbreaking role for Cleveland as the first African American pitcher to start a game and the oldest rookie in the history of the Majors. The whole of Negro Leagues Baseball, past, present, and future, counted on him to come through, as did an entire race of people fighting against the stigma of inferiority. Paige’s childhood friend and former Negro Leagues teammate Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe was in attendance at the historic game. He recalled the event and how he was bursting with pride, that tears rolled uncontrollably down his cheeks owing to the power of the moment. But there was also an incredible amount of anxiety. He, like other African Americans who were there, asked himself: could the elder player on the mound still deliver? Radcliffe knew that the man on the mound was forged of strong stuff, just as any black person, like himself, had to be who somehow climbed to the pinnacle of excellence and success over America’s horrid color line. Radcliffe and others who knew Paige well found reassurance in what they knew to be an absolute certainty: that the ball was in the hands of the best pitcher to play the game and that he had no intention after traveling that long and hard road to now fail the biggest test in his life and to let his believers and the race down.1 The internal drive of Satchel Paige, given its deep roots, virtually ensured a stellar performance. First, he was a survivor. His steadfast determination drove him to be something more than what his circumstances of birth at the beginning of the twentieth century and the harsh impoverishment of his childhood in Mobile, Alabama, bestowed upon him. Paige, as part of the educational experiment at the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro LawBreakers , concluded that he wanted to become something more than just another throwaway colored boy. He did exactly that after his discharge from the reformatory, starting a steady climb to overcome the limitations placed on him in the Jim Crow South. Within that same South that browbeat him at every turn there also existed a black South containing a wellspring of culture, sustenance, and renewal of spirit from which Paige drank deeply. African American culture and traditions imbued him with an inner peace and resilience compatible with his inner hunger. That culture also taught manners and empathy for others. His background , combined with his experiences, forged a tough-minded competitor and sage navigator of the American racial obstacle course and the business of baseball. He became a ballplayer whom, even with his...