Just as in 1932, however, the record books for 1933 failed to reflect the Crawfords’ dominance due to disarray in the black baseball ranks. Paige recalled going 31–4 in games against other Negro League teams that year, with 16 shutouts. Greenlee claimed that Josh Gibson finished the season with 55 homers and 239 hits, for an astonishing .467 average. According to various accounts, Oscar Charleston and Cool Papa Bell also hit well over .300. But while Greenlee’s new Negro National League started the season with seven teams, it ended with only three: Chicago, Nashville, and Pittsburgh, which was declared champion by default. After Posey’s Grays pulled out, Baltimore followed, and teams from Columbus and Detroit went under.
In a defiant piece in the Courier, Greenlee spokesman John L. Clark charged that other teams had left his boss “holding the bag.” Greenlee had been forced to make up a $1,100 deficit, and would thenceforth require that all teams wishing to join the league put down a cash deposit. Looking for more financial stability, Greenlee issued invitations during the off-season to other black racketeers who owned baseball teams on the side: his pal Alex Pompez, the owner of the New York Cubans, and Abe and Effie Manley, the husband-and-wife team behind the Newark Eagles.
Yet while his new league may not have been initially profitable, Greenlee was making plenty of money from his two most valuable assets: Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. Once Paige arrived in 1931, Gus started booking as many extra exhibition games as possible, often forcing his players to sleep on the bus as they traveled from city to city. As Paige put it: “That fast ball of mine was popping against town druggists who were playing only on Sundays, and against major leaguers who were earning a few more bucks after the regular season was over.” Wherever they played, Greenlee supplied posters guaranteeing that fans would see Gibson hit at least two home runs and Paige strike out the first nine men he faced—and the two routinely made good on the promise.
The duo were in such demand that Greenlee could pay them hundreds of dollars a month in addition to their regular salaries. He also stroked Paige’s ego by giving him top billing on the posters. At first, Paige basked in the attention, and the extra income. “If it hadn’t been for Gus, I never could have kept those offers to pitch straight,” he recalled. “He was my agent, booking around when I didn’t have to pitch for the Crawfords. He was a sharp—a real one . . . . He was so sharp that they must have a school for what he could do and he learned real good at that school.”
Greenlee also tried to school Paige on how to manage his windfall—to no avail. “You can keep this up for ten years and save some dough and you’ll be in great shape,” Gus told him. But Satchel was having too much fun living high: eating and drinking at the finest establishments, buying fancy clothes and a collection of as many as fifteen shotguns. As usual, he would sum up his spendthrift ways in a colorful turn of phrase decades later: “You can’t tell the guy who’s got good gravy all over his front shirt that the gravy bowl is going to be empty some day.”
Paige was also enjoying life as the prince of Pittsburgh. Whenever the Crawfords were at home, he had the run of the city, holding court at the Crawford Grill and drawing big crowds at the Centre Avenue YMCA, where he sparred with John Henry Lewis, a boxer whom Greenlee had signed and who was on his way to becoming the light heavy-weight champion. “The whole town was glad to see me,” Satch recalled. “I’d walk down the streets in Pittsburgh and everybody tried to talk to me.”
In 1934, Paige rewarded Greenlee and the fans of black Pittsburgh with the best season of his career. Against other Negro National League teams, he was 14–2 in regular games and 2–0 in exhibitions, with 144 strikeouts and an earned run average of 2.16. Outside the league, he won another 21 games without a single loss—raising his overall total to 35–2, with an ERA of 1.38. To Greenlee’s delight, Paige saved his best performance of the season for a July 4th game against the Homestead Grays, after Cum Posey grudgingly agreed to start playing exhibition matches with the Crawfords again.
More than ten thousand fans crowded into Greenlee Field for the showdown—so many that hundreds had to stand in the bleacher aisles and along the infield perimeter. After walking Homestead’s star slugger, Buck Leonard, in the first, Paige began striking out one Gray after another. He fanned the first batter in every inning and seventeen overall, matching his previous high. By the end of the game, the Grays had reached base only one more time, on an error, and gone hitless for the first time ever. Bewildered by the way Paige’s fastball rose just as it crossed the plate, Leonard kept asking the umpire to inspect the ball for evidence of tampering. When the ump finally threw out one ball that appeared to be scuffed, Paige sneered. “You might as well throw ’em all out because they’re all gonna jump like that,” he shouted from the mound.
In the stands, Gus Greenlee gloated while Cum Posey fumed. Posey was smoking his favorite cigars—Toby stogies from Marsh & Co.—and the Courier reported that he “ate two boxes” of them by the time Paige’s no-hitter was over. Meanwhile, one of Greenlee’s assistants brought along a first-aid kit to use on his boss in case the Crawfords lost. But there was no need for it: the Crawfords beat the Grays, 4–0, and afterward Greenlee grinned from ear to ear as he posed for a picture with his pitching ace.
Greenlee was all smiles again two months later, when Paige helped make the second East-West Classic worthy of its name. This time, the early September sky over Chicago’s Comiskey Park was clear, and some 25,000 fans showed up. The game was still scoreless in the sixth inning when the leadoff batter for the West hit a double. The East’s manager motioned for Paige. Taking his usual slow walk from the bullpen, he stopped to throw his warm-up jacket into the dugout. “It’s Paige,” he heard a fan cry out. “Goodbye, ballgame.” Climbing the mound, Paige glanced toward third base, brought his elbows to his chest, and waited several more seconds before unleashing a blazing fastball for strike one. Ten pitches later, he had retired the side with a strikeout and two forced outs. After that, he pitched three more flawless innings, striking out five more batters and giving the East the time it needed to finally score a run in the eighth. Another Crawford, Cool Papa Bell, produced the winning run by walking, stealing second, and dashing home on a blooper over second base.
By 1934, the crowd for “the Classic” included several thousand white fans and dozens of white reporters. Their reaction showed that Greenlee’s all-star game was becoming more than a treasured rite for black Americans. By exposing whites to the best Negro players, and showcasing their thrilling defense and base running as well as pitching and hitting, it was advancing the case for integrating the major leagues. In the Chicago Daily Times, columnist Marvin McCarthy reflected the newfound respect in a piece headlined “Black Matty” that compared Satchel Paige to pitching legend Christy Mathewson. “To try to enumerate all the endless diamond miracles the East and West colored boys wrought would be a wasted effort, like wiping sweat off an old fish’s brow,” McCarthy wrote. “Trying to stretch hits on the outfielders was as crazy and self-destructive as a rooster crowing next door to a colored camp meeting . . . . But, of course, there were none to stretch off Black Matty (or Black Magic if you prefer).”
Back in Pittsburgh, Big Red showed his gratitude to his “Black Matty” with two very public displays of appreciation. As soon as Paige returned from the all-star game, Janet Howard told him that she wanted to set a wedding date, and he agreed to late October. Greenlee offered to hold the ceremony at the Crawford Grill, and Paige asked Bojangles Robinson, his longtime bachelor running buddy, to be best man. When the day came, so many people thronged the streets of the Hill District that Greenlee had to lock the doors. Then after the preacher pronounced Paige and Howard man and wife, Greenlee announced that he had another surprise for the groom. “Satchel won’t be leaving us, don’t worry about that,” Gus told the crowd. “I have a new contract here for him.” In front of everyone, Greenlee presented Satch with a new two-year deal, which he signed as Janet and Bojangles stood over his shoulder. “ ‘Satch’ Says �
��I Will’ Twice,” cheered a Courier headline.
But as 1935 began, Paige was back at the Grill with his hand out for more cash. The cost of keeping his new wife in style had created “a powerful lightness in his pocket,” he recalled, so he asked Greenlee to sweeten the new deal. This time, Greenlee refused. “Don’t forget those games we got coming up,” was all Gus said, in a cold voice. Furious, Paige went home, packed his suitcases and told Janet they were getting out of town. It wasn’t long before an opportunity presented itself: an auto salesman from Bismarck, North Dakota, offered Satchel $400 a month and a new car to jump to his local semipro team for the rest of the 1934 season.
When Paige ignored an order to report to spring training in early 1935, Greenlee began hurling hardballs of his own. He dealt Paige’s new contract to a Jewish semipro team called the House of David and announced that Satch had been banned from the Negro National League for the year. Greenlee also spun the story to the black press, where interest in Paige was starting to take a backseat to the rise of Joe Louis. “Heroes come and go,” Chester Washington sniffed in the Courier. “The champ of today can be the chump of tomorrow . . . . Satchel apparently made the mistake of regarding the contract as a ‘scrap of paper’ and now he must pay the price.”
Fortunately for Greenlee, the Crawfords were so good by 1935 that they didn’t need Satchel Paige. With Leroy Matlock stepping in as their ace and five starters batting over .300, the Craws won the first half of the season and ended up in a playoff with the second-half winners, the New York Cubans. After losing three of the first four games, Pittsburgh clawed back to even the series at three-all. The Cubans were leading the final game 7–5 when their ace, Louis Tiant Sr., gave up solo home runs to Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston. With the game tied, Cool Papa Bell worked his base-running magic. He singled, stole second, and then raced home on an infield error, giving the Craws the game and the title. At the party thrown at the Crawford Grill, the normally unflappable Greenlee couldn’t disguise his glee. “Gus was really happy,” recalled Judy Johnson. “I think it gave him even more satisfaction to win the championship without Satchel.”
By the next spring, Greenlee and Paige had patched up their differences again. Although lucrative, Paige had found his year in Bismarck stressful: one of his mostly white teammates had responded to his brashness with a muttered taunt of “dirty nigger,” and in another game his outfielders refused to take the field behind him after he criticized their play. (Satch pitched nonetheless and struck out the side.) As the 1936 season began, the Courier reported in a breathless “Flash” headline that Paige was returning to Pittsburgh for a salary that was rumored to be the highest in the Negro National League. He helped the Crawfords finish in first place for the second half of the season, and to dominate a Denver tournament that took the place of a league playoff in 1937. But then the fraught relationship between Greenlee and Paige took its strangest turn yet when Satch joined the Crawfords for their Southern spring training tour in 1938.
When the Crawfords reached New Orleans, several mysterious, dark-skinned men dressed in ivory suits and Panama hats started showing up at their games. Greenlee suspected that they were from the Caribbean baseball leagues, where black players had been spending more and more time to supplement their meager earnings in America. “Haitian pirates, that’s what they are,” Greenlee fumed. At one point, he even tried to have a local court throw the scouts in jail for “conspiracy.” But after several weeks, one of the men approached Paige and introduced himself as Dr. José Enrique Aybar, from the Dominican Republic. He explained that he was an envoy from a team called Cuidad Trujillo. He offered Paige $30,000 to spend the season in the Dominican Republic and bring eight players with him, with the money to be divided as Satchel saw fit. When Paige expressed skepticism, Aybar came back the next day with a statement showing that $30,000 had been deposited in a bank in the name of Satchel Paige.
It appeared that Rafael Trujillo, the Dominican Republic’s military strongman, was looking to shore up his sagging popularity. Knowing how passionate his countrymen were about baseball, he had taken over the two best teams in Santo Domingo and created a new squad named in his honor: Los Dragones de Cuidad Trujillo. But the Dragons had started losing to provincial teams, and Trujillo had grown worried that their disappointing play might cost him the next election. So he dispatched Dr. Aybar—who was also the dean of the University of Santo Domingo and a member of the National Assembly—to America with a promotional flyer bearing Paige’s picture so that he could hunt down the fabled pitcher and bring him back to rescue the Dragons.
When Greenlee learned that Paige had taken the money and run yet again—and was using Trujillo’s cash to lure away other Crawfords—he was furious. But this time, he was in no position to fight back. Since his last showdown with Satch, Greenlee’s financial fortunes had taken a precipitous turn for the worse. He had invested thousands of dollars in his boxing prospect, John Henry Lewis, who had won the light heavyweight crown but was having trouble breaking into the heavyweight ranks. A newly elected Democratic mayor was putting the squeeze on gambling in Pittsburgh, and word was that Greenlee had lost a small fortune when one widely played number hit.
Adding to Gus’s woes, Greenlee Field had become a perennial money-loser. Greenlee’s partners had refused to pay for a roof for the stadium, leaving it vulnerable to rainouts and heat waves that kept fans away. His bootlegging friends, the Tito brothers, insisted on hiring white cronies to man the turnstiles and sell popcorn in the stands, offending blacks from the surrounding neighborhood. Attendance at Crawford games had dropped to less than 1,700 a game, hardly enough to cover Greenlee’s $4,000 a month payroll and the other costs of operating a ballpark and taking the team on the road.
Paige soon pulled out of the Dominican Republic deal, after Trujillo’s goons started following him around day and night and warning of dire consequences if he didn’t keep winning. But when Paige approached Greenlee about returning to the Crawfords, Gus offered him only $450 a month, with a $15 fine for any game he missed. “I wouldn’t throw ice cubes for that kind of money,” Paige responded arrogantly, so Gus sold the rest of Satchel’s two-year contract to Abe and Effie Manley of the Newark Eagles for $5,000. (The Manleys didn’t have any better luck changing Paige’s mercenary ways: he refused to move to Newark and spent the next few seasons playing in the Mexican League and jumping from exhibition to exhibition until he eventually settled down again—at least for a few years—with the Kansas City Monarchs.)
Meanwhile, Cum Posey sensed Greenlee’s weakness, and he was finally in a position to capitalize on it. After years of trying to bankroll the Homestead Grays on his own, Posey had brought in his own racketeer to help finance the club. His name was Rufus “Sonnyman” Jackson, a smooth-faced, ebony-dark numbers man who also owned the top nightclub in Homestead. Posey named Jackson president of the Grays and cut a new deal to play their games in Forbes Field, throwing Greenlee Field further into the red. Then, in March 1937, Posey and Jackson traveled to New York City for an owners meeting that would shift the power balance of Pittsburgh baseball yet again.
“GRAYS GET GIBSON,” exclaimed the headline in the Courier the following week. After three days of secret negotiations, Greenlee had agreed to trade Josh Gibson, his top slugger, and Judy Johnson, his all-star third baseman, to Cum Posey in exchange for two players and $2,500 in cash. In a further sign of Greenlee’s financial predicament, he had dealt pitcher Harry “Tin Can” Kincannon to the New York Black Yankees “for an unannounced sum.” The owners reelected Greenlee as president of the league, but now that looked like no more than a consolation prize. The real news was “the biggest player deal in the history of Negro baseball,” as the Courier put it, one that would “make the Homestead ninery one of the most formidable members of the league.”
That turned out to be an understatement. In Gibson and first baseman Buck Leonard, the Grays now had the most formidable slugging duo in the Negro game. With Gibson’s arrival, Vic Harris
, the Grays’ manager and center fielder, and Ray Brown, a curveballer who was married to Posey’s daughter Ethel, also came into their own. Starting in 1937, the Grays won eight of the next nine Negro National League pennants, as well as three of the first black “World Series” contests against a rival league that sprang up in 1942. In another shrewd move to ensure the team’s financial survival, Posey and Jackson cut a deal to start playing half of their games in Washington, D.C., where they came to be known as the Washington Homestead Grays.
Back on top of the Negro baseball world, Cum Posey began to take a public stand on integrating the big leagues. In February 1938, he and Chester Washington interviewed the president of the Pittsburgh Pirates and got him to endorse the idea. “If the question of admitting colored players into organized ball ever becomes an issue, I would be heartily in favor of it!” said William Benswanger, singling out Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige as two players of “big league caliber.” On the Courier sports page, meanwhile, Wendell Smith, the paper’s newest sports columnist, took up the integration cause. “If Pittsburgh Pirate officials weren’t afraid, they’d sign Ray Brown, Buck Leonard and Josh Gibson and stop worrying about whether their team is going to cop the N.L. pennant or not,” Smith wrote in October 1938.
The next month, bulldozers rolled onto the corner of Bedford Avenue and Junilla Street and began tearing down the house that Gus Greenlee built. In its latest New Deal experiment, the FDR administration was awarding millions of dollars to cities across America to erect housing developments for the poor, and Pittsburgh had decided to locate its first one in the area surrounding Greenlee Field. The city’s Housing Authority offered Greenlee $38,000 for the land and threatened to seize it if he didn’t take the deal. Greenlee never commented on the matter, but his spokesman John L. Clark didn’t hide his bitterness in a story called “The Rise and Fall of Greenlee Field.” Greenlee had tried everything to save the park, Clark wrote—issuing stock, selling season tickets—but nothing worked. “Greenlee Field joins the list of banks, industries and other enterprises which should not be again attempted in this city for 100 years,” Clark concluded glumly. “It is safe to say that Pittsburgh is no place to attempt big things for Negroes.”
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