The Smartest Book in the World

by Greg Proops

  In 1937, Paige flew down to the Dominican Republic. (Paige’s departure broke up the Crawfords and got Paige banned from the Negro Leagues, but he was never banned for long.) The Caribbean was even wilder than the Negro Leagues. The dictator Trujillo had some shady-assed hoods give Paige a suitcase containing thirty grand and told him to put together a team of black all-stars to play on the Los Dragones. To make it weirder, a voodoo priest from Haiti gave him a wanga to help him win (though later he found out it was an evil charm to make him lose). During the championship, Paige saw the armed soldiers on the field—not necessarily to protect the players. The militia fired rifles in the air during games and shouted, “El Presidente doesn’t lose.” On the day before the championship series, the team was locked in jail for the night so they wouldn’t go out and party. They won the championship, but Paige’s nervous stomach couldn’t handle the strain of the lifestyle and the spicy food. He did note that black players were given respect in Latin America and allowed to eat and be with others, unlike in our beloved land of the free.

  Paige threw hard, and for years all he used was a fastball with deadly accuracy. Then one day in Mexico, his arm went dead. He tried everything—hot baths, massage, rest, chiropractors—and then he finally shut himself in a room thinking it was all over at thirty-two. He was facing retirement and poverty while he was at the apex of his career. The Negro League teams he had spurned and jumped from were happy to see him beg a little. No job was forthcoming despite his huge popularity. “When you been at the top and hit the bottom, it’s a mighty long fall.”

  His second act was just beginning. The Kansas City Monarchs’ white owner, J. L. Wilkinson, whose partner was a Klansman (ironic, that), showed mercy and took him back. “I’d been dead. Now I was alive again,” said Paige. They played him on the Monarchs B-Team, which immediately became known as the Satchel Paige All-Stars. He played first and couldn’t hit, but fans came to the small towns to see him.

  I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I toss one that ain’t never been seen by this generation.

  —Satchel Paige

  Then one day he threw without pain. Hooray. He next learned a changeup for the first time in his career. Cool Papa Bell taught him the knuckleball, which Paige eventually came to throw even better than Bell. He rose from the ashes and became a star again, pitching in the Negro World Series in 1942 and 1946.

  The Negro Leagues didn’t bother with helmets, and they had a trifle more latitude in the kind of pitches one could hurl as compared to the majors. This was more than a little pine tar. You could straight out spit and do whatever you liked to the ball. Paige threw a fastball as hard as anybody, but when his arm went bad, he employed a bunch of trick pitches that he gave exotic names—the Hurryup Ball, Midnight Rider, Midnight Creeper, Two-hump Blooper, the aforecited Be-ball, Looper, Drooper, Nothing Ball, Jump Ball, Trouble Ball, the incredibly appointed Whipsy-dipsy-do—and he was just as effective. Players in the majors who faced him in the late ’40s and ’50s said he could still bring the hard one when he had to.

  SATCHEL AND THE GREAT DIMAGGIO

  I just got a hit off Satchel Paige, now I know I can make it with the Yankees.

  —Joe DiMaggio

  Paige was pitching in a tourney in California when the young Joe DiMaggio from San Francisco got to face him. DiMaggio was the scourge of the minor leagues, crushing the ball and running up a sixty-one-game hitting streak on his way to the New York Yankees, a zillion World Series, Marilyn, and immortality. He got one fluke hit off Satchel. The Yankee scout wrote a telegram to the big club: “DiMaggio everything we’d hoped he’d be: Hit Satch one for four.” Paige meant that much as a competitor.

  The Negro Leagues were a triumph of personal courage and entrepreneurial spirit, but they are also a disgraceful chapter in American discrimination that lasted for far too long. Big league parks would rent to the Negro teams because they paid hard cash and they drew good crowds, especially when Satchel was pitching. The Washington Senators made $100,000 a year renting to Negro teams. They also didn’t allow the black players to use the clubhouse.

  There’s a couple of million dollars’ worth of baseball talent on the loose, ready for the big leagues, yet unsigned by any major league. There are pitchers who would win twenty games a season, outfielders who could hit .350, infielders who could win recognition as stars, and there’s at least one catcher who at this writing is probably superior to Bill Dickey—Josh Gibson. Only one thing is keeping them out of the big leagues—the pigmentation of their skin.

  —Shirley Povich, Washington Post, 1941

  In the ’40s, Time and The Saturday Evening Post ran articles about Paige, and those pieces—even with their racist stereotypes—reminded fans of how long he had been going and his greatness. And how funny he was.

  For the first time a white magazine had burned incense at the foot of a black man outside the prize ring. It changed Paige into a celebrity. He immediately developed into a matinee idol among Negroes in this country. The Saturday Evening Post made him ten times more famous than the black press had. He cashed in on it by becoming a one-man barnstormer. He brought people back to the ball game. He got blacks in the habit of going to ball games and spending their money. It caught the eyes of Branch Rickey, who was a money changer from way back.

  —Ric Roberts, Pittsburgh Courier

  WWII brought home the fact that minorities were being asked to defend the USA without enjoying civil rights when they came home. But that would soon change. Branch Rickey, the man who ran the Brooklyn Dodgers, was scheming to do what no one had done: bring blacks into the majors.

  They said I was the greatest pitcher they ever saw . . . I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t give me no justice.

  —Satchel Paige

  In the Negro Leagues, one of Paige’s teammates was the young Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson had a tryout with the White Sox in 1942, and they thought he was worth fifty grand, but they wouldn’t pull the trigger. Eventually, though, he became the first black man to play in the white big leagues. Jackie was worried he wouldn’t make the grade when he got signed in 1945. He confided in Gene Benson, his roommate, who reminded him of all the illegal pitches the Negro League allowed: “Jackie, just remember one thing: where you’re goin’ ain’t half as tough as where you been.”

  For all Jackie’s talent, Paige was the trailblazer, and he and his compatriots of the first generation of black baseball stars were the very face of the daring, jive-talking, crowd-pleasing style of Negro League play that came to the big leagues and white fans. The great paradox is that the success of the Negro Leagues led by Satchel in drawing fans actually delayed integration, as the white owners wanted that rental income.

  Paige took Jackie’s signing personally: “Signing Jackie like they did still hurt me deep down. I’d been the guy who’d started all that big talk about letting us in the big time. I’d been the one who’d opened up the major league parks to colored teams. I’d been the one who the white boys wanted to go barnstorming against.”

  Despite his feelings, Paige said of Robinson, “He’s the greatest colored player I’ve ever seen.”

  There were better players than Jackie: Monte Irvin was one. Josh Gibson thought he should be first. The truth is simply that Satchel Paige could not be the first black man in white baseball at that late date in his career, even if he was the best known. He was older and making more than almost any white player, and he would not have gone to the minor leagues for a year as Jackie did. Jackie had the temperament and character, and in the end he wanted that culturally important job. Jackie was a staunch visionary; Paige a veteran showman.

  When everybody’s calling you ageless, you got time for those comebacks.

  —Satchel Paige

  In 1948 at the age of fortysomething, he finally got the call from maverick owner Bill Veeck, and a year after Robinson made the Brooklyn Dodgers, Paige became a big leaguer.

  Brought out to the park to audition for V
eeck and manager-shortstop Lou Boudreau, Paige said he felt “numb.” Boudreau asked him if he wanted to loosen up by running. Paige said yes, then remembered he hated running and ran a few yards, then came back. He threw for a few minutes and only missed the plate a couple of times. Boudreau, who won the AL MVP that year, stood in against him and couldn’t do anything. Paige was signed for half a season and given a year’s pay. He was finally in white baseball. Veeck told him, “I’m just sorry you didn’t come up in your prime. You’d have been one of the greatest right-handers baseball has ever known if you had.”

  Paige pitched in relief for the Indians a few times, then was asked to start. He threw back-to-back shutouts, and they sold hundreds of thousands of tickets. He went on to a 6–1 record that season, and, most impressively, when the Associated Press writers voted for Rookie of the Year, Paige garnered several votes, which he was quite delighted by, but he said that he “wasn’t sure what year the gentlemen had in mind.” Some papers were horrible, calling it an affront to the game to have an old clown like him, some were exultant; one New York paper called him “a Paul Bunyan in Technicolor.”

  After Cleveland he played on the St. Louis Browns and got in the All-Star Game a couple of times. By now he was in his fifties, but he didn’t stop. He caught on with the minor league Marlins in Florida again for Veeck. In 1965, at fifty-nine, hustler and owner of the Kansas City Athletics Charley Finley brought him back for one game. Paige was seated in a rocking chair in the bullpen and attended by a “nurse,” but he still threw three big-league scoreless innings. They brought him out for the fourth, so he could take a bow. The crowd gave him a standing ovation as he walked off the mound. Paige always pleased the crowd. He is still out there inspiring us and making us love baseball.

  MONUMENTS AND WEEPING

  The first professional Major League white team Paige played for, not a segregated team, was the Cleveland Indians of 1948. They also won the World Series. (The last time they did that little thing.)

  Progressive Field in Cleveland has a monument park out back, and you may go there and stand in breathless wonder in front of his plaque or weep quietly as some sentimental Smartest Book types have done. For Satchel Paige put on a brave face in a bad situation and triumphed. With wit and humor.

  Ted Williams, a baller who was nobody’s sissy, had this to say when he was placed in the Hall of Fame: “The other day Willie Mays hit his five hundred and twenty-second home run. He has gone past me, and he’s pushing, and I say to him, ‘Go get ’em, Willie.’ Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. I hope that one day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.”

  Williams played on the Boston Red Sox for twenty-one years with breaks for two wars as a marine pilot. He is considered by many to be the greatest hitter of all time. He also played on a team that was the very last to integrate in 1959, a full twelve years after Jackie Robinson. Though the Boston Celtics basketball team was the first to field an all-black lineup and hire a black coach. The Sox owner Tom Yawkey just was not into it. In 1966, when Teddy Ballgame was elected to the Hall of Fame, it was only three years after the March for Jobs and Freedom on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, not that long after the march from Selma to Montgomery and the Watts riots. No white ballplayer had ever seized the day the way Ted did during his induction to the Hall. His speech lit a fire under baseball’s collective ass, and within five years they started a special panel and put Paige and Gibson in the Hall.

  When Paige was inducted, he got on the stand in his spectacles and his suit and said, “The only change is that baseball’s turned Paige from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal.”

  PAIGE THE PHILOSOPHER

  Father Time takes us all. It took Satchel Paige and it’ll take me.

  —Bill “Spaceman” Lee

  Paige was contemplative, and he philosophized on many topics. He even had a John Lennon–like quote about faith: “Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.” Then there is his dread of running: “I don’t generally like running. I believe in training by rising gently up and down from the bench.”

  One of his more famous thoughts is, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?” The question of age came up throughout Paige’s career, and he would often reply, “I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a hundred times: I’m forty-four.” His mother, Lula, told a reporter that he was fifty-five rather than fifty-three, saying she knew this because she wrote it down in her Bible. Paige wrote, “Seems like Mom’s Bible would know, but she ain’t ever shown me the Bible. Anyway, she was in her nineties when she told the reporter that, and sometimes she tended to forget things.”

  Paige really quit the road only when he was in his sixties. As an actual old man he toured with the Indianapolis Clowns, who had featured Women players and a midget. He was the one wearing spectacles dispensing wisdom from the back of the bus and pitching an inning or two for disbelieving fans who thought he had passed. He then went back as a special coach to the Atlanta Braves, so he could get his pension.

  Writer Richard Donovan printed a profile in Collier’s magazine called “The Fabulous Satchel Paige.” This brought even more notoriety to our hero. It was 1953, and Paige had outlasted Ruth, Dizzy, and Bob “Rapid Robert” Feller. The best part of the rules is he followed so few of them.

  Paige never said these things in this particular order, but when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. These are, in fact, on his family tombstone in Kansas City:

  How to Stay Young

  1. Avoid fried meats that angry up the blood.

  2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.

  3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.

  4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful.

  5. Avoid running at all times.

  6. And don’t look back—something might be gaining on you.

  SMARTEST BOOK BASEBALL TEAM VIII

  All-Time Negro League Team

  The Negro Leagues used lights to play at night way before the white leagues. They also had funner hangouts after the game. The teams were a source of pride for the black community, and on Sunday people put on their best clothes and went after church. It was a thing and a scene. Not a corporate revenue-flow situation.

  Manager: ANDREW “RUBE” FOSTER (1879–1930)

  A great pitcher, Rube Foster helped establish the Negro League, taught Christy Mathewson the fadeaway, set the standard for coaching that white teams imitated. He became mentally ill but was absolutely monumental to black ball.

  Catcher: JOSH GIBSON (1911–1947)

  The “black Babe Ruth” was lovable and could crush the pellet. If he had played in the white leagues, we would have an award named after him.

  First Base: WALTER FENNER “BUCK” LEONARD (1907–1997)

  Big and bold, Buck Leonard batted cleanup behind Gibson and was deadly. They called him “the black Lou Gehrig” because he killed pitches.

  Second Base: FRANK GRANT (1865–1937)

  The greatest nineteenth-century black player, Grant was classy and smooth around the bag. Played in the white minors for three years for Buffalo in 1886–88, but obviously never got called up.

  Third Base: WILLIAM JULIUS “JUDY” JOHNSON (1899–1989)

  Judy Johnson was a star in the first Negro League World Series and a superb fielder. He was eventually voted into the white Hall of Fame. As a manager, he mentored Josh Gibson.

  Shortstop: JOHN HENRY “POP” LLOYD (1884–1964)

  The papers called Pop Lloyd “the black Honus Wagner.” Wagner said he was honored. No word on what Lloyd felt.

  Right Field: CRISTÓBAL TORRI
ENTE (1893–1938)

  The Cuban Strongman could pitch, play second and third, and was the grooviest right fielder. Awesomely hit three home runs in a game against some barnstorming Yanks in Cuba. Babe Ruth was in right and demanded to pitch to Torriente after the second tater. Cristóbal promptly hit Ruth for a two-run double.

  Center Field: OSCAR McKINLEY CHARLESTON (1896–1954)

  Charleston was maybe the best player in any league ever. He played center and could run, throw, hit for average, and cream the ball. They called him “the black Ty Cobb,” but he was a much better fielder than Ty Cobb. Sam Lacy, the longtime writer for the Baltimore Afro-American, said he was better than Willie Mays. Hot.

  Backup Center Field: JAMES THOMAS “COOL PAPA” BELL (1903–1991)

  I am not leaving Cool Papa Bell off this team. Not only does he have the best nickname in history but he was also the fastest cat to play ball. He batted lead-off, stole, and was so quick that he once stole two bases on one pitch. He played for more than twenty years and, even though at forty-three he was in a batting race, he sat out the last two games so the white scouts could get a look at Monte Irvin.