Title: Satchel Paige Pitched Past ’Em
Milto - June 18, 2010 03:14 AM (GMT)
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| Satchel Paige Pitched Past ’Em Look Ahead: He rode a spot-on fastball and salesmanship to the top of baseball by Norm Alster, Investor's Business Daily Boston was in Kansas City for a late September ballgame in 1965. And the Red Sox bench was humming with chatter. The Sox players stared at the long, lean, gray pitcher for Kansas City as he trudged slowly, almost painfully, to the mound. Bill Monbouquette, Boston’s pitcher that night, recalled the cocky words of teammate Tony Conigliaro: “I’m going to get a hit off that old buzzard.” That old bird was 59-year-old Satchel Paige, who on that night was setting a record as the oldest player to appear in a Major League Baseball game. Just 10 months shy of his 60th birthday, Paige set down young Conigliaro and the rest of the Red Sox. In three innings, they managed just one harmless hit off the future Hall of Famer. Monbouquette, author of a 1962 no-hitter, recalls the awestruck response in Boston’s dugout: “How good was this guy in his 20s?” Hank Peters, the Kansas City general manager who had signed Paige to pitch that night, still marvels at his performance. “He was able to keep the hitters confused,” Peters told IBD. “He was a smart old guy and he knew how to mix up his pitches.” Toward Cooperstown Satchel Paige’s mix of pitches had been confusing hitters for 40 years. He was so impressive, the National Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him in 1971, making him the first Negro league player so honored. Record keeping was often sketchy in the Negro leagues, where Paige pitched for two decades. But he pitched year-round, often day after day, for four decades. By his own account, Paige (1906-82) pitched in over 2,500 games. That’s roughly double Jesse Orosco’s big-league record. In his 20s, Paige featured a fastball so wicked, catchers puts steaks in their mitts to cushion the impact, says Larry Tye, author of “Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend.” Over the years, the righty added a bewildering array of off-speed pitches. All these were delivered with pinpoint control through a baffling assortment of windups. Most of Paige’s best work came before he reached the majors. More than once he heard from MLB scouts: “We’d sign you — if only you were white.’” It was not until 1948, when he was 42, that Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck signed him. This made Paige the fourth black in the majors since Jackie Robinson had broken the color line the year before. Despite his age, Paige dazed American League hitters. In posting a 6-1 record and stellar 2.48 earned run average, Paige helped the Indians win the 1948 world title. Four years later, at age 46, he won 12 games for the seventh-place St. Louis Browns. All this supported the claim of many baseball people that Paige was one of the greatest pitchers of all time. But because of baseball’s Jim Crow rules, many of his exploits never won full recognition. Paige pitched for two of the great teams of the Negro leagues: the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Kansas City Monarchs. He also pitched for squads in Cuba, Mexico and Puerto Rico, as well as in California and North Dakota. Extra Play He was a baseball moonlighter, leaving the Negro leagues to twirl for local or barnstorming teams. Some of them were integrated, as was the Bismarck, N.D., club he led to the national semipro title in 1935. St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Famer Dizzy Dean, a 30-game winner in 1934, barnstormed for years with Paige. They squared off against each other often in exhibition games. Paige, reckoned Dean, was “the best pitcher I ever see.” He went on: “If Old Satchel and I played together, we’d clinch the pennant mathematically by the Fourth of July.” Joe DiMaggio called Paige the best pitcher he ever faced: “Satch has a curve with so many bends it looks like a wiggle in a cyclone; it gave me optical indigestion.” Paige was more than a top pitcher of amazing longevity. He was also a great showman who drew fans to the ballpark. An almost cartoonish figure with his long, bony limbs, high leg kick and windmilling arm motion, he was a peerless crowd pleaser. The Salesman In the current parlance, he was a master at creating and marketing his brand. Paige was such a crowd magnet, his teams in the Negro leagues would rent him out to rival clubs for a night. He would share the rental fee with his club’s owner. “You could guarantee an increase in attendance if you could say Satchel was pitching,” said Leslie Heaphy, author of “The Negro Leagues: 1869-1960.” Said Tye: “Satchel was brilliant at making money — not just for himself, but for his owners.” In an age where players — white and black — had little freedom of movement, Paige pretty much came and went as he pleased. “He was the first free agent,” Tye said. Players in the Negro leagues earned a fraction of MLB salaries. But by pitching exhibitions and through the winter in California or the Caribbean, Paige padded his income. One year in the 1940s he managed to earn $40,000, as much as anyone in all of baseball, Tye says. “He pitched all year round,” the author noted. In 1935, Paige’s Bismarck team played 30 games in 27 days — and he pitched at least an inning in each. Paige was no saint. Before Sinatra ever recorded the song, Satchel could claim: “I did it my way.” With little respect for contracts, he often walked out on his teams for a bigger paycheck elsewhere. A world-class skirt chaser, he was married twice — at the same time. And he demanded special treatment, often driving his flashy Cadillac rather than riding the team bus. But the fans — black and white — loved him. And paid to see him. Even while still a Negro league pitcher, Paige drew huge crowds to venues such as Wrigley Field and Yankee Stadium. His first start for the Indians drew 72,434 fans to Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium. In a later start he set a record for a major league night game, luring over 78,000 there. He responded with a three-hit shutout. Also in 1948, at Chicago’s Comiskey Park, he helped the White Sox to their first sellout in three years, then blanked the home team. Born in Mobile, Ala., Leroy Robert Paige was the seventh of 11 children. As he wrote in “Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever,” his 1962 autobiography, “It was poverty-stricken living before I knew what that meant.” He earned the nickname Satchel toting bags in the Mobile train station. He learned the strength of his right arm in rock fights. A high-powered fastball was a natural gift. But what really set Paige apart was his control. And this did not come naturally. “He went out and worked at it,” Tye said. On Target Wild when he signed with Chattanooga in the Negro minor leagues in 1926, Paige practiced throwing a ball at 60 feet through a grapefruitsized hole in a fence. The repetition worked. Soon he could put the ball through the hole five out of 10 times, Tye says. Wrote Paige: “I got so I could nip frosting off a cake with my fastball.” He liked to show off his control — another reason he was a crowd favorite. He’d hold pregame exhibitions, hitting matchbooks propped up on sticks above home plate. So fine was his aim, he could “throw a ball over a folded gum wrapper,” Heaphy said. “He had the best control of anybody I ever saw,” said former Red Sox All-Star Johnny Pesky. As Paige put it: “It ain’t so much how hard you throw. It’s why and where.” He was full of advice. What’s unclear is whether he followed it himself. He warned against eating fried foods, which “angry up the blood,” then fried up just about everything from bacon to catfish, Tye says. Still, President Eisenhower once referred to Paige’s advice as “words of wisdom.” Paige harbored anger at how he and other blacks had been excluded from Major League Baseball, Tye says. And the pitcher stood tough: He would not sign up his barnstormers unless a city could assure adequate lodging and dining facilities. Still, he often tried to defuse racial situations with gentle humor. His election to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., was richly deserved, said Tye: “Nobody in the history of baseball pitched better for longer than Satchel Paige.” Paige, working out with the Kansas City Athletics in 1965, was 42 when he reached the majors in 1948 and helped Cleveland to its last world title. --AP |
osfan58202233 - June 19, 2010 03:19 AM (GMT)
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| Despite his age, Paige dazed American League hitters. In posting a 6-1 record and stellar 2.48 earned run average, Paige helped the Indians win the 1948 world title. Four years later, at age 46, he won 12 games for the seventh-place St. Louis Browns. |
almost an Oriole...
this was a great read, thanks for posting it
szekely - June 20, 2010 04:06 AM (GMT)
With D, I thank you. Great story. Loved Dimaggio's quote: "it gave me optical indigestion.” Brilliant, like Paige.
Milto - June 25, 2010 04:45 AM (GMT)
BEST OF LEADERS & SUCCESS
Baltimore Pitcher Jim Palmer Sought Perfection
Follow Your Passion: The right-hander gave his all on the mound on the way to three world titles and the Hall of Fame
BY MICHAEL MINK
FOR INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Jim Palmer didn’t want to just get by. Or be just better than average. He wanted to be the best.
To reach that level, Palmer stuck to constant personal challenge.
“I don’t think you can go through life never knowing how good you can really be,” Palmer, 64, told IBD.
When young pitchers asked him how he won 20 games or more for eight seasons, Palmer’s answer was direct: “Personal integrity.”
What does that mean? Simple. “It’s how hard are you willing to work? How diligent are you going to be?” he said. “Are you really going to do everything you can, going to all ends of the Earth, to be successful?”
Loving what you do makes that a lot easier, Palmer says. He played most of his career, which spanned from 1965 to 1984 with the Baltimore Orioles, in the era before multimillion-dollar contracts. “Looking back, it was never about the money. You could make a nice living, but it wasn’t overwhelming like it is now. The most important thing is I ended up doing something that I really loved to do,” he said.
His career regular-season record was 268-152 losses, a winning percentage of .638, with an earned-run average of 2.86.
Champion
In the postseason he was just as effective, going 8-3 and helping the Orioles to three world titles. Palmer was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1990.
“Jim had a good head on his shoulders. From the minor leagues to his very last pitch that he made in the majors, he knew the strengths and weaknesses of every hitter that he faced,” said Elrod Hendricks, a Baltimore catcher who passed away in 2005. “He remembered what (a batter) did against him and what the pitch was and where the location was. He could also tell you the atmospheric conditions that time of day. It was a joy catching him. He was a perfectionist.”
Palmer, who was adopted at birth, credits his parents with starting him out in the right direction. He was keenly aware of the importance of consistency. He compares playing baseball to owning a restaurant. You can give customers a four-star dinner on Friday night, Palmer said, “but if you can’t reproduce that performance on Saturday night, you’re going to be out of business. I always looked at life as being that way. The one thing I learned in baseball is they always take away the 20 wins after the season. You always start the next one at zero.”
Preparing carefully gave Palmer an advantage. “The edge is that you have self-confidence that you’re going to be able to do the things you need to do,” he said. “If you’re in great shape, and you’ve done your homework, and you’ve prepared yourself as well as you can, then you’ve already played the game (mentally) the night before.”
“He was an intellectual pitcher first and a physical specimen second,” said fellow O’s pitcher and Cy Young winner Mike Flanagan.
In 1966, Palmer discovered he could learn almost as much watching how other pitchers worked hitters as he could pitching.
That year, the Orioles played the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. In Game 1, he watched reliever Moe Drabowsky strike out 11 in six-plus innings of a 5-2 Baltimore victory.
Beating Koufax
In Game 2, Palmer became the youngest pitcher to throw a shutout in a World Series, defeating Sandy Koufax in the last game the great lefty ever pitched. The Orioles went on to sweep the Dodgers. “My shutout would never have happened if I hadn’t been sitting on the bench paying attention to what Moe did,” Palmer said. “The defining moment to me is that somebody showed me how to do it. I took responsibility for paying attention, and then took all the things that I had learned, even though I was only 20 at the time, and was able to be successful.”
For his stamina, like many pitchers, Palmer was an advocate of running.
“He would lead the running every day. Right up to his last days in uniform, he set the pace for the pitching staff in running,” Flanagan said. “And it was an intense pace.”
This story originally ran Dec. 3, 2001, on Leaders & Success.