Satchel Paige Print, Vintage Baseball Poster, Retro United States Wall Art, Black and White Print

SATCHEL PAIGE — a LostTeams editorial print telling the existing story of Satchel Paige, 1926-1965.

Fifty-nine. That was his age, in years, the last time he stood on a Major League pitching mound. The number reads like a misprint, a slip of the typesetter's hand, a decimal set in the wrong place. It is not. On the twenty-fifth of September, 1965, at Municipal Stadium in Kansas City, a man of fifty-nine walked out and pitched three scoreless innings of Major League baseball, and gave up a single hit, a double, to a future Hall of Famer less than half his age.

Leroy Robert Paige, known since boyhood as Satchel, had been the finest pitcher of his generation for most of the years he was forbidden to prove it. He was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1906, and by the middle of the 1920s he was pitching for money in the Negro Leagues: for Chattanooga, for Birmingham, for the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Kansas City Monarchs. He barnstormed the length of the country and wintered in Cuba, in Mexico, in the Dominican Republic, beating white major leaguers in exhibition games whenever the two worlds were allowed to touch.

They were rarely allowed to touch. For more than two decades a colour line, written nowhere and enforced everywhere, kept the best Black players out of the white major leagues. Paige threw his pitches, the bee ball, the hesitation pitch, in front of crowds who knew exactly what they were watching and a record book that would not hold it.

When the door finally opened, he was already old. In July of 1948, on what was recorded as his forty-second birthday, Cleveland signed him, the oldest rookie the game had ever seen. He went six and one that season and helped Cleveland win the World Series, the first Black man to pitch in one. He came back in his mid-forties for the St. Louis Browns and was twice named to the All-Star team.

And then, seventeen years after that late beginning, the rocking chair set out on the grass, the liniment, the three quiet innings at fifty-nine. In 1971 he became the first man chosen for the Hall of Fame primarily for a career spent in the Negro Leagues, a game beginning, at last, to reckon with what it had refused to see.

He liked to say, do not look back, something might be gaining on you. Nothing ever did. The talent outlasted the ban that was built to bury it.

Hang it. One day someone will ask you what it is, and you will know where to begin.