A’s owner Charlie Finley had a nursemaid to tend to “old” Satchel Paige for his MLB finale.
Nothing Was Gainin’ on Satchel Paige
DATE: September 25, 1965
SITE: Municipal Stadium, Kansas City, Missouri
OPPONENT: Bill Monbouquette of the Boston Red Sox
RESULT: Three scoreless innings
September 25, 1965, Kansas City—He stood out on that little hill that to enemy
hitters over the past 30 years always looked like a mountain. For Satchel Paige, the view was always majestic. He could hear the buzz in the
stands. Satchel always could. Right now, he laughed to himself, they were probably
wondering how old he was.
Was he 59? Or 62? Or 64? Had it been any other 59-year-old man, somebody
surely would have asked, “What are you doing on a major-league mound?” Nobody
was going to ask Satchel Paige that. Not even at 59.
Another baseball season had come and almost gone. Only a couple regular-season
games left. The A’s were out of it. So were their visitors, the Boston Red Sox.
The owner of the Kansas City A’s, Charles Finley, had noticed the lagging attendance at Muncipal Stadium and decided to do something about it.
He contacted Paige, who hadn’t pitched in the big leagues since 1953—he’d retired after a 3-9 record in 117 innings for the St. Louis Browns in 1953 at age 47— and asked him if he’d like to come back to the big leagues and pitch the regular-season finale. Paige, who was always up for making a dollar, said sure.
Finley did the act up big-time. When Paige went out to the bullpen to warm up,
there was a nurse there and a rocking chair. Ever the showman, Paige sat down in the chair and commenced to rocking as the crowd of 9,289 began trickling in. The nurse even started rubbing liniment on his limber right arm and Paige went along with the gag.
But once his warm-ups were complete, the fans hooting and hollering, the lanky
Paige, 6-foot 3-inches, all arms and legs, strode deliberately to the mound for the
very last time. This time, it was just baseball.
There were nights where he’d tell the outfield to sit down so he could strike out
the side, like he’d do in his barnstorming days. There were other nights he’d put up
a 2X4 behind home plate with 10-penny nails in it and proceed to nail the board to
the backstop with his pitches from the mound.
Tonight, he’d just pitch. He’d been doing this for a very long time, spanning
baseball generations. He once struck out the great Rogers Hornsby five times in a
single barnstorming game. Hornsby won his first batting title in 1920, his last in
1928. He had long since retired.
Then there was Joe DiMaggio. He’d called Satchel “the fastest pitcher I ever
batted against. And the best.” DiMaggio had been retired for nine years.
Former Cubs’ slugger Hack Wilson said Satchel’s fastball “started out like a
baseball but by the time it got to the plate, it looks like a marble.”
“(He) must be talking about my slowball,” Paige replied. “My fastball looks like a
fish egg.” Wilson had died in 1948. Satchel pitched on.
Why, Dizzy Dean, who used to barnstorm with Ol’ Satchel, hadn’t been on a
major-league mound in 18 years. Now he was an announcer. Dizzy said Satchel was
the best pitcher he ever saw, adding “my fastball looks like a change of pace
compared to that pistol bullet that ol’ Satchel sends up there.”
Dean, Hornsby, Wilson, DiMaggio—all of them were gone now. Yet here was
Satchel Paige, a baseball in that long, spidery hand, standing on the mound at
Municipal Stadium, staring in at a stocky left-handed hitting rookie, Jim Gosger.
Paige was back in the big leagues. One last time. For the longest time, he wondered if
he’d ever get the chance that Jackie Robinson did.
From the late 1920s on, the name Satchel Paige was known all across America.
He’d been wowing them in the Negro Leagues and in barnstorming tours.
Some of that was because of his undeniable talent. Some of it was because he
understood how to be colorful. He called his pitches different names: his be-ball
(“because it be where I want it to be”) his jump ball, trouble ball, Little Tom, Long
Tom, his midnight rider, and his four-day creeper. Whether the hitter could actually
distinguish between any of the pitches didn’t matter. Paige could and the lore grew.
“I’m the easiest guy in the world to catch,” Paige once told a rookie receiver. “I
don’t take to signals too good. All you have to do is show me a glove and hold it still.
I’ll hit it.”
When barnstorming, Paige used to guarantee to strike out the first nine hitters.
He was willing to go anywhere and pitch for a dollar. He jumped teams, jumped
leagues, went wherever there was a little more money. Despite his magnificent
talent, not all the black newspaper writers were sympathetic to his cause.
As Chester Washington wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier, “No player is bigger than a
baseball club, and no player is certainly more important than the National
Association of Negro Baseball Clubs.
“And this goes for Satchel Paige, too. . . . Despite his contract, Paige, who has in
the past set a bad example for Negro baseball by his ‘gallivantin’’’ tactics, repeatedly
refused to join the Pittsburgh Crawfords training camp at Hot Springs; instead, he joined the Bismark [North Dakota] Club, where he expects to play ‘free-lance’
baseball.”
Later, when Paige joined the Crawfords, then took off again in a contract dispute,
black baseball’s greatest pitcher was rapped by the black press. “Some owners and
fans are genuinely glad to have Paige leave,” they wrote then. “Others are sorry.
Negro baseball has been very good to Paige. His phenomenal, well-publicized
pitching ability could not be expressed in terms of finance. No colored club drew
enough cash customers to pay him a salary commensurate with his ability. Then
again, his unreliability was a factor which at all times kept him from being a valuable
asset to any team.”
Because of that reputation, when it came time to break the color barrier several
years later, major-league owners weren’t all that tempted to bring Paige along, even
though, at his advanced age, he could probably still win.
Finally on July 9, 1948, the Cleveland Indians’ maverick owner Bill Veeck signed
the 42-year-old Paige. When he made his first big-league appearance, relieving Bob
Lemon in the fifth inning of a game Cleveland trailed the St. Louis Browns, 4-1, all
of baseball was watching to see how the legend would fare. Paige threw two scoreless
innings.
He made his first start a month later and the Indians drew 72,000 to watch him
pitch a night game against the Washington Senators. He won, 4-3.
Some baseball folks still talk about a game that Paige pitched on August 6, 1952,
when he was at least 46 years old. For 12 innings, the ageless Paige shut the Detroit Tigers out, finally winning the 0-0 game in the bottom of the 12th. He won 12 games
that season.
But he retired after the 1953 season with a 3-9 record. But 3-9 for the Browns,
that might have been the equivalent of a 15-win season for some teams. Even that
year, when Paige maybe was 49 years old, he had his moments. In June, the sad
Browns, losers of 14 straight, stumbled into New York to face the Yankees, who were
riding an 18-game win streak.
With Duane Pichette inexplicably pitching superbly one Wednesday afternoon,
holding a 3-1 lead into the eighth, Browns’ skipper Marty Marion had a hunch to
bring in ol’ Satchel to try to close it out.
A New York AP sportswriter caught the moment perfectly.
“A lone figure disentangled itself from the little group out there, stepped over
the low fence and headed for the mound. It wasn’t exactly a march, although there
was a certain dignity in the shuffling advance.
“His pants legs dangled almost to his ankles, his shirt hung on his bony
shoulders like tired bunting the day after a celebration. Old Satch never was much
for sartorial splendor on a ballfield.
“He took his warm-up pitches, then stood back and rubbed his hands with the
rosin bag. You could almost hear his mind ticking, as if he was thinking ‘Well, so you
want a little action, hey boys?’”
Paige was magical. He got Joe Collins and Irv Noren to pop out to end the eighth,
then in the ninth, got Mickey Mantle to hit a foul, trying to bunt a third strike (“Why for that boy to try that?” was Satch’s quote the next day), induced Yogi Berra to pop
out, gave up a single to Gene Woodling, then retired Gil McDougald on a pop-up to
preserve the Browns win.
Magically, it all came back for Satchel one last time this night 12 years later. Leading off the game, Boston outfielder Jim Gosger popped Paige’s pitch up into foul territory. One out.
Next was another young lefty, Dalton Jones. He topped a slow roller to first baseman Santiago Rosario, who bobbled it. Next up was Boston’s talented Carl Yastrzemski, twice an American League batting champion. Paige’s next pitch was in the dirt, scooting past catcher Bill Bryan, letting Jones go to second. When Paige’s second pitch was also in the dirt, Jones lit out for third. Bryan threw him out. Two down. When the next pitch missed, Paige was behind in the count, 3-0, an unusual predicament for a guy whose control was so extraordinary, he convinced Cleveland Indians’ owner Bill Veeck to sign him by throwing five straight pitches over the stub of Veeck’s ground-out cigarette.
Paige fired a fastball on the outside corner and Yastrzemski swung and bounced it off the left-field wall. It was the last hit off the great Negro League legend. It also prompted much teasing in the Yastrzemski house. Yaz’s dad, Carl Sr., had also gotten a hit off the great Paige, except he did it about 20 years earlier. Carl Sr. hit a triple.
Paige got 20-year-old Tony Conigliaro, who led the league in home runs that
year, to end the inning. The Red Sox scoring threat had passed. Before the night was out, Paige faced six more hitters— Lee Thomas, Felix Mantilla, Ed Bressoud, Mike Ryan, Boston’s pitcher Bill Monbouquette—and got ’em all.
When he himself came to bat, the whole Municipal Stadium crowd rose and cheered him. Cheered him even louder when he struck out. And when A’s manager Haywood Sullivan sent out Diego Segui to relieve Paige to begin the fourth inning, the cheers grew the loudest of all.
As Satchel went into the clubhouse to change, the fans in Municipal Stadium were urged to light matches in tribute and by the time Satchel came out of the locker room to the dugout in his regular clothes, the stadium lights had been turned down and as thousands began to sing, “The ol’ grey mare she ain’t what she used to be.” One of the greatest careers in the game was over. A little later than usual. Better late than never. In the clubhouse afterwards, Paige sat in his long A’s underwear and chatted with the newspapermen. It had been a cool night but Paige said he handled it okay.
“Naw, the cold was nothing,” he told the Kansas City Star. “It ain’t like it is when you’re sitting around. When I got goin’ I got hot, and there was nothing on my mind but baseball.”
It didn’t sound as if Paige planned on just sitting around.
“Everybody doubted me on the ballclub,” he said. “They’ll have more confidence
in me now. Before, they only took my word for it. Don’t forget, I ain’t been up in this league for 15 years (actually, it was 12 years.) Now I’ll stay in shape because they know what I can do.”
Satchel Paige never did come back to pitch. But don’t think it was because he couldn’t. One of the greatest careers in the game was finally over. Better late, much better late, than never.
