This year marks the 100th Anniversary of the Negro Baseball League, the alternate sports universe created out of necessity for athletes excluded from major league baseball during the depths of the Jim Crow caste system. Both the athletes and America lost out due to the illogic of caste.
LeRoy “Satchel” Paige was one of the greatest baseball pitchers ever to step onto a mound. Here was a man who threw so hard and so fast that “catchers had to cushion their gloves with beefsteak so that their hands wouldn’t be burning after the game,” his biographer Larry Tye told National Public Radio. The beloved Yankee center fielder Joe DiMaggio, who went to bat against Paige at exhibition games before Paige was hired to the majors, called him the best pitcher he had ever faced.
But Paige didn’t get the chance to make the most of his gifts. He came of age in the 1920s and thus spent most of his career playing on Negro League teams that were every bit as talented but did not have the resources and infrastructure of the all-white majors.
Though he was one of the greatest pitchers the sport has ever known, the limits of caste reduced him at one point to picking up spare change by pitching batting practice for white players in the minor leagues. By the time the majors opened up to African-Americans in 1946, when Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Satchel Paige was already forty and considered too old for the game.
Then, in 1948, the Cleveland Indians were in the midst of a tight pennant race. The owner, Bill Veeck, thought Paige might put them over the top and signed him up as a free agent.
At forty-two, Paige became the oldest rookie in major league baseball. He pitched a 5-0 shutout for Cleveland over the Chicago White Sox, helping Cleveland make it to the playoffs, and ultimately to the World Series, just as the team owner had hoped.
Paige would never be able to make up for what had been deprived him. And audiences and the sport were deprived, too, of his gifts under the shadow of caste.
For more on Satchel Paige and the effects of caste, please read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. https://www.amazon.com/Caste…/dp/0593230256/ref=sr_1_2…
For more information on the Negro Leagues:
— Negro League Baseball Museum, https://nlbm.com/
— https://www.npr.org/…/bob-kendrick-president-of-the…
— https://www.mlb.com/history/negro-leagues/history