Satchel Paige , 2021
watercolor
not for sale

Leroy Robert "Satchel" Paige
Born: July 7, 1906, Mobile, AL
Died: June 8, 1982, Kansas City, MO

Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige is one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history. He came from humble roots as the son of a gardener and a washer woman. Paige was the seventh of twelve children. His father did work regularly, and his mother’s earnings were meager, so Paige and his siblings had to work from an early age. He got the nickname “Satchel” while he was working as a baggage carrier in Mobile, Alabama as a young boy. When Paige was 12 years old, he was remanded to the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law Breakers for shoplifting. It was at the school that he came to hone his baseball skills. The school’s coach, Edward Byrd, told Paige that when he pitched, he should kick his foot up high to essentially blackout the sky and leave the batter unsettled. Paige would take the lessons he learned at the school into adulthood. He was a showman and his way of strolling to the mound would be become as legendary as his windmill windups. It is said that Paige’s fastball was so fierce that members of opposing teams would sometimes call in sick rather than to face him. He gave his pitches names like “Midnight Creeper” and “Hesitation Pitch”. Batters who faced the “Hesitation Pitch” would be fooled into swinging early when Paige paused in mid-delivery. Paige played with a number of teams, often barnstorming across the United States. He also played in Canada, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. In 1933 and 1935, he lived in Bismarck, North Dakota and played on an integrated team. Some of the Negro Leagues teams he played for included the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Baltimore Black Sox, the Birmingham Black Barons and the Kansas City Monarchs. From 1940 to 1946, Paige won four Negro American League pennants with the Kansas City Monarchs. In 1948, at the age of 42, he signed with the Cleveland Indians and joined the major leagues. In that same year, he helped the Cleveland Indians to win the World Series. Later, in 1965, Paige would become the oldest pitcher to play a game in the major leagues when he pitched for the Kansas City Athletics at age 59. A little-known fact about Paige is that he once made a cameo appearance in a 1959 film called “The Wonderful Country”. Today, the Satchel Paige Foundation carries on his legacy, and he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971.

Sources: The Society for American Baseball Research, Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, National Baseball Hall of Fame, Major League Baseball, Encyclopedia Britannica, Library of Congress, National Public Radio, and the Satchel Paige Foundation were the primary research sources for the biographical information contained in this exhibition label.

Exhibited by:

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