Sport: Satchelfoots

• Share

Last week large, dark Leroy ("Satchelfoots") Paige went home to his native Mobile for a day of triumph. Satchelfoots owes his nickname (optionally shortened to either "Satchel" or "Foots") to his size 12 shoes. He stands 6 ft. 3½ in. high, weighs 186 lb., and is regarded by colored baseball fans and many white sportswriters as the greatest Negro pitcher of all time, as one of the greatest pitchers of any hue in baseball history.

Satchel has blinding speed, marvelous control, and, unlike most white flingers, he is a prodigious hitter. His team is the Travelers, a roving division of the Kansas City Monarchs which, like the white and bearded House of David baseballers, barnstorms, taking on all comers. Last week Monarch's Travelers played the Mobile Black Shippers. Satchel unlimbered his fearful right arm, planted his size 12's on the mound, blazed away for three innings. He faced only eleven batters, pitched only nine balls, fanned four, yielded one measly scratch hit. It was a typical Paige show and the dusky customers loved it. His team won easily, 14-to-5.

Apparently Satchel got strong by shouldering 200-lb. blocks of ice. Last week his old ice-wagon employer recalled his prodigious appetite: "That boy et mo' than the bosses." Satchel was born 31 years ago on Mobile's South Side. The boy played on the sandlots, then with a semi-pro outfit, then with the Chattanooga Black Lookouts. Up in the big time, he was the ace of the Pittsburgh Crawfords for seven years. The famed Homestead (Pa.) Grays snatched him up, and he found himself riding high on $250 a game, averaging one game a week. Last year he went to the Monarchs, where he works on percentage.

Satchel's feats are legion. In 1933 he stretched a winning streak to 21 games, pitched 62 consecutive scoreless innings. In 1936 he pitched five nine-inning games in one week, yielded three runs. In 1937 he hit .408 (lifetime average: .362). Last year he won 54 games, lost five.

Once, in Savannah, when a base hit and an error put two men on base, he got a ribbing. He countered by grandiosely calling in his outfielders, then striking out the next three men.*

The New York Yankees' great Outfielder Joe Di Maggio, after facing Satchel in exhibition games, declared the Negro had more speed than anybody. The garrulous, once-great Dizzy Dean allowed that Satchel was plenty fast, but had no curve worth mentioning. When Diz batted against Satchel, the black pitcher struck him out with three consecutive curves.

Colored baseball in the U. S. is organized into two major leagues. Some teams operate in the same towns as the white majors (New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington, Philadelphia), others in smaller towns (e.g., Birmingham, Jacksonville, Baltimore). There are besides, innumerable unaffiliated small-town teams, mostly barnstormers. Some Negroes play with white semi-pro teams. But no Negro plays in the white major leagues.