Product Description

He is that rare American icon who has never been captured in a biography worthy of him. Now, at last, here is the superbly researched, spellbindingly told story of athlete, showman, philosopher, and boundary breaker Leroy “Satchel” Paige.

Few reliable records or news reports survive about players in the Negro Leagues. Through dogged detective work, award-winning author and journalist Larry Tye has tracked down the truth about this majestic and enigmatic pitcher, interviewing more than two hundred Negro Leaguers and Major Leaguers, talking to family and friends who had never told their stories before, and retracing Paige’s steps across the continent. Here is the stirring account of the child born to an Alabama washerwoman with twelve young mouths to feed, the boy who earned the nickname “Satchel” from his enterprising work as a railroad porter, the young man who took up baseball on the streets and in reform school, inventing his trademark hesitation pitch while throwing bricks at rival gang members.

Tye shows Paige barnstorming across America and growing into the superstar hurler of the Negro Leagues, a marvel who set records so eye-popping they seemed like misprints, spent as much money as he made, and left tickets for “Mrs. Paige” that were picked up by a different woman at each game. In unprecedented detail, Tye reveals how Paige, hurt and angry when Jackie Robinson beat him to the Majors, emerged at the age of forty-two to help propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series. He threw his last pitch from a big-league mound at an improbable fifty-nine. (“Age is a case of mind over matter,” he said. “If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”)

More than a fascinating account of a baseball odyssey, Satchel rewrites our history of the integration of the sport, with Satchel Paige in a starring role. This is a powerful portrait of an American hero who employed a shuffling stereotype to disarm critics and racists, floated comical legends about himself–including about his own age–to deflect inquiry and remain elusive, and in the process methodically built his own myth. “Don’t look back,” he famously said. “Something might be gaining on you.” Separating the truth from the legend, Satchel is a remarkable accomplishment, as large as this larger-than-life man.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #39153 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-09
• Released on: 2009-06-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400066513
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Tye, a Boston Globe reporter and author of The Father of Spin, offers the first biography on Satchel Paige, the premier pitcher of the Negro Leagues. Having interviewed more than 200 veteran fellow players of the Negro and Major Leagues, he is able to flesh out the Satchel Paige persona. Through PaigeÖs hardscrabble years in Jim Crow Alabama to his time with the all-black Monarchs, one of the powerhouses in segregated colored ball, Tye dissects SatchelÖs mastery of pitching, his accuracy, power and velocity, and signature pitch, the sizzler. Satchel was among the peerless Negro Leaguers, who beat the white big leaguers more than 60% of the time; he struck out some of the biggest sluggers, like Ralph Kiner, Rogers Hornsby and even Joe DiMaggio, who got one hit off of Satchel and was signed by the Yankees immediately. He became one of four black athletes signed up in the late 1940s, with the Cleveland Indians, three years after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers (the two men were bitter rivals). This is the definitive biography of a black showman-athlete, and as Tye makes the case, one of the finest pitchers ever, who finally was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Stefan Fatsis In 1937, during a self-exile from organized baseball, Satchel Paige pitched in the Dominican Republic for a team backed by the megalomaniacal dictator Rafael Trujillo. The Dragones roster was stacked with Negro Leagues stars fleeing their financially strapped clubs for a Caribbean payday, including James "Cool Papa" Bell and Josh Gibson. In Paige's telling, the season came down to a single game a day or two before a presidential election. Fans filled the rickety stadium. Soldiers brandishing knives and guns lined the field. Win and the Dragones would be heroes. Lose, Paige wrote years later, and they were as good as "passed over Jordan." Paige started, pitched the entire game and won, 6-5. The American ballplayers were whisked off the island the same night, and Trujillo was reelected. It was a terrific story. The only hitch: Almost none of it was true. The game didn't determine a champion; had the Dragones lost, one more contest remained. Paige didn't pitch until there was one out in the ninth inning, and he allowed three runs. The Dragones won, but the final score was 8-6. Paige and his teammates stayed on the island at least a few more days. The presidential election wasn't for another year, and Trujillo didn't even run. The gap between myth and reality is a central theme of Larry Tye's exhaustively researched biography of Paige, the long-limbed showman with a dazzling repertoire of pitches who rose from poverty in the Jim Crow South to become one of the most charismatic players in baseball history, as well as one of the best. Tye, a former Boston Globe reporter, examines everything from Paige's birth records to his FBI file (the government considered him a threat to baseball's institutional apartheid). Tye even discovers that Paige was married to two of his three wives at the same time. But while "Satchel" is definitive, it isn't a sweeping, dramatic narrative in the vein of Richard Ben Cramer's "Joe DiMaggio," which is too bad given its subject's complex and colorful life. Paige was born Leroy Robert Page in 1906 in Mobile, Ala. His mother washed clothes for white families. His father was a layabout. Paige earned his nickname because he carried suitcases, because his feet were as big as suitcases or because he stole suitcases. At age 11, he was caught shoplifting and sent to reform school. He emerged, at 17, a product of Booker T. Washington's philosophy that social change would come through personal industry -- and as a first-rate pitcher. "Do you throw that fast consistently?" the manager of Mobile's all-black semipro team asked. "No, sir," Paige supposedly replied. "I do it all the time." It is hard today to imagine the career Paige crafted. In his 20s and 30s, he never stayed with one team more than three or four seasons. He established his success with Negro Leagues teams in Birmingham and Pittsburgh but refused to lay down roots and bolted for weeks, months or years when a better offer came for his prodigious talent and box-office personality. He claimed to have pitched in at least 2,500 games for as many as 250 teams, figures Tye deems plausible. Along the way, Paige squandered his money, alienated his bosses and embarrassed his opponents, sometimes having his fielders sit down while he struck out the opposing side. Few stayed offended for long, though, because wherever Paige went, fans and reporters, and a good story, always followed. As his Negro Leagues compatriot Buck O'Neil put it, "Satchel was a money tree for all of us." Tye adores his subject. His Paige is "skyscraping" with a "blinding" fastball that defied gravity and rose on its way to the plate, a pitcher who "never walked a batter unless he meant to, or almost never." And while Tye debunks some tales from Paige's life, he accepts others as gospel. For instance, he explains that a sportswriter composed Paige's famous rules for living ("Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you") but doesn't question other Paige-isms ("Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching"). Tye also is enamored a bit much of statistics compiled against inferior competition, like Paige's 29-2 record during a summer in Bismarck, N.D. And when writing about baseball itself, the author often lapses into period cliche: A pitcher is a "moundsman," New Yorkers are "Gothamites" and Philadelphians "Quakerites," Paige is "the suitcase sensation" and the "minstrel of the mound." The challenge in crafting a portrait of the "real" Paige is that Paige himself spent his life avoiding, and then subverting, reality. He was an egocentric loner, and his thoughts and motivations were as elastic as his pitching arm. Did Paige's shuffling gait, constant clowning, caricatured speech and itinerant selfishness make him a Stepin Fetchit or, worse, an Uncle Tom, someone who had the ability to directly confront a racist institution but refused? Or was he a subtle pioneer, a free agent decades before players would gain that right, a black star who played to the prevailing stereotype in order to soften a bigoted, white America by striking out its best hitters? Tye acknowledges the former opinion but clearly, and convincingly, sides with the latter. Until his death in 1982, Paige resented that he wasn't selected to break baseball's color barrier -- he was signed by Cleveland in 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson debuted in Brooklyn -- and that his role in tearing down that wall went unacknowledged. Paige refused to play in towns unless he and his black teammates were given food and lodging. He helped integrate semipro teams. He headlined tours against major-league all-stars. And he did speak out, not only with his arm but in the pages of newspapers, black and white alike. After Paige returned from the Dominican Republic in 1937, his name bylined a column in the Baltimore Afro-American. "The opportunities of a colored baseball player on these islands are the same or almost the same as those enjoyed by the white major league players in the States," he wrote. "That's something to think about." The shame for Satchel Paige, and America, is that it took baseball so long to do so.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics agreed that Tye's greatest challenge was to separate the truth of Paige's life from the fiction, promulgated by the shamelessly self-aggrandizing Paige himself. To this end, Tye researched Paige's life thoroughly, scrutinizing source documents from birth records to FBI files and conducting more than 200 interviews with Paige's family and friends. Tye's fondness for his subject is obvious, but that doesn't prevent him from debunking the myths surrounding Paige's life. However, a couple of critics felt that Tye was still too credulous, and others considered some of his arguments a bit tenuous. Though Tye has unearthed some eye-opening information -- for example, Paige was a bigamist -- Satchel is no racy, tell-all biography but a balanced examination of a legendary athlete and pioneer.

Customer Reviews

An Incredible "Paige" in American History
With impeccable scholarship and a meticulous understanding of American history, author Larry Tye delivers a definitive exploration of Satchel Paige in Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend (June 2009, Random House).

Delving into the myths, legend and actual facts surrounding arguably the greatest professional pitcher ever, Tye paints an incredible portrait that began on July 7, 1906, when Leroy Robert Paige was born in Mobile, Alabama, and will forever be a part of pop/sports culture, though he passed away on June 8, 1982, after battling emphysema for a number of years.

"I ain't ever had a job. I just always played baseball," says Paige, which adeptly summarizes an amazing career on the diamond at a time when the only ball was white, through the re-integration of Major League Baseball to 1968, when the Atlanta Braves took a major step to right a wrong that would have left the superstar who gave so much without a pension.

But before Paige became the iconic ace on the mound, he had early brushes with truancy, which did not destroy the care and concern from his mother, Lula Paige. Mentors like Edward Byrd, Alex Herman, Big Bill Gatewood brought him an understanding in the art of pitching. Paige went from being released from reform school (1923), to playing semi-pro ball in Mobile (1924) to signing his first pro contract in 1926.

And it was then that Paige's cunning strategy on the field, quick wit and unique charm disarmed racists and made him one of the greats in the various manifestations of the Negro Leagues and barnstorming tours with MLB (white) players. The tours with Dizzy Dean became huge draws and fueled the growing fascination of the right-hander who was already larger-than-life.

"Satchel actually had been challenging Jim Crow ever since he took his pitching on the road," writes Tye, "and he did that from the beginning. They called freelance play like that barnstorming, to distinguish it from formal league games."

Paige was the ultimate free agent, with his services being "rented out" by his team to other clubs and playing winter ball in the Caribbean. He was also accused of skipping out on contracts when better offers came his way.

Before he was the "Yankee Clipper," Joe DiMaggio - the Pacific Coast League's Most Valuable Player - proved he belonged in MLB in February 1936 after facing Paige, who was asked to pitch in the exhibition game by the New York Yankees. "DIMAGGIO ALL WE HOPED HE'D BE. HIT SATCH ONE FOR FOUR," is the post-game report from a Yankee scout to management.

Tye places particular emphasis on the 1930s, which was a decade of great triumphs and a hideously hard fall from the summit of sports. Franchise owner Neil Churchill brought Paige to Bismarck, North Dakota, in 1933 and 1935 to play on his integrated club. In one of the greatest pro games ever, more than 27,000 fans in Yankee Stadium in 1934 watched a spectacular duel between Paige and Stuart "Slim" Jones. And owner J.L. Wilkinson of the Kansas City Monarchs removed Paige from the scrap heap in 1938 and 1939 when arm woes appeared to have destroyed his career.

The 1945 re-integration of MLB by Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Paige's July 7, 1948, signing with the Cleveland Indians and stints with the St. Louis Browns and - in 1965 - Kansas City A's are packaged well with the 1971 induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum. And upon reflection in the twilight years, Paige tackled numerous issues surrounding the hateful treatment of NLB players, racism and the slights he personally felt in any number of venues.

"It happens to lots of leading men as they fade into supporting roles. Loneliness sets in, along with sadness," Tye writes. "There is more time to remember all you have achieved and to wonder why others have forgotten. There are endless hours to tally who stood by you, and who failed to. Satchel had suffered enough real indignities to keep anyone thinking for a long time."

The victories and defeats on the field of play by Paige are chronicled in four pages of pitching statistics. But what Tye proves beyond a shadow of a doubt is the biggest win of them all came when Jim Crow couldn't get the bat off its shoulder when Paige fired three blazing fastballs for called strikes.

A Bittersweet Biography of an All-time Great
Larry Tye delivers a wonderful story of the legendary Satchel Paige, perhaps the greatest pitcher of all-time, who was denied national adulation for the bulk of his professional career; toiling in relative obsurity in the Negro Leagues, before finally getting called up to the Big Leagues, with Cleveland in 1948. He was 42.

It's difficult to imagine how many games Paige might've won had he been allowed to pitch in the Major Leagues during the peak of his physical abilities, with a good or bad team. It wouldn't have mattered. Just like Steve Carlton won 27 games for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1972---an otherwise moribund team---Paige may have done as well or better. The sad reality is he never had the chance.

However, this was a man who didn't mourn his unfulfilled potential in the spotlight. His charismatic personality was infectious, and radiated a charm that made him a national icon during his brief Major League career. His "rookie" season, he won 6 out of 7 starts, with a 2.48 earned run average for the World Champion Cleveland Indians. It's doubtful they would've made it to the Series without Satchell Paige.

Perhaps even more remarkable was the year Paige put together for the old St Louis Browns (a horrible team) in 1952, when he posted a 12 and 10 record with an e.r.a. slightly over three; at the tender age of 46. Just to prove how amazing this man was, he even pitched three innings of shut-out ball for the Kansas City A's, in 1965. He was only 59. I'll never forget reading that story in the newspaper as a youngster, thinking that anyone over 40 was half-dead; but 59? I became an instant fan of this gregarious celebrity.

Throughout the rest of his life, Paige always displayed a charisma and effervesence rarely seen by anyone, in any walk of life. His stories about the Negro Leagues, with players such as Josh Gibson, Buck O'Neal, Cool Papa Bell, among others, brought them to life for me. It also reminded me of the injustice these greats had to endure because this country was too narrow-minded to accept the African American into the game, until it was too late to make a difference to Paige and other players of his era.

This book is destined for greatness; Tye brings to life a wonderful story of one of baseball's legendary athletes; who was perhaps born a quarter century too soon to achieve greater fame and glory. Hopefully, this book will educate an entire generation of baseball fans about the bittersweet life story of Satchell Paige; an American legend.

Tye Delivers A "Paige-turner" With Something For Everyone
If you ignore this book simply because you were NOT a sports lover or like me had never heard of Satchel Paige before, you are doing yourself and those around you a great disservice. SATCHEL is the result of a skillful writer who is able to take the life of someone great and give it to readers in a way that inclues something for everyone.

Who couldn't relate to a man who can from nothing, wasn't supposed to become anything and was able to build a brand name for himself that would appeal and inspire so many. That is what Satchel Paige did, and that is what his story will continue to do. I learned from this biography that success is not just what you have achieved for yourself, but what you have been able to give to others through your life.

We see a man who inspite of all of his accomplishments, was still plagued by the ghosts of his past. Who couldn't relate to that?

Kudos to Larry Tye for taking us inside the man and not just inside the sport. I think everyone who picks up this book and really digest it will be a better man or woman because of it.