Paige’s Star turns helped get baseball to integrate

In the beginning the All-Star Game was anything but.

White-Star Game would have better described it. Black baseball players, no matter their skill or grace, were blackballed from the first mid-season classic in 1933 and for thirteen seasons to follow. It was the American way of doing things during that era known as Jim Crow, when everything from public bathrooms and schools to the all-American pastime was separated into decidedly unequal racial universes.

The good news is that, from the start, the Negro Leagues had their own All-Star Game, one that often drew a bigger crowd than its white counterpart, featured a gutsier, more hellbent brand of baseball, and showcased stars like the mighty Josh Gibson, speed demon James “Cool Papa’’ Bell, and Leroy “Satchel’’ Paige, the most artful and overpowering pitcher ever to toss a baseball.

Satchel offers the perfect prism into what those games were like and how they helped pave the path to integration. Negro League fans gave him more votes than any player in the summer of 1934, the second season that Negro League owners staged what they called the East-West Classic. Satchel had been voted in the first year, although he denied it, perhaps because his margin was so thin or because he neither played nor showed up. This time he was ready. He entered the game in the sixth inning with a runner on second, none out, and 20,000 screaming fans on the edge of their seats in the double-decked grandstand of Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Satchel stranded that runner where he stood, then pitched three more scoreless innings on the way to his East team notching its first All-Star triumph. “Today’s game was more than a masterpiece! It was more than a classic!’’ wrote William G. Nunn Sr., sports editor of the black-oriented Pittsburgh Courier. “It was really and truly a diamond epic!’’

Marvin McCarthy, a white reporter with the Chicago Daily Times, was even more impressed by Satchel’s performance, and more surprised. “With measured tread an African giant crosses the line and heads for the pitcher’s box,’’ McCarthy wrote in a column titled “Black Matty,’’ for Christy Mathewson, the dominating white pitcher who won thirty or more games four times. “It’s Paige! It’s Satchel Paige and goodbye ball game’’ whisper the stands. And it is. He must stand 6 feet 6 inches in his sox. Gaunt as old Abe Lincoln. He walks with that slow Bert Williams shuffle. Maybe it takes him two minutes to cross the 50 yards to the box. He stoops to toy with the rosin bag - picks up the old apple. He mounts the bag, faces third - turns a sorrowful, but burning eye toward the plate, nods a nod that Hitler would give his eye for - turns his gaze back to the runner on second - raises two bony arms high toward the heaven, lets them sink slowly to his chest. Seconds pass like hours. The batter fidgets in his box. Suddenly that long right arm shoots back and forward like the piston on a Century engine doing 90. All you can see is something like a thin line of pipe smoke. There’s an explosion like a gun shot in the catcher’s glove. ‘Strike [one],’ howls the dusky umpire.’’

Coverage like McCarthy’s was barrier-busting for a general circulation newspaper, enough so that the column was reprinted in the Courier, one of America’s most influential black publications. White writers in cities like Chicago finally were discovering black baseball, fourteen years after Negro Leagues pioneer Rube Foster breathed life back into it. Buried in the stories were two messages: that the world would not end if Caucasians and Negroes sat together in the stands watching baseball, the way they had the last two All-Star games at Comiskey Park, and that there were first-rate ballplayers among those Negro Leaguers, especially the skyscraping Satchel Paige.

The East-West All-Star Game was the biggest Negro sporting event of the year, and Satchel pitched in four more. He won one (1943), lost one (1942), and had no role in the decision for the other two (1936 and 1941). Win, lose, or draw, Satchel was blackball’s most marketable commodity, and his presence at those East-West games helps explain why they drew crowds larger than the Major League All-Star game seven times between 1938 and 1948. “We want Satch,’’ fans would yell until the manager sent him to the mound. After one such contest, a black scribe credited Paige with turning out “more Negroes . . . than Lincoln freed.’’

Contests like those helped convince Major League owners not just how great the best of black ballplayers were, but how they could help fill Major League stadiums. That knowledge would fuel the toppling of the color bar and, by the early 1950s, the death of the Negro Leagues and their proud East-West competition. Satchel was not the first black to be signed to the Majors, although he understandably felt he should have been. But he proved he still had enough fire in his belly and sting to his pitch that the Cleveland Indians signed him to his first Major League contract on July 7, 1948, his 42nd birthday.

Five years later, playing for the St. Louis Browns, Satchel was named to his first Major League All-Star team and his seventh overall. He was picked by Casey Stengel of the Yankees, who had been known over the years to point to Satchel warming up in the bullpen and warn his players, “Get the runs now! Father Time is coming!’’ He had designated Satchel an All-Star in 1952, when he earned it, but the pitcher never made it into that rain-shortened game. So the New York managing wizard had him back the next year, the way he said he would. Fans knew they were watching history, with 47-year-old Satchel the oldest ever to pitch in the Midsummer Classic, and they loved bearing witness even as he yielded three hits and two runs in a single inning.