Post by canefan on Sept 20, 2015 18:55:56 GMT -5
Incredible story. I would love to have seen him pitch
Fifty years ago, Satchel Paige pitched his last big-league game in KC ... at age 59
The account of Satchel Paige’s three-inning outing against the Red Sox in The Kansas City Star. The spectacle of Satchel Paige’s final stint with a major-league team included a nurse tending to him while he sat in a rocking chair. This photo was taken two days before Paige pitched his final game for the Kansas City A’s. In his last major-league pitching appearance, Satchel Paige retired nine of 10 Boston batters for the Kansas City Athletics on Sept. 25, 1965 at Municipal Stadium. He was relieved by Diego Segui (left) and was cheered by 9,289 fans after manager Haywood Sullivan made the pitching change. Satchel Paige was at least 59 years old when the threw three scoreless innings against the Boston Red Sox for the Kansas City A’s in 1965. He needed just 28 pitches Hall of Famer Hank Aaron visited the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in 1999 and stood next to a statue of Satchel Paige, who supposedly struck out Aaron in a minor-league game in 1973, when Paige would have been in his 60s. Satchel Paige pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues before he was signed by the Cleveland Indians in 1948, at the age of 42. Satchel Paige pitched 14 seasons for the Kansas City Monarchs between 1935 and 1955. In 1948, he became the oldest rookie in the major leagues at 42 when the Cleveland Indians signed him. Paige was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971. The account of Satchel Paige’s three-inning outing against the Red Sox in The Kansas City Star. The spectacle of Satchel Paige’s final stint with a major-league team included a nurse tending to him while he sat in a rocking chair. This photo was taken two days before Paige pitched his final game for the Kansas City A’s.
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The spectacle of Satchel Paige’s final stint with a major-league team included a nurse tending to him while he sat in a rocking chair. This photo was taken two days before Paige pitched his final game for the Kansas City A’s. WPS Associated Press
If you stand at 22nd and Brooklyn and look northwest, toward downtown, you can use your imagination and feel that old stadium. They built it into the ground. Dug out mounds of earth to make room for the field where some of the country’s greatest athletes played — Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, George Blanda and Mean Joe Greene.
Yes, Municipal Stadium had some moments. When the old place was finally abandoned — first when the A’s left for Oakland, then as the Royals and Chiefs moved to the Truman Sports Complex — they ripped down the structure and buried the field. It’s an open park now, with a cluster of homes where right field used to be.
Some believe that if you dug up the rocks and mud here you could find old stadium bones. The skeleton of a playground for so many legends. Josh Gibson. Fred Biletnikoff. Hank Aaron. Some believe you could find those old memories, buried underneath.
Maybe that’s where the rocking chair is. Those old enough to remember always smile when you mention the rocking chair. How could they forget?
This was 50 years ago next week — Sept. 25, 1965. One of the greatest nights that old stadium ever saw. Certainly the best moment the Athletics had here before moving, though admittedly, that’s a low bar.
The story sounds made up now, impossible, like some myth passed down from grandfather to father to son, exaggerated with each telling. That makes it the perfect Satchel Paige story. This one happens to be verifiably true.
Paige, then at least 59 years old, threw three scoreless innings against the Red Sox. He needed just 28 pitches. The hit was by Carl Yastrzemski, the Hall of Famer, then 26 years old. In his prime. Paige had pitched against Yaz’s father, a generation before, but now he was the oldest man to ever appear in a major-league game by a fair margin. Heck, Paige was the oldest man in the majors when he debuted 17 years earlier.
This was another publicity stunt by A’s owner Charlie Finley. By 1965, Paige was more than a star. He was a legend. He’d pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues — and for anyone who would pay him in the offseason — before finally debuting with the Cleveland Indians in 1948. He was the first Negro Leagues player inducted to the Hall of Fame, in 1971.
Yes, Paige was famous. Finley had a hunch Paige might still be able to pitch in 1965, but he was dead certain he’d draw a crowd.
Finley’s plan with Paige worked, and not just by quadrupling the attendance from the day before. As it turned out, the old man still had it. Paige retired nine of the 10 batters he faced on a team that finished second in the league in hitting. Fifty-nine years old. That’s older than 21 current big-league managers, plus the commissioner.
“I’ll never forget being at that game,” says Royals Hall of Famer Frank White, then 15.
“He threw slow, then he threw slower, and he just kept getting outs,” says Billy Bryan, the A’s catcher that day.
“I was there in the bleachers and I’m quite sure that had something to do with me wanting to be a baseball player,” says Rick Sutcliffe, the former Cy Young winner.
“Absolutely incredible,” says John Thorn, baseball’s official historian. “No precedent for it.”
You probably have heard some of the stories. Satchel Paige is like something straight out of mythology. Part Nolan Ryan, part Elvis, part Zeus. The stories are legend.
How he guaranteed to strike out the first nine batters he faced, or your money back, and would have his outfielders sit down just to prove the point. He said he won 104 of 105 starts in stadiums across the hemisphere in 1934, and nobody who saw him pitch would challenge the claim.
Joe DiMaggio said Paige was the best pitcher he ever faced, and the fastest. Dizzy Dean said his own fastball “looks like a change of pace alongside that pistol bullet old Satch shoots up to the plate.”
Once, Paige pitched for the Dominican Republic dictator’s team in a series where the outcome would decide an election. Heavily armed spectators watched. Paige planned for police to ferry him and his American teammates back home after winning. Nobody talked about what would happen if they lost.
These stories are how Paige’s greatness has to be measured. He could’ve been the first player to break baseball’s color barrier. Even by 1946, closing in on 40 (more on his age in a minute), he was among the sport’s best pitchers. Instead, Paige is a different sort of pioneer.
He was baseball’s greatest showman, and the sport’s first beloved black star. More than 70,000 people showed up to his first start in Cleveland, on a Tuesday night. More than 78,000 came to his second start.
So much of baseball’s history is told through cold numbers. Paige’s is told through stories, many of them by now embellished, others true but so incredible they sound made up.
“How many wins did he have, how many starts, does it really matter?” Thorn says. “We don’t ask how many bears Davy Crockett really killed.”
Paige was more than a entertainer, though. Strip away the nine-strikeouts-or-your-money-back guarantees, forget the different names he had for his pitches — the trouble ball, the midnight crawler, the two-hop humper, the bat dodger and the be-ball, among many others — and Paige is one of baseball’s most prolific, ruthless and successful pitchers.
He was so dominant that a generation — heck, two generations, probably — of baseball players often say their favorite moment in the sport was playing with Paige, or getting a hit off Paige, sometimes even striking out against Paige.
He had a dominating fastball, stunning in its speed and unfair in its location. He combined it with a terrific change-up and a workable curveball for most of his years, though he was said to have experimented with a screwball and knuckleball as well.
It has been said that Paige threw more pitches in more stadiums in front of more people and in more years than anyone in professional baseball history. The New York Times Book of Sports Legends estimated that he performed in front of crowds of more than 10 million people, only a small portion of that in the major leagues.
Part of Paige’s legend is in his age. Nobody really knew how old he was, himself included.
He had different answers when he was asked at different times. Back then, it was common to keep birth records on the back page of the family Bible. Well, once, Paige said a goat ate the Bible. Sometimes, he would answer with a question: how old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are? Sometimes, he would say that age is a case of mind over matter.
“If you don’t mind,” he would say, “it don’t matter.”
Officially, Paige listed his birthday as July 7, 1906, though many ballplayers at the time lied about their age to help their careers. Maybe it was just a coincidence — wink, wink — that Paige’s claimed birthday was the same as one of his best friends, Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe. Many thought Paige was at least five years older than he claimed, maybe 10.
So when Finley announced that Paige would pitch in a big-league game in 1965, it was hard not to see it as just another publicity stunt. Finley loved gimmicks. Once, he took a mule on the road, even walking the animal into the team hotels.
The A’s were a miserable team, last in the standings and attendance. Two days before Paige pitched, they drew 690 fans. For the season, they barely cracked a half million fans. Finley was desperate for money, desperate for attention, and Hal Lebovitz of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that Finley was treating Paige “like a sideshow freak.”
“We were just hoping he didn’t get his brains beat in,” White says now.
Even by the standards of professional athletes, Paige had an enormous amount of confidence. That was true in the 1920s, when he told batters what pitches he was about to strike them out with, and it was true in 1965 when Finley asked if he could pitch three innings.
“That depends,” Paige said. “How many times a day?”
The A’s made a big production out of Paige’s appearance. They invited former stars of the Blues and Monarchs for a luncheon and a three-inning exhibition before what was billed as Satchel Paige Night. Buck O’Neil was there. Hilton Smith, too, and Cool Papa Bell and Bullet Rogan and many others.
Paige sat by himself before the game and between innings in that old wooden rocking chair. A hired nurse rubbed his arm with ointment, and a personal water boy brought him refreshments. Paige was in on the joke. The A’s dugout was below the field level, so sitting on the rocking chair was fine because, “at my age, I’m close enough to being below ground level as it is.”
By then, Paige didn’t have much on his fastball, of course. After the game, Mike Ryan told The Kansas City Star the ball he swung at “looked like a balloon.” Paige kept getting outs, though. The first batter he faced popped up, and the second reached on an error before being picked off.
Paige’s best weapon was what everyone called his hesitation pitch, where he paused his delivery after planting his left foot, sacrificing velocity for timing. But he fell behind to Yastrzemski 3-0, and gave up a double off the left-field wall. That brought up Tony Conigliaro, who led the league in homers that year, but Paige gave him that cartoon delivery and got another pop-up.
The crowd stood and waved and screamed as Paige walked off the mound.
“You didn’t want to be embarrassed by an old man,” says Eddie Bressoud, who played shortstop for the Red Sox that day and flew out to right field against Paige. “It’s like, ‘What is this guy, 60 years old and he’s going to get me out?’ I think everybody felt that way. So were we embarrassed? Yeah, I think so.”
Paige needed just six pitches in the second inning, and eight in the third. Other than Yastrzemski’s rope off the wall, nobody made solid contact. Bill Monbouquette, Boston’s pitcher that day, struck out.
The plan all along was for Paige to pitch only three innings, but he walked out to warm up before the fourth. After a few moments, A’s manager Haywood Sullivan came out to get him, allowing the crowd one more time to cheer. They sang “The Old Gray Mare” as Paige walked off the mound.
“If I tell you the truth, I never expected to see what I saw that day,” says Diego Segui, who would come in to relieve Paige. “I never expected to see what I saw, for real. You don’t think a guy that age, he’s got all this gray hair, and he’s getting everybody out? You don’t expect that.”
Paige left the game with the lead, but the A’s, perhaps fittingly, ended up losing. They lost 103 times that year, and finished 43 games out of first place.
After he pitched that day, all the reporters wanted to know what it felt like. Fifty-nine years old! Amazing! Paige seemed to be the only one not impressed.
“It was no big deal for me to come back up here, because I had no business being out,” he said. “Now folks can see that I must have had a lot more going for me, and I deserved to be in the big leagues when I was in my prime.”
There was talk of Paige coming back the next year. He told reporters he would like that, but referenced other commitments. Finley did not, apparently, offer him a contract. Neither did any other owner.
Paige still pitched for years, well into the 1970s. Some of it was at showcase events, some of it on barnstorming tours. The Braves gave him a contract as “an assistant trainer” so he could qualify for his pension, and it is said that he pitched against Hank Aaron in a minor-league game.
Even if we take Paige at his word about his age, he would’ve been in his mid-to-late 60s. Aaron was nearing the end of his career, but still hit 40 homers in 1973.
They say the old man got Aaron that day. Twice.
George Toma can close his eyes and picture that day. Toma was 36 then, the groundskeeper at Municipal Stadium. Paige was a legend, already, and that was especially so in Kansas City, where the stories about the old Monarchs were told the loudest.
Toma’s shop was in center field, and every day that Paige was with the A’s, part of Toma’s routine was to walk that old rocking chair over to the home dugout. He remembers it as a natural wood color, with slats on the bottom.
Toma has lived a heck of a life. He’s been the groundskeeper at every Super Bowl, worked for Ewing Kauffman and Lamar Hunt and consulted for teams across the country. That’s a lot of memories, but through 75 years around sports, he says watching Paige pitch that day a half century ago remains one of his biggest thrills.
There aren’t many regrets in a life like that.
Thinking back on that day reminds Toma of one, though.
“I wish now I’d have kept that rocking chair,” he says. “If you ever hear of where that might be, you let me know.”
Read more here: www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mellinger/article35763006.html#storylink=cpy
