Bob Feller and Satchel Paige

Feller, The Heater from Van Meter, was Iowa’s favorite son then and always. He was the real-life Roy Hobbs, the farm boy baseball prodigy played by Robert Redford in The Natural. Feller’s dream was to be the most overpowering pitcher the Majors had ever produced, and he may have been. He was the winningest pitcher in the history of the Cleveland Indians. He pitched three no-hitters, and led the league in strikeouts for seven seasons and in wins for six. At age seventeen he fanned seventeen Philadelphia Athletics, an American League record that he would break two years later. Feller also wanted to be the richest player ever and came even closer there, in part by organizing a series of barnstorming exhibitions that played to enormous crowds. His granddaddy tour came in 1946.

Feller dreamed up the idea during his long days and nights manning anti-aircraft guns on the USS Alabama during World War II. He knew that getting other Major Leaguers to join him would be easy given how desperate most were to supplement their meager salaries, and he signed up the best.

Feller chartered DC-3 planes to ferry the cream of the Major League players to the thirty-four games he set up across the U.S. He hired a doctor, a trainer, a lawyer, a secretary, a publicity man, and an advance man, then booked ballparks and hotels. He bought insurance in case the planes crashed and the players died. Feller was a meticulous man and personally saw to everything that mattered. The only thing missing was the right opponent, one talented enough to give Feller’s big leaguers true competition and gritty enough to give fans their money’s worth.

Only one man could deliver on that tall order. Feller had been an immature sixteen, Satchel a ripe twenty-nine, when the two faced off for the first time a decade before in an exhibition game in Des Moines. The teenager took mental notes. He also saw how successful the first round of interracial barnstorming was in the 1930s, when Dizzy Dean captained the Caucasians and Satchel was major domo of the African American crew. By the time Feller was contemplating his own barnstorming tour in the mid-1940s, Dizzy was past his prime but Satchel, four years Dean’s junior, could still pack a stadium and pitch with impact. Feller knew the Negro Leagues were the only source of players on a par with his Major League stars. He turned to Satchel as the sole Negro Leaguer with the savvy and showmanship to match his.

Feller and Paige were an unlikely twosome. Rapid Robert was as stiff and awkward as Satchel was playful and charming. Feller came of age in the Iowa cornfields, Satchel in Jim Crow Alabama. One was the feel-great story of an American hero making good on a Major League diamond, then enlisting in the Navy and earning six battle citations. The other was an American tragedy of an athlete who served his country in ways it would acknowledge only belatedly and had played his baseball in the shadows of the Negro Leagues. Yet both were motivated by money, in pursuit of which they formed an improbable alliance and even a friendship. And while both were racial moderates at best, the games they organized substantially advanced the integration of America’s pastime and America itself.

With help from J.L. Wilkinson and Tom Baird, Satchel assembled a team that was the black analog to Feller’s. The pitching staff included Monarchs’ ace Hilton Smith and Dan Bankhead of the Memphis Red Sox, who would become the first African American to pitch in the Majors. Batting titlist Buck O’Neil was at first, and playing third was Howard Easterling, who batted .321 for the season despite entering it late after returning from three years of war duty in the Pacific. It was, as Feller’s press release claimed, a “Who’s Who in Negro Baseball.” As for Satchel, the release called him “the old wizard of colored baseball . . . whose name is legendary on two continents.”

Black or white, most players signed up for the greenbacks – $3,500 for a month’s work, which was twice what most black players earned for a whole season and about half the annual salary for the average Major Leaguer. What made this series different from other inter-racial competitions was the national spotlight. Never had so many fans or journalists been on hand to weigh the barnstormers’ relative merits. “The whole trip was because of racial rivalry,” says Feller. “We knew that was what would happen and we knew that would draw very well.”

Draw they did, with the tour attracting 250,000 fans. Satchel’s team got off to a strong start, taking the first game 3-1 in Pittsburgh. Feller’s club came back in a doubleheader the next day, with an 11-2 shellacking of the Paige All-Stars in Youngstown and a 5-0 shutout in Cleveland. Games bounced back and forth from there as the teams moved around the country, from Pennsylvania to Ohio and Illinois, New York back to Ohio, Virginia, Kansas and Missouri, and finally to California. Along the way there were brilliant touches of showmanship, as in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where Chicago White Sox catcher Frankie Hayes drew a walk off Satchel. Hayes took a three-foot lead off the bag, then fell asleep. Literally. “Old Sachmo’ disdained the orthodox procedure of snapping a throw to First Baseman Buck O’Neil,” the Council Bluffs paper reported. “Instead he ran over in person and was standing squarely on the sack with the ball when Hayes finally woke up. The Sox catcher was an easy victim.”

The Paige-Feller pitch-off is more difficult to weigh since neither threw more than five innings a game and they generally went just two or three. But in fifty-four frames against Satchel’s team, Feller gave up fifteen runs, for an average of 2.50 per game. Satchel pitched forty-two innings, allowing eighteen runs, or 3.86 per game. Feller recorded slightly more strikeouts and fewer walks per nine innings. The verdict was clear: Satchel pitched well, Feller pitched better. The bad cold Satchel suffered for part of the tour might have played a role. The Major League batters he faced were, as a group, better than his Negro League teammates, and as Feller said, “they all bore down to see what they could do against such a fabled figure as Satchel Paige.” Yet in the end the gap was mainly a matter of age: Feller, at twenty-eight, was in his prime, having just completed the strongest of his eighteen seasons in the Majors. Satchel, holding his own at an incredible forty years old, was trying to prove he was as good as ever but instead confirmed he was not quite. His games against Feller looked more like a father-son rivalry than an encounter between peers.

In his memoirs, Satchel preferred to focus on his competition with Feller the next year, 1947, when there were fewer games and he fared much better. Feller over the years bared both sides of his personality – the prickly and the charming – in evaluating Satchel and his black all-stars. He took the low road to start, when The Sporting News in 1946 asked whether any of his colored opponents were big league material. “Haven’t seen one – not one,” said Feller. “Maybe Paige when he was young. When you name him you’re done. Some are good hitters. Some can field pretty good. Most of them are fast. But I have seen none who combine the qualities of a big league ball player . . . Not even Jackie Robinson.”

After being slammed then and later for alleged racism, Feller’s tone changed, at least with Satchel. He went from equivocal to gung-ho. In 1962 he made a persuasive pitch in Sports Illustrated for Satchel’s admission to the Hall of Fame. In Bob Feller’s Little Black Book of Baseball Wisdom, published in 2001, he was more effusive, saying Satchel had “perfect control” and “could spot a hitter’s weaknesses very quickly, quicker than anyone I ever knew . . . Satchel Paige was one of the top five or ten pitchers in the entire history of baseball.” In a 2006 interview Feller raised his rating, calling Satchel “one of the top five in history” and saying, “I had a great relationship with Satchel.”

Feller never pretended to be a social activist. He did not worry about where his Negro League opponents stayed or ate or where they were banished. “That was their problem,” he said. “They had their own traveling secretary . . . We had nothing to do with each other away from the ballpark.” The point was to make money. But in that process the tour gave many of the black players their first chance to ride in a plane and play to sell-out crowds of whites as well as blacks. They got to match their skills against a team not just of Major Leaguers, but the very best of whiteball. That is what mattered in the end to most of the Negro Leaguers who barnstormed with Feller, including Satchel. By showcasing their skills and those of their teammates, these two traditionalists did as much to advance the racial cause as anyone in baseball. Satchel said as much when he was inducted to the Hall of Fame, by which time he had repaired his breach with Feller and had played with him again on the barnstorming circuit and on the Cleveland Indians. Feller was proud that “the case for Satchel Paige had been made in part by what baseball people saw in his outstanding performances against my barnstorming team.” The world, Feller added, saw “that good black players could succeed against good white players.”