1930s Pittsburgh, Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige

Gus Greenlee, owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords and a notorious racketeer, sought rectitude on a baseball diamond. He had played ball growing up in the South, and in Pittsburgh he had heard about the ragtag collection of black and white teenagers gathering under the banner of the Crawfords, a name taken from a bath house on The Hill. Through the 1920s the team had lost its white players and its hardscrabble feel, and by 1929 it was attracting top athletes from across the city. There was a smart catcher named Wyatt Turner, a great ground-ball man in Harold Tinker, and Josh Gibson, a young steelworker who could hit the ball farther than anyone had ever seen in Pittsburgh and perhaps all of America.

Between 1910 and 1930, Pittsburgh had changed in ways that boded well for its African American community, Negro League baseball, and Greenlee’s storied Pittsburgh Crawfords. Southern blacks streamed into the city between 1910 and 1930, filling jobs in the mines and mills and doubling the size of its Negro population. Athletics was a unifying force in black Pittsburgh, with young and old gathering at segregated gyms, swimming pools, and, most popular of all, sandlot baseball diamonds. By the early 1930s Pittsburgh was to America’s black sports scene what Harlem was to its literary and arts life. The timing could not have been better for Gus. Fans and the press were drawn to his Crawfords in a way that was unusual for a semi-pro squad, with upwards of 6,000 turning out for games. All the team lacked was money, a gap that Greenlee, master self-promoter and sports fan, gladly filled with the roll of bills he carried in his pocket.

At first it seemed like Christmas to the young men of the Crawfords. A rich owner who not only agreed to their pleas that he purchase the team but also insisted on paying players their first salaries. Next he bought two Lincoln Town Cars to ensure they traveled in style, to be followed by a custom-built Mack bus with “Pittsburgh Crawford Baseball Club Inc.” stenciled along the side. And he began building a stadium worthy of the team’s talents and potential profitability. His other ambitions for the team were less noble, but no need for anyone to know now. Crawfords’ uniforms had just enough room on the back to carry a pitch for Gus’s favorite politician, state Senator James Coyne, and the stream of clean cash from fans was ideal for laundering his winnings from the rackets. What neither he nor his players sensed was that before long, the ballclub would capture this gangster’s heart and pay him back in ways he never imagined.

The 1931 season was nearly over by the time Satchel arrived in Pittsburgh in August, but there would be more celebrating the next season. The Great Depression was in full fury, with one in four Americans out of work. Ballpark receipts were off so much for Cum Posey that just meeting payroll was onerous. A perfect time, Gus reasoned, to give his cross town rivals, the Homestead Grays a taste of the medicine they had been dispensing. Gus’s finances had fared better – booze and bets often are the last things people give up in a withering economy, although he swore he was out of the numbers racket. Whatever the source of his winnings, he used them to seduce the Grays’ finest players and build the most expensive payroll blackball had seen. Greenlee raided Negro Leagues teams for top players. He went beneath the muscle to the heart of the Grays, raiding them of Double Duty Radcliffe, Oscar Charleston, and Josh Gibson, the pride of the lineup. The Crawfords now had it all: sluggers, speedballers, an infield that rarely let anything through to the outfield, and outfielders who Satchel said were sure and swift enough to catch raindrops. As good as the 1931 Grays were, the 1932 Crawfords – with five players destined for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown – made an even more compelling case as the Negro Leagues’ best ever. Satchel claimed it was the best period, white or Negro.

The Crawfords’ owner gave the public and press a two-fer – Josh and Satch – billing them as the “greatest battery in history” and guaranteeing that Gibson would hit two home runs while Satchel would strike out the first nine men. The dynamic duo delivered everywhere from Pennsylvania coal towns to Midwestern farm country. In return Gus helped make Satchel the highest-paid black baseball player in America, with Josh a distant second.

And Satchel filled the stands for every game the Crawfords played, home and away, swelling ticket sales to 200,000 a season. Out-of-town reporters came, mainly to see Satchel but taking in the whole field and team. White America had Babe Ruth’s rags-to-riches story to help it through the Depression; blacks had Satchel Paige. It was Satchel, not Josh, who made fans laugh as well as gasp and kept them coming to Major League stadiums for Negro League games during those hardest of times. He was an economic savior for the Crawfords and other teams in 1932 when, for the first time since 1920, no major Negro League was operating.

Josh Gibson, the other man in Satchel’s orbit those years, was even more of a behemoth than Gus Greenlee. History binds Josh and Satchel at the hip as the two towering figures of the Negro Leagues, but nature left them as mismatched as yin and yang. Josh was a hitter who mashed pitchers, Satchel a pitcher who undid batters. Josh’s power emanated from his huge arms and torso, Satchel’s from his stringbean legs. The differences, however, went deeper. Josh steered clear of the limelight. Satchel lived in and monopolized it. Josh was eaten up by the limits of his ravaged knees and his Jim Crow world, consoling himself with booze that had been legalized and opiates that had not. Satchel learned to cope and triumph. Josh was a player’s player with a bench full of friends. Satchel played to the crowd, which made his teammates admire more than love him.

Yet Satchel’s best friend on the team was Josh. It was not a relationship of equals: Satchel was the senior partner in the minds of everyone from Gus Greenlee to the media and fans. It was not a mutual admiration society, either. Josh was closer to other teammates and oftentimes felt ambivalent about Satchel, who befriended few others. It was not even the special bond often forged between pitcher and catcher, since Cy Perkins, not Josh, was Satchel’s preferred battery mate. But Satch and Josh spent endless time together, sometimes as roommates, with the Crawfords, on small-town teams, and in winter ball. They were like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, opposites who fed off and relied on one another. Their trash-talking reflected the puffed-up nature of their relationship, yet also its warmth. “I’m gonna throw smoke at yo’ yolk,” Satchel would taunt before whipping in a fast one. “If you could cook,” Josh would yell back after walloping a long ball, “I’d marry ya.” Even when he felt like screaming, Josh, like Gus, chose to laugh. Or sigh. To Satchel, meanwhile, traveling with and getting to know Josh was, he said repeatedly, his fondest memory of Pittsburgh and the Crawfords.

What an athlete says about what he does helps separate the mere star from the superhero. Josh Gibson did at least as much with the bat as Satchel did with the ball. He hit home runs further than Babe Ruth and may have slugged more of them. He lived his life large and saw it end even more dramatically and tragically than Satchel’s or Babe’s. But while Josh resisted touting his glories or telling his story, Satchel relished both. The result: Satchel Paige remains one of the most recognizable personalities in sports while Josh Gibson is largely unknown.