Satchel Paige and Babe Ruth

Did Satchel Paige pitch to Babe Ruth? This was one of the questions I pursued while researching my book. Here is what I found.

Satchel said he did meet up with a barnstorming team assembled by Babe on a warm night in Los Angles in 1930 or thereabouts, and struck out an inconceivable twenty-two of them, two more than today’s Major League record. “Everybody in that whole place was mobbing me. I almost lost an arm getting it pumped so many times,” he wrote in his 1962 memoir, but “I never counted those twenty-two strikeouts as my one-game record. I always said it was eighteen even though I hit twenty-two in other games, lots of times. But when I talk about records, I’m talking about league games and those twenty-two strikeouts always came in exhibition games . . . I know some of the boys ain’t in shape when I whiff them in those games.” As for Babe himself, Satchel wrote in his 1948 and 1962 books that he did not play against him in the contest in Los Angeles or anywhere else. “When I was pitchin’ he wasn’t playin’ and when he was playin’ I wasn’t pitchin’. A keen regret I have is I never pitched to Mr. Ruth.”

Others tell a different story. “I saw Satchel play in an exhibition game with daddy and daddy commented on the fact that he’s quite a pitcher,” Julia Ruth Stevens recalled from her home in Conway, New Hampshire, in 2007. Stevens, who was 91 then, had sharp recall of events from her father’s playing days although she was not sure how he fared in the exhibition appearance against Satchel. That game was in New York, she added, but “they may have had more than one game together. This was a long, long time back, in the 1930s.”

Two more versions come from Satchel himself. He said he played against Babe but offered no details in a 1943 story carrying his byline in the Pittsburgh Courier. Five years later he told writer and publisher Bennett Cerf that during an exhibition game in Phoenix he intentionally walked three men to get to Babe, then struck him out on four pitches. Bob Feller, who one day would replace Dizzy as Satchel’s barnstorming sidekick, said he heard and believed similar stories about Satchel striking out Babe, as did Cool Papa Bell.

The last Babe-Satchel account is the least flattering to the pitcher, which may be why he chose not to recall it. Baseball’s most powerful hitter matched skills with its most overpowering pitcher in 1938 or thereabouts in a battle of barnstormers on the South Side of Chicago. Ruth would have been about forty-three then, and officially retired for three years. “Babe comes up and the first pitch Satchel throws he hits over some trees, 500 feet,” Buck O’Neil remembered in an interview in 2006, repeating a story he told eleven years earlier during a seminar at Hofstra University. “You know who greets him at home plate? Satchel. He held up the ballgame for 10 minutes while a kid got the ball and brought it back for Babe to autograph. That’s the only time Satchel faced him.”

My take: there is little doubt that Satchel and Babe did face off, at least in exhibition games. I only wish I had been there to see it.