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.

During my current tour through Atlanta, Mobile, Birmingham and Anniston, I have had a chance to reflect on Satchel Paige’s career, from his start in Mobile to his later days in Atlanta.

A few days ago, the Atlanta Journal Constitution published an opinion piece I wrote about Satchel Paige’s tenure as pitcher-coach-trainer and all around goodwill ambassador with the Atlanta Braves. Paige was signed in 1968 by Braves owner William Bartholomay. That contract gave him the chance to work for three more years — until he turned 65 — so he could lock in his pension.

As always, Satchel gave more than he got, raising the profile of the Braves and, even at the age of 62, putting on a spectacular show.

See the full piece in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Satchel Paige was pitching in the Negro Leagues in California when he got the news he had been anticipating for two decades. Brooklyn Dodgers President Branch Rickey had just signed a Negro to a big-league contract. The first Negro in modern times. Word tore through America’s clubhouses and grandstands that October afternoon in 1945: a black man was going to be in the minors, then the Major League. Jackie Robinson would topple baseball’s color bar. And Leroy “Satchel” Paige would not.

Earthshaking—almost like the emancipation of the slaves, integration supporters proclaimed. It was fitting “that the end of baseball’s Jim Crow law should follow the conclusion of a great war to preserve liberty, equality and decency,” wrote Lee Dunbar of the Oakland Tribune. A desecration of the natural order, segregationists shot back. “We live happier with segregation in athletics as well as all other activities,” argued Bud Seifert of South Carolina’s Spartanburg Journal. Bob Feller, the Cleveland Indians flamethrower with a golden arm and tin ear, told reporters that if Jackie “were a white man, I doubt if they would consider him as big league material.”

The public listened to the cacophony of voices, but the one it wanted to hear most of all was Satchel’s. What did America’s best-loved black ballplayer—the man everyone had assumed would be first—make of the Dodgers’ historic move? “They didn’t make a mistake by signing Robinson,” Satchel said. “They couldn’t have picked a better man.” The words ate at him even as he uttered them. Not only was he being bumped, he was being bumped by his Negro Leagues teammate, an untested rookie who could not hit a curve, gun a throw to first, or land the job as the Kansas City Monarchs’ second baseman until an injury forced out the incumbent.

The piece above is an excerpt. For more on Satchel Paige’s reaction to the breaking of baseball’s race barrier, please see the entire article in History Now, a publication of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

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.

Baseball inspires poetry, as true fans of both well know. Jack Buck showed us that. So did Ogden Nash, Garrison Keillor and Grantland Rice.

Now comes E. Ethelbert Miller with The Fifth Inning. A poet, essayist, memoirist and literary activist, Miller reflects, as he nears 60, on life, relationships and loss in this, his second memoir, released last March.

Why the fifth inning? Miller writes:

In the fifth inning you know anything can happen. This could be a complete game. You count your blessings for surviving the fourth. The first hitter sends a ball deep to the warning track in left field. This brings your manager to his feet. He starts to pace in the dugout. He’s afraid you’re losing it. You look down at your feet and kick the rubber. You’re afraid too, and it tips the next hitter off. One swing and you’re down four. The next two hitters follow with a single and a double. It’s over now. You might as well play catch in the backyard with the kids. The catcher asks the umpire for time and walks out to the mound. Here comes your manager getting ready to ask for the ball. Inside your glove, you hold it and keep waiting for it to speak. The silence tells its own story. The game keeps searching for an author.

For more, see the following interview with Miller or visit his web site.

When I give talks and interviews, the questions I’m asked most often is, “Should we believe stats for Satchel Paige’s days in the Negro Leagues? Could he, for instance, really have pitched in 2,500 games and won 2,000?”

Let’s do the math: he played for more 40 years, pitching two or three innings nearly every night, year-round. He played in the Negro Leagues during their season, and in barnstorming games when there wasn’t a league game. His teams often played double-headers and sometimes three games in a 24-hour period, with him pitching parts of two or even three. After the season was over he played in the California Winter League, then headed to the islands to pitch in Cuba or the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico or Venezuela.

My conclusion: Satchel Paige’s claims of playing in 2,500 games is, if anything, an understatement.

But here’s what we really should take away from that achievement: 2,500 games over 42 years is a punishing schedule. Punishing physically and psychologically. Look at how that compares with today’s Major League schedule. Starting pitchers throw every fifth game and relievers every other night, on average. They play from April through October, if they are lucky and make it to the World Series, then spend the winter resting and getting back into shape. Even if any of these players could last 42 years, which they won’t, that would amount to a fraction of Satchel’s game and win totals.

So yes, Satchel Paige made outlandish claims, and he generally backed them up. And no, nobody ever will break Satchel Paige’s Major League record for longevity, set in 1965 when he suited up for the Kansas City A’s at the over-the-hill age of 59 years, two months and eight days. How did he do? Three innings of one-hit, shutout ball against the hard-hitting Boston Red Sox.

One of my favorite things about writing books is getting to spread the story about Satchel Paige face to face to live audiences.

This past week I did two talks that spanned the age spectrum. The first was the Society of American Baseball Researchers (SABR) winter event, where I appeared with former Red Sox pitcher Bill Monbouquette and Tampa Bay Rays switch hitter Fernando Perez, the first Major Leaguer whose work has been published in Poetry magazine. Perez shared his take on baseball today. Monbouquette contrasted that to the way the game was played in his era a half century ago, and recounted what it was like facing off against Satchel in his last Major League game back in 1965. Monbo was the last big-league player to strike out against Paige, a historic achievement that still makes him smile.

For a recap and audio clips, see http://tinyurl.com/yhngk2f

My second talk was to a lively high school audience in Concord, MA. The challenge: how to make anything that happened before last week — not to mention as far back as the 1920s and 30s — matter to today’s teens. I can only hope that, couching that history in a story about a brilliant baseball player, these kids will understand a bit more about a Jim Crow era where baseball, like every institution that mattered in America, was divided into black and white worlds.

To write a biography of Satchel Paige, whose career lasted longer than any player before or since, eyewitness accounts were critical. I talked with 200 former Negro Leaguers and Major Leaguers who played with or against Satchel. One of the most extraordinary was Silas Simmons, a veteran of the early Negro Leagues whom I met in 2006 in Florida at a party celebrating his 111th birthday.

Simmons was amazingly tuned in given his age and his frail physical condition. He remembered just what the game was like when he started playing semi-pro ball in 1911. He also remembered the waves Satchel was making in Negro Leagues baseball even though Paige was getting in to the game around the time that Simmons was getting out.

For me, Simmons and the rest of the aging ballplayers I talked to were essential in setting the scene of what baseball was like when the game was divided into black and white universes. They painted for me the glory and the tragedy, the greatness of the best of the African American ballplayers and the heartbreak that they couldn’t showcase their skills on the grand stage of the all-white Majors.

Simmons’ history in the Negro Leagues was uncovered only in his old age, by baseball historian and genealogist David Allen Lambert, who, in the fall of 2005, located Simmons and spread the word. Not long after, The New York Times wrote a front-page story, commenting on, among other things, the joy with which Simmons attended contemporary games. In October 2006, Dr. Layton Revel, founder of the Center for Negro League Baseball Research and a great source for my book, organized the birthday party where I met the 111-year-old former pitcher and outfielder. The sad news is that Simmons died 15 days later at his nursing home in St. Petersburg, Florida; the great news was that he relished the occasion, and those of us who attended got a chance to celebrate his life and contributions to baseball.

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.”

He was not a welcome ally to many in America’s Civil Rights movement of the early 1900s, but none could deny the attention-getting power of Lester Rodney, the hot-blooded young sports editor of the paper published by the Communist Party USA.

The Daily Worker had always had in its crosshairs that era’s Jim Crow system of racial segregation, but never the sports scene. It was not until the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, in 1935, that Joseph Stalin and his minions decided that each national party should appeal to its masses through local traditions. In America that meant baseball. The Daily Worker hired as its first sports editor 25-year-old Rodney, a New York University night student from Brooklyn who knew as little about the socialists as he did about journalism. Yet Rodney loved baseball, and he made ending the Major Leagues’ ban on blacks his passion for more than a decade. His opening salvo set a tone that was part Karl Marx, part Babe Ruth. “Tell the big league magnates that you’re sick of the poor pitching in the American League. You want to see Satchel Paige out there on the mound,” Rodney wrote in an unsigned editorial in 1936. “Demand better ball. Demand Americanism in baseball, equal opportunities for Negro and white. Demand the end of Jim Crow baseball.”

Rodney, who died Sunday at the age of 98, understood that fireballer Leroy “Satchel” Paige, slugger Josh Gibson, and other stars of the Negro Leagues had proven they were the equals of the all-white Major Leaguers. For years a cadre of crusading sportswriters had covered as many interracial barnstorming tours and Negro League games as their editors allowed, dropping in lines whenever they could pointing out the skill of black players and the stupidity of keeping them out of the Majors. But Rodney was one of the few to take on segregation point-blank. He put big league players and managers on the record on race, getting Leo Durocher of the Brooklyn Dodgers in trouble for saying he would have no problem signing a black if it boosted his team. He linked The Daily Worker’s campaign for racial justice to World War II – asking how blacks who were dying overseas to defend freedom could be denied it back home on the baseball diamond, and proposing that Negro Leaguers fill the glaring holes left by white stars serving in the Army and Navy. He even swapped stories with sports columnists at all-black newspapers, although one leading African-American journalist later claimed that the Communists damaged the desegregation cause more than they helped.

Rodney also pressed Paige, the Negro Leagues’ most celebrated player, to condemn the separate and inequitable baseball structure that had made him a superstar and a rich man. It was asking for something few if any other players were doing, and certainly none with Satchel’s following. This was in 1937, before there was a formal Civil Rights movement but when there were all-too-real lynchings of black men. It was asking a lot – and Rodney was so convincing that Paige obliged.

Under Rodney’s banner headline “Paige Asks Test for Negro Stars,” Satchel proposed three experiments to determine whether Negro Leaguers were the equals of Major Leaguers: 1) the winners of the big league World Series would play Satchel Paige’s All-Stars at Yankee Stadium, with his crew not getting paid unless it won; 2) he would pitch for any team in the Majors the following year, getting a paycheck only if he proved his worth; 3) big league fans would vote whether to let in blacks. It was audacious for Paige to talk to the Communist publication, bolder still to lay down the gauntlet for white baseball. “The thought was that Negro stars wanted to play only among their own people, which was patently ridiculous,” Rodney explained in a recent interview. “Here was a guy who knew he was the best pitcher in the game and he wanted to go where the money and notoriety would be best. He wanted to prove his worth. It’s like if you’re one of the greatest violinists in the world and you lived in Podunk. You want to go to Carnegie Hall, you don’t want to stay in Podunk. He understood exactly that somebody of his caliber pitching in the big leagues would lead the way for a new generation of black kids.”

Rodney understood, too, that getting Satchel Paige on the record would make fans and owners, white along with black, pay attention, and that integrating America’s pastime would make it easier for America to envision integrating its classrooms and board rooms.

The text above appears as an Op-Ed in today’s Boston Globe.