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.

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.”

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.

William Bartholomay was a Chicago insurance executive who in 1962 bought the Milwaukee Braves and in 1966 moved them to Atlanta. Bartholomay care about Satchel enough to hire him as a pitcher-coach-trainer for long enough to meet his pension needs. In case there was any doubt about what he was doing, he assigned Satchel No. 65, the age at which his retirement salary would kick in. “Baseball would have been guilty of negligence should it not assure this legendary figure a place in the pension plan,” the owner said at the signing in 1968. Looking back forty years on, Bartholomay says Satchel justified his faith by performing sensationally as a goodwill ambassador, the way he had for Saperstein and his other benefactors.

He did it partly by signing autographs and spending time with fans. The team was new to Atlanta, and its fans were new to the team and often to baseball itself. Satchel helped with the adjustment. An even richer dividend from hiring him came during the summer of 1968, when riots were raging and cities burning in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Having a bridge-builder like Satchel was reassuring to Atlanta and to the Braves. He was not the only black on the team, just the best-known and most-trusted. He had suffered the Jim Crow injustices King railed against and embodied the preacher’s dream of an integrated America. “He came to us four months after the King funeral in Atlanta,” says Bartholomay. “Those were pretty tough times for African-Americans and the country in its entirety. Satchel understood that. He helped in a way that went way beyond baseball.”

Life with Satchel brought new touches to Atlanta’s start-up franchise. A rocking chair was installed in front of his locker. He had young teammates toting his fishing gear and serving as gophers. Names were more twisted than ever, intentionally or otherwise. “He called me Daffy,” says Dusty Baker. “I said, ‘My name is Dusty.’ He said, ‘Daffy, I know what your name is.”’ In spring training Satchel lived with friends, as was his wont, but this time it was at a funeral home. On the bus he broke the mournful quiet after painful losses, getting the team laughing with tales of Cool Papa Bell hitting a popup so high that it took a full day for it to fall back to Earth. On the plane he still carried his typewriter, along with a suitcase, clothes bag, and attaché case. Phil Niekro, the world’s most accomplished knuckleballer, recalls Satchel sitting at the back of the plane by himself with his case on the pull-out tray. “I was going to the bathroom and he said, ‘Niekro, sit down for a second. Do you drink?’ I said that I have one now and then and he said, ‘What would you like?’ Anything I wanted was there in his little case.” What impressed the Torre brothers was Satchel’s attitude about life. “He was always sort of being thankful for just being alive. He was thankful he got the opportunity to play in the Majors even as late as he got it,” says Frank. “It was all about life and Satchel enjoyed living,” agrees Joe, the ex-Yankees’ skipper now managing the Los Angeles Dodgers: “He never stopped thinking young.”

They called Satchel a trainer, but “he didn’t do any training,” recalls Dave Percley, the Braves’ real trainer. What he wanted to do was pitch. Bartholomay was concerned about his eyesight, “which was going pretty rapidly. We worried that he wouldn’t see a line drive coming back to him.” But Satchel proved that even at the age of sixty-two the crack of a bat was enough to tell him where the ball was headed, and he pitched a couple of innings in an exhibition game for the Braves’ highest-level minor league team, Triple-A Richmond. It was a face-off for the ages when fellow Mobilian Hank Aaron stepped to the plate: history’s greatest hurler against its greatest hitter. Satchel was smiling as he unleashed his first one, a slow arcing pitch. Hank had stepped out of the box, but too late. Strike one. The next was slower still. Hank dropped his bat into the dirt in disgust. Strike two. The future home run champ checked his swing on the next pitch, making the count one ball, two strikes. “Now Aaron, still glowering at his old friend, stepped forward in the box as far as rules would allow,” Wilt Browning, who covered the Braves for the Atlanta Journal, remembered years later. “Again Paige’s pitch came floating toward the plate out of the fading light of early evening. Aaron tried to time the pitch. He made a mighty swing. The ball clicked weakly against the top of Aaron’s bat and flew softly, with little arc, to the waiting third baseman for the out. The old man pounded his bony fist into his glove with the sort of youthful joy all of us could understand.”

As Scott Ostler writes, “Ruth had it easy, eased into the big-league system like a man cruising onto a freeway. Paige was like the advance scout for Lewis & Clark. He made up the rules -and broke them – as he went.”

That says it all.

I am recently back from a tour that took me to San Francisco and Stockton, CA, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh (twice), Cleveland, Washington, D.C., Kansas City, St. Louis, Manchester, NH and Concord, NH. I did talks at ballparks, talks at bookstores, and lots of radio and print interviews. A few themes emerged from my travels that I want to share:

# Satchel the magnet. There is endless interest out there in Satchel the ballplayer and Satchel the man. Seems like everywhere I went I met people who had played with or against him, often in barnstorming games that never registered on the radar of the press or the baseball establishment but that meant everything to the small-town players who got see Satchel up-close. Add to that the fans who saw Satchel pitch, or whose parents or grandparents did and passed down stories. Then there were those who think they did, or wish it to point where they believe it.

That was brilliant for me as I traveled, making clear that I didn’t have to tel people why they should care, just what more they should know about him. When I had useful things to say – whether it was sorting out fact from myth about his on-field accomplishments or talking about Satchel as a racial pioneer — people ate it up. When I got things wrong — like the timing of a Joe Louis title bout — people rightfully were all over me (I saw the error early on and it is being corrected in later editions).

Bottom line: I had a blast talking about Satchel and people seem to like to listen.

# A conversation on race. The discussion of racial themes in my book resonates more than I dreamed. A lot has to do with what is happening in the wider world, whether it is the Gates-Crowley-Obama saga, the plummeting participation of African-Americans in Major League Baseball, or the hopeful scene at the recent Hall of Fame inauguration, where the only two living players to be inducted were African-American.

Everywhere I spoke, whether it was live or via radio, listeners wanted to hear about how Satchel and other longtime Negro Leaguers set the stage for Jackie Robinson. They wanted to know why Branch Rickey hadn’t picked Satchel as the barrier breaker, and how Satchel felt about him picking Jackie. What they wanted more than anything, I think, was to openly talk about race — in sports, in society, and in ways that we can use Satchel’s refreshing candor on race to help us face a still-painful topic.

That is a big reason I wrote my book, which I saw as a biography of two American icons: Satchel Paige and Jim Crow. I was delighted to talk about Satchel and race — and more delighted when my talks drew in young people, who don’t know much about the Jim Crow era of segregation and are the audience I am most anxious to reach with my book and Satchel’s story.

# Balkparks as a forum. Random House and I have made this a tour with a twist. In most every city I visit, the trip is centered around a talk and signing at a minor or major league ballpark. In Stockton, the Ports, with help from the local chamber of commerce, gave out books to the first 350 fans who showed up and are making Satchel the centerpiece of a community-wide literacy campaign. In San Francisco, the Giants’ owner hosted a pre-game talk on the field where I was joined by the team’s announcer and by Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda, who knew Satchel well. In Kansas City, the Royals did something similar with former ace Paul Splittorf and me, while the Pittsburgh Pirates had me in for a brilliant weekend of activities.

I love that the baseball world is taking Satchel seriously, and using my book to spawn a conversation about race and baseball. I also love that, rather than the standard giveaway of a bat or ball, some teams have been willing to strike a blow for literacy as well as for me by giving away books.

# The Paiges. I can’t talk about my tour without talking about the special people who turned up at each stop. There were old ballplayers, black and white, whom I interviewed about their days in the Negro Leagues and Majors, playing with or against Satchel. There were Negro League experts, from the professionals at Kansas City’s great museum to the Society of Baseball Research people for whom black baseball is a passion and who turned out at a conference last month in Pittsburgh.

Best of all were Satchel’s daughters Rita, Shirley and Linda Sue, who joined me for a talk in Kansas City. They told stories filled with charm and pathos. They were warm and welcoming. They made my day.

Please keep sending questions and comments, and please come to my remaining talks. You can find them listed on this site’s schedule.

I would also appreciate advice on how to broaden the conversation on Satchel. I have been writing op-eds for newspapers from LA to St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Mobile, Boston and elsewhere. I have been talking on the radio and via web sites. But I have a feeling there is more I could be doing to engage young people and others who care about baseball and race. Thoughts?

The short answer is YES, any journalist or author has to factor that in. The way to do that isn’t to make presumptions about what they were really thinking or feeling, or discount what they say, but to ask enough questions — and put the interviewee at sufficient ease — that they will be more likely to be honest. At times you also can let them go off the record.

I don’t want to embarrass my interview subjects or push them further than they are willing to go. I do want to get the full and truthful story.

As I keep saying in these postings, readers now have a long book to decide for themselves whether or not I succeeded.

Larry