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.

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.

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.

All the same, I feel like I got to know Satchel like I might have an old uncle I’d never met but heard so much about, or even a grandfather, by spending two years absorbed in his newspaper clippings and stats, talking to his friends, family and teammates, several of whom had never had a chance to tell their stories, retracing his steps through Mobile, Kansas City, Puerto Rico and beyond, and learning about his exploits over 40 years of baseball and three-quarters of a century living an amazingly full life.

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.”

What ties them together is that they are important stories that are at risk of slipping away. Why? Because they have been forgotten or told incompletely. Because first-hand witnesses are aging and their experiences have not been recorded.

Getting to those witnesses is the first step. The next is collecting everything written about the people and the era, which generally amounts to thousands of magazine and newspaper articles, hundreds of books and endless unpublished material. For Satchel alone, I have 72 pages of printed footnotes and bibliography, with lots more online.

Last week at Boston University I joined other authors in talking about that process, as described by Bill Kirtz at Poynter.org.

What do those audiences have in common? Only this: that Satchel’s story seems to resonate with all of them.

That is more a tribute to him than me. His story has something for everyone — from racial pioneer to poster child for graceful aging. There’s the baseball stuff, the human tragedy of the racially segregated, impoverished world in which he grew up, and his triumphing over all that. We talk a lot these days about needing stories of human inspiration; none is more inspiring than that of Leroy “Satchel” Paige.

Why does it matter how old Satchel was? Because that was part of the myth that Satchel himself created to generate buzz among the press and others who were happy to cover all-white Major League Baseball, but barely noticed the Negro Leagues.

Satchel Paige: masterful PR with brilliant talent to back it up.

When you approach a publisher you have to have more than a general theme. If you are writing fiction, you generally need a finished book before anyone will consider it. With non-fiction, your proposal needs as many specifics as possible – on your thesis, how you will back it up with numbers and facts, who you already have interviewed and who else you will talk to, how what you are proposing differs from what others have already published, who you believe will buy your book, and on and on. All that takes lots of work and time. A publisher has to see precisely what the book will look like and how good a writer you are.

I don’t say this to discourage you or anyone from trying. Rather, it is a warning that book-writing is very hard work and that getting anything published these days is very difficult, especially by a press that reaches a mass market. So only try it if you have the time, you have a strong enough ego to withstand rejection, and, most important, you are so passionate about your topic that you can’t not write about it.

I had six friends read Satchel cover-to-cover before I sent it in. They ranged, as I explain in my Acknowledgments, from a Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer to journalists to an expert on the Negro Leagues. Other friends and colleagues read bits and pieces. Once it got to Random House, the terrific editor who bought the book did a rigorous edit, as did a series of other editors.

The good news is that each reader offered up ways to make it better. The frustration is that all that reading and revising takes time, which is why it is a full year after I submitted it that Satchel finally is about to hit the stores. That happens next week, on June 9.

Was it worth all that work? I leave that to you.

I am new to blogging and not sure what anyone visiting this site wants to hear. I will take my cues from you.

Want to know about the process — what it is like researching a book like this, writing it, selling it to a publisher, or going through the endless editing?

Want to know some of the things I found, and some of the people who helped me along the way, from Negro Leaguers to Major Leaguers, SABR folks to other baseball researchers, friends/family of Satchel, and…. ?

Or maybe you’d rather offer up your own takes on Leroy “Satchel” Paige and let my book speak for me.

Once it comes out I will write occasionally about things I am finding as I speak across the country, and things I might have put in the book had I known them earlier. I would love to hear from you on places I should be going and talks I should be giving that my publisher and I didn’t think of. I have endless energy to talk about Satchel, because I remain fascinated by him and the lens he offers into the Negro Leagues, the Jim Crow era, and America itself.

I recently started researching a new book for Random House — a bio of Superman. More about that later.

Bye for now.

Larry