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.”

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.”

That story, outlined in yesterday’s New York Times by John Klima, is as tragic as it is familiar.  The Red Sox had in for tryouts Jackie Robinson and two other Negro Leaguers before Branch Rickey signed Jackie, but the racist Sox were only doing it to appease an activist Boston city councilor.  And other Major League owners repeatedly hinted at plans to sign Satchel Paige and other great Negro Leaguers over the years, only to back out for lack of fortitude or resistance from fellow owners.