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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

“Cool Papa” Bell played with Satchel Paige at the peak of both of their careers. They were teammates on the 1930s Pittsburgh Crawfords, one of the best Negro League teams ever. In 1937 both joined the team of Dominican dictator Trujillo, winning a championship with help from Leroy Matlock, Sam Bankhead, and a dozen other Negro Leaguers.

Cool was there again for Satchel in the 1940s, teaching the aging pitcher to throw a knuckleball, which meant gripping the horsehide with the tips, nails, and knuckles of his middle fingers. Slower than his 1930s fastball, but just as hard to hit.

After he stopped playing, Cool Papa spent twenty-one years as a custodian and night watchman at City Hall in St. Louis, never joining Satchel in the Major Leagues. Satchel made sure, though, that Cool was not forgotten, at least in the Paige household. His children spent time with Bell and learned firsthand what it was like to travel in the segregated South, playing great ball despite the daily challenges of Jim Crow.

Like Satchel said, remembering him means remembering all the great Negro Leaguers, including the fastest of all, Cool Papa Bell.

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.”