Leroy Satchel Paige

Pitchin' Man Leroy Satchel Paige

Publisher Marketing: In 1948 LeRoy "Satchel" Paige became a Major League baseball star. In truth, he had always been a star, just not like this. This was his dream come true. For twenty-two years he had been a Major League baseball legend, but in another venue. His venue had been in the Negro Leagues and his "America" was the segregated one. Now all that changed, and he was a star on a White Major League baseball team, the Cleveland Indians. The 1947 the sudden integration of baseball caught everyone by surprise. Those who controlled professional sports had held the line against integration since 1884. Today's baseball fans cannot imagine an all White Major League or for that matter an all White NFL, NBA or NHL. Well, perhaps the last one can be imaged, but for sixty-two years it was that way. Sports were all White, all the time, and it seemed like it would go on like that forever. Most fans knew it was wrong and wanted integration, but the strong southern racist mind set stood firm. It had to change and finally in 1944, the "old turkey neck buzzard" Kennesaw Mountain Landis "kicked the bucket." His death was a good thing. Now nobody was left to keep Blacks out of Big League Baseball. No great parties of celebration were held, but people of good will started to work immediately to force the sports world to grow up. By the end of 1947, three Blacks were on Major League rosters and many more were in the minor leagues. So on his 42nd birthday, LeRoy "Satchel" Paige became the oldest rookie in baseball history. He was the "toast of the town" and that town, of course, was Cleveland, Ohio. In the Black world, Satchel Paige was a pitching legend. In the White world folks did not know how good he really was, but many White major league players knew exactly how good he was. That was because many top stars had played against him in exhibition games. Contributor Bio:  Thomas, Ken Harry Tolley was Special Professor in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham who works as a researcher, author and freelance consultant. He is co-author of How to Pass Verbal Reasoning Tests, How to Pass Numeracy Tests, How to Succeed at an Assessment Centre and How to Pass the Police Initial Recruitment Test, all published by Kogan Page. Contributor Bio:  Lebovitz, Hal Hal Lebovitz, who was inducted into the writer's wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000, was a sportswriter for more than six decades. He got his first job covering high school sports for the Cleveland News in 1942 and soon became a beat writer covering the Cleveland Browns and Cleveland Indians. He was hired by the Plain Dealer in 1960 to cover baseball and was that paper's sports editor from 1964?1982. ?Ask Hal, the Referee, ? his popular column on sports rules, also appeared in the Sporting News from 1947?1993. A former college athlete, he also coached baseball, basketball, and football and officiated all three sports, including a stint as a referee traveling with the Harlem Globetrotters. His sportswriting continued to appear regularly in the News-Herald (Lake County, Ohio), the Morning Journal (Lorain, Ohio), and several other newspapers, until his death, at age 89, in 2005.