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“You might say I traded five years of freedom to learn how to pitch.”
Providence Grays. Thus a black man named White, from a university named Brown and a team called Gray, was the first of his race to make it to the Major Leagues.
By 1898 the last loopholes of tolerance had been closed even as the last black team playing in a white league, the Acme Colored Giants, was going bankrupt. A new era of apartheid had dawned. Baseball split into white and black worlds.
There were old-fashioned hit-and-runs, where the base runner was off with the pitch and the batter always managed to put the ball into play Bunts were executed precisely. Players slid face-first to beat the tag. Teammates held “skull sessions” after every game to mull over what went wrong and how to make it right. Today it would be called small ball, or smart baseball. It was what the Majors were before the Babe and his era of long ball; it was wild and free, which was liberating for Negroes whose lives off the field were anything but.
Negro Leaguers pioneered the widespread use of lights—and night baseball—a full fifteen years before the Majors.
By World War II, blackball was the fastest-growing black enterprise in America.
Baseball in the first half of the twentieth century was like a plantation where white Major Leaguers owned the manor house and Negro Leaguers subsisted in servants’ quarters. Playing in the dark half of that segregated universe meant playing in the shadows.
Well, he was a hard thrower, learned how to pitch afterwards.”
There are two places to hide if you are shy: off on your own, or at the center of a crowd. Satchel did both.
“I’d look over at the Cleveland Indians’ stadium,” Satchel recalled years later. “All season long it burned me, playing there in the shadow of that stadium. It didn’t hurt my pitching, but it sure didn’t do me any good.”
Marriage, he imagined, “was like walking in front of a firing squad without anybody making you do it.”
Another way Negro players coped with their wayfaring life in racist surroundings was to dream up their own lexicon. Most outsiders never knew because players never used it with them, and even if they overheard they would not have understood. Which was the point. It let players talk about fans, foes, and anything else without worrying about being overheard, the way immigrant parents used Yiddish, Polish, or Italian to keep things from their English-speaking children. For the baseball men, their language was about more than secrecy. It fostered intimacy. It was a shorthand for making their world
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Lahoma wanted a father for her daughter and a husband for herself, but she took what she could get, which was a boyish man learning, baby step by baby step, how to make lasting commitments to a city, a team, a woman, and a little girl.
“For the first time, a white magazine had burned incense at the foot of a black man outside the prize ring,”
Satchel tried to be philosophical. He understood that he was aging and old-school, while the twenty-six-year-old Robinson was a college boy and army veteran who Rickey felt could bear the ruthless scrutiny of being first. Jackie did not balk at Rickey’s plan to start him in the minors, in faraway Montreal. Satchel never could have abided the affront. Jackie had the table manners whites liked, Satchel was rough-hewn and ungovernable. Satchel realized he was a specter from the past rather than the harbinger the Dodgers wanted of a more racially tolerant future.
White baseball titans knew that black fans were turning out in sizable numbers for their games and in droves for Negro League and exhibition contests, especially during the war years. They knew, too, that black stars like Satchel and Josh Gibson were crowd pleasers of the kind that the Majors longed for in the wake of the retirement of Babe Ruth in 1935—and that, with the exception of Satchel, Negro Leaguers could be had cheap. It was the color green more than black that had Branch Rickey wringing his hands at public hearings and plotting to actually do something about integrating the sport.
NO BASEBALL PLAYERS in the 1940s thought of free agency, or knew what the expression meant. If they had, they would have seen that Satchel was the first free agent in the history of the sport.
Even those who did follow the Negro Leagues failed to give Satchel his due. Black reporters called him a “jumper.” They branded him disloyal, undependable, out of control, and infantile. They joined the owners’ bandwagon, first saying blackball should ban Satchel for a year, then forever.
At the time of his signing nearly everyone rallied around Jackie, the way Satchel had, but the barbs and swipes flowed freely in later years. It was not just his deficits on the field that ate at the veterans but the way he stayed back at the hotel playing checkers or pinball while everyone else was out on the town. There was one more thing old Negro Leaguers held against Jackie: he never paid homage to the earliest barrier breakers like Fleetwood Walker or to them.
Just as the rise of the Negro Leagues had spawned culture and commerce in the Negro community, their fall killed off cultural institutions and traditions. Street’s Hotel in Kansas City, the center of the Monarchs’ world, closed down. So did the Vincennes in Chicago. Churches no longer had to worry about letting out in time for the Sunday ball game, and congregants had one less occasion to don mink stoles or straw hats. Rather than attending a contest in the neighborhood, fans watched on television, cheering for faraway teams without the company of friends or neighbors. The gladful community of
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He laughed out loud and said, ‘Those sons of bitches can beat you but they can’t eat you.’ I was back in the game that night, shaking, but saying to myself, ‘You sons of bitches can beat me but you can’t eat me.’” “It meant everything to me,” adds Qualters, who has passed on the advice to countless young players he has coached. “Satchel meant that it’s not a life and death situation. You do the best you can and don’t let mental things interfere with the job.”
“Don’t pray when it rains if you don’t pray when the sun shines.”
“Ain’t no man can avoid being born average, but there ain’t no man got to be common.”
“Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance ...
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When Satchel makes it, newspapers across America trumpeted, so do the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Birmingham Black Barons, and a lineup of black stars from Moses Fleetwood Walker to Johnny Schoolboy Taylor.
