Don’t Look Back

Satchel Paige as a Cleveland Indian; circa 1949

On Saturday I took in a college baseball game at The Diamond; George Mason defeated VCU by a score of 8-2.

During the game I wandered around the stadium, took some photographs and thought about baseball scenes from 50 or more years ago. With 43 years of Richmond Braves baseball now a fading memory, I couldn’t help but think of what was a temple of baseball in my youth — Parker Field, which was located where The Diamond is now.

Parker Field opened in 1954 to serve as home for a new International League club — the Richmond Virginians. As the V’s were one of the New York Yankees’ Triple A farm clubs, in those days the Bronx Bombers paid Richmond an annual visit in April. Just before Major League Baseball’s opening day, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford and the other great Yankees of that golden era played an exhibition game in Richmond against V’s.

It was always a standing-room-only affair.

Other than the hometown pinstriped V’s my favorite club of the IL then was the pre-revolution Havana Sugar Kings. They played with an intensity, bordering on reckless abandon, that made them a lot of fun to watch, especially for the kids.

One of the most celebrated players I saw perform at Parker Field was Leroy “Satchel” Paige (1906-82). Yes, the legendary Paige — with his windmill windup and high kick still working for him — plied his craft on the mound here in Richmond to the delight, and other reactions, of local baseball fans.

In 1971, Paige was the first of the Negro Leagues’ great stars to be admitted to Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame, based mostly on his contributions before he helped break the Major League color line in 1948, as a 42-year-old rookie. The statistics from his pre-Big League days are mind-boggling. Some say he won some 2,000 games, and threw maybe as many as 45 no-hitters.

Furthermore, long before the impish poet/boxer Muhammad Ali, there was the equally playful Satchel Paige, with his widely published Six Guidelines to Success:

• Avoid fried meats that angry up the blood.
• If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
• Keep the juices flowing by jangling gently as you walk.
• Go very lightly on the vices, such as carrying-on in society – the society ramble ain’t restful.
• Avoid running at all times.
• Don’t look back, something may be gaining on you.

Long after his days as the best pitcher in the Negro Leagues, following his precedent-setting stint in the American League, Paige was on the roster of the Miami Marlins (1956-58). Like the V’s the Marlins played in the International League. When I saw him, Paige was in his 50s. Not a starter, anymore, he worked out of the bullpen.

In the late-1950s live professional baseball in Richmond was mostly a white guys’ scene. Which meant the boos would start as soon as the crowd noticed Paige’s 6-3, 180-pound frame warming up in the middle of a game. When he’d be called in to pitch in relief, the noise level would soar. Not all the grown men booed, but many did. That, while their children and grandchildren were split between booing, cheering, or being embarrassed and not knowing what to do.

Naturally, some of the kids liked seeing the grownups getting unraveled, so Paige was all the more cool to them.

Sadly, for many white men in Richmond, then caught up by the thinking that buoyed Massive Resistance, any prominent black person was seen as someone to be against. So, they probably would have booed Nat King Cole or Thurgood Marshall, just as easily.

The showman Paige would take forever to walk to the mound from the bullpen. His warm-up pitches would each be big productions, with various slow-motion full windups. Then the thrown ball would whistle toward home plate with a startling velocity, making some of the kids cheer and laugh.

Paige, from Mobile, Alabama, must have understood what was going on better than most who watched him pitch then. He was a veteran performer, who knew perfectly well there wasn’t much he could do to change the boos; they were coming from folks trapped in the past.

Of course, I hadn’t the slightest idea that what I was seeing was an aspect of the changes the South was going through, to do with race. My guess is few fans then knew or cared that the reaction to Paige being split on generational lines was a sign of how America’s baseball fans were going to change.

In the late-’50s, even fewer fans could have imagined that a young black Milwaukee Braves outfielder playing then, named Hank Aaron — also from Mobile — would go on to break Babe Ruth’s career home run total and establish a new record in 1974 that still stands in some books.

Now, with the benefit of decades of reflection, I figure that Satchel Paige was a visionary. When he was ignoring the booing adults and accentuating the positive, by delighting the children who were rooting for him, Paige was seeing the future. Moreover, he was following his own best advice — Don’t look back.

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– Image from satchelpage.com