Eyewitnesses said that Satchel Paige, one of the best pitchers baseball will ever see, would tell his teammates to sit on the field, so confident that he’d strike out the batter on his own.
The right-handed ace’s showmanship was backed up by the remarkable athletic ability on display with his deadly accurate fastball. Over an estimated 2,600 innings pitched, Paige registered more than 200 wins and, impressively, more than 2,100 strikeouts. And those numbers are incomplete—many of his games, having been played in the Negro Leagues, going unrecorded.
“Satchel was pitching in a way if, just based on his performance as a pitcher, he would’ve ranked as one of the all-time greats, if not the greatest,” says Larry Tye, author of the 2009 biography Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend.
For 20 years after he more-or-less hung up his cleats, however, the National Baseball Hall of Fame, where baseball greats from Babe Ruth to Walter Johnson were enshrined, didn’t have room for Paige or any other Negro Leaguers. Because it was a different league, segregated from the majors solely by race, the Hall hadn’t even considered its players eligible for induction. But in 1971, the Cooperstown, New York, institution finally began to recognize the accomplishments of players whose case for greatness rested on their performance in the Negro Leagues, starting with Paige.
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