This month's museum pick...

Negro Leagues Baseball Museum
Kansas City, MO  

“Satchel Paige was the best and fastest pitcher I've ever faced." –-Joe DiMaggio, recalling the time he faced Paige as part of his tryout for major league baseball. DiMaggio went 1 for 5 against Paige. 

"The only change is that baseball has turned Paige from a second class citizen to a second class immortal." –Paige, after the major leagues integrated in the late 1940s and finally allowed him in – at age 42.

One of the great “what might have beens” in American history is the question of how baseball’s record books would have read if the major leagues had remained integrated as they’d been at the start. Even though amateur rules drawn up in 1868 banned “colored persons” from playing on teams, professional teams ignored the rules and often had black ball players. But by the close of the 19^th century, black players had been Jim Crowed out of the sport. It would take 47 years until the arrival of the incredibly gifted and brave Jackie Robinson before baseball would be whole again.

In the meantime, black players spent their years in the wilderness playing for the Negro Leagues (the Negro National league and the Negro American League became the two biggest and longest lived black leagues). In a way the Negro Leagues were a cracked mirror of the white major leagues – cracked in the sense that they lacked the financial base and resources of their white counterparts. Their stadiums were smaller and had fewer amenities, their equipment was often threadbare and old, and players’ salaries were low. But with respect to the level of play in the Negro Leagues, those white fans who were not blinded by racial animosity knew that dozens of its players could have easily been starters on any major league baseball team.

Perhaps the best known of the Negro Leagues players who were denied their shot at a place in the major league record books was Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige (he picked up the “Satchel” moniker during a stint as a railroad baggage handler). Almost everybody on both sides of the color line agreed that Paige was, flat out, the finest pitcher that ever lived. No hitter, white or black, ever got the best of him. Of course good batsmen would get the occasional hit – Paige was an immortal, but he wasn’t a god. Still, over the years no man ever was able to make the hits he got off of Paige exceed the strikeouts Paige administered to him.

Adding to Paige’s immense talent was a phenomenal intelligence and unbelievable physical longevity. Paige’s observations on life and baseball showed him to be a deeply insightful and witty man, with a great sense of irony and comic timing ("I never rush myself. See, they can't start the game without me."). His pitching arm, which lasted until he was 59*, was the strongest, most durable arm anybody ever saw in the sport. Paige once boasted that the more he threw, the stronger his arm became.

Attached to the awe people felt for his strength was controversy over how old Paige really was. The official record says he was born in 1906, but many believed that Paige may have been born sometime in the late 19^th century. Paige himself never really gave a clear answer, no doubt enjoying the attention as the controversy over his age whirled about him for years. He was often Delphic in his replies to direct questions about his age, telling one interrogator, “Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” 

An ironic demise

Jackie Robinson’s sensational 1947 season opened major league baseball to talented black players. Scouts eagerly began recruiting the Negro Leagues’ best athletes, creating an unsupportable drain on already strained franchises. It spelled their doom. Black fans, faithful during the years of segregation, began shifting their allegiances to the integrated major league teams. The Negro National League folded almost immediately, closing down in 1948. Some all-black semi-pro teams persisted, but by the mid 1950s, the old Negro Leagues were extinct. 

Despite his official age of 42, the Cleveland Indians signed Paige to their bullpen in 1948. He would go on to play for three major league teams, compiling a 28-31 record over six years. He finally officially retired as a player in 1965 – ostensibly at age 59 – after being asked to pitch three innings for the Kansas City A’s. But he would never play the Bigs in his prime, and to this day fans wonder what it might have been like if Joe DiMaggio had faced Paige during that glorious 1941 season when the Yankee Clipper hit safely in 56 straight games. 

At Cooperstown, NY, the Baseball Hall of Fame has a section set aside to honor and tell the story of the old Negro League players, 15 of whom were voted into the hall despite most of them never having officially played major league ball. While Cooperstown’s after-the-fact honoring of the Negro Leagues’ greatest players is laudable, it only tells a small part of the story. To understand the Negro Leagues as something much more than their legendary players, you have to go to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (NLBM) in Kansas City, MO. 

A 10,000-square-foot facility that opened in 1997 as part of a 50,000-square-foot cultural space anchored by the American Jazz Museum, the NLBM tells the whole story of the Negro Leagues, noting not just the superlative athletes but the yeoman players, the team owners and the loyal fans who sustained the leagues through several decades. Complementing the museum’s dedication to the preservation of Negro Leagues artifacts and an in-depth telling of their story, is its location in Kansas City’s 18^th and Vine neighborhood, which for years was the city’s historical center of African American life.  

By Patrick Totty