Remembering The Greatest Professional Baseball Pitcher Who Ever Lived

On July 7, 1906, the greatest pitcher ever to play professional baseball was born. No it wasn’t Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, Bob Gibson, or even Sandy Koufax. They were all great, but  the greatest pitcher ever to play professional baseball was named Leroy “Satchel” Paige. The great Joe DiMaggio once called Satchel Paige “the best and fastest pitcher I’ve ever faced.”

Page was not only a great pitcher but a consummate showman. More than once he’d call in his outfielders to the infield and then singlehandedly strike out the other side. During a Negro League World Series game in 1942, when he intentionally walked two batters so that he could face power hitter Josh Gibson with the bases loaded. Gibson was the Babe Ruth of the Negro leagues. Gibson was the only man in history (that includes MLB players) to hit a home run clear out of the old Yankee Stadium. For his World Series stunt, after loading the bases, Paige taunted Gibson and told him where he intended to place each throw, The great Josh Gibson struck out in three pitches.

Paige didn’t get to play in the major leagues until he was 42, because he was black and sadly before Jackie Robinson, baseball was all-white. Even at 42 his fastball could stun batters.

Before then he played in the Negro professional leagues and during the off-season pitched for teams in the Caribbean and Central and South America. As a barnstorming player who traveled thousands of miles each season and played for whichever team met his asking price, he pitched an estimated 2,500 games, had 300 shut-outs and 55 no-hitters. In one month in 1935, he reportedly pitched 29 consecutive games.

He played parts of six seasons in the major leagues his W-L  record was 28-31 and he had a 3.29 ERA (his last MLB pitch was thrown in 1965 when he was 59.  But stats don’t tell the story of this man who was kept out of the major leagues until he was in the declining years of his career.  From the stories if there was no restrictions against blacks in MLB, he would have been the greatest MLB pitcher ever.

Along with being a great pitcher, Leroy “Satchel” Paige was a master of home-spun philosophy. Some of his quotes are still famous. My favorite of which was, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

Some of his others were: