Sadder Than It Needed to Be
Did you ever read a biography and decide it was a good read only when it avoided the subject himself? I felt this way reading Mark Ribowsky's 1994 biography of Satchel Paige.
Perhaps the greatest control pitcher of any era, Paige won a lot of games as a barnstorming Negro League veteran and lasted long enough to play a decade in the Major Leagues after the color bar was dropped.
Yet old Satch made his fame truly outsized as much with his mouth. He told great stories and fed the press masterful sound bites that were equal parts whimsy and philosophy. "Don't look back, something might be gaining on you" was a famous one, the first half of which forms the title of Ribowsky's book. Yet a core thesis of this frustrating bio is how little Paige let people in on his real life.
"History has a hard, often cruel glare, and great men are never as great as they seem to be," Ribowsky notes in the introduction to Don't Look Back. "The lesson Satchel Paige never learned was that honesty could have been good for the soul, at least better for it than bitterness."
Certainly understanding his success as a pitcher proves elusive. Ribowsky has a frustrating back-and-forth manner in this and other matters. He notes with great sternness how the myth of the Negro Leagues as being a land of faulty record-keeping doesn't stand with the facts, yet he often pulls back from using those same records to make Satchel's case, noting Paige's entertaining tendency to push his own legend to absurd degrees. "Print the legend" is not Ribowsky's approach here, but in lieu of hard stats it is missed.
What, for example, was Paige's famous "hesitation pitch" all about? Those wanting details will have to settle for a spotty description of a ball that seemed to leave Paige's right hand an instant too late, thus discomfiting the batter at a crucial moment. How it differed from a slider or curveball, or how fast it came to the plate, are details Ribowsky doesn't exactly fill in.
Ribowsky's strongest focus on Paige's playing abilities is less athletic than tactical. He had the ability to give up big hits and still find ways to win with just the right pitch at the right moment. In an era where complete games were the norm, Paige was known for pitching in both games of a doubleheader.
This ability to outlast his foes gave him another weapon, boundless confidence. He once taunted Josh Gibson, the famed Negro League slugger and fellow future Hall-of-Famer, by telling him what he was going to throw before he threw it.
"I'm not gonna throw smoke at yo' yolk - I'm gonna throw a pea at your knee," Ribowsky quotes Paige telling Gibson before striking him out.
What, for example, was Paige's famous "hesitation pitch" all about? Those wanting details will have to settle for a spotty description of a ball that seemed to leave Paige's right hand an instant too late, thus discomfiting the batter at a crucial moment. How it differed from a slider or curveball, or how fast it came to the plate, are details Ribowsky doesn't exactly fill in.
Ribowsky's strongest focus on Paige's playing abilities is less athletic than tactical. He had the ability to give up big hits and still find ways to win with just the right pitch at the right moment. In an era where complete games were the norm, Paige was known for pitching in both games of a doubleheader.
This ability to outlast his foes gave him another weapon, boundless confidence. He once taunted Josh Gibson, the famed Negro League slugger and fellow future Hall-of-Famer, by telling him what he was going to throw before he threw it.
"I'm not gonna throw smoke at yo' yolk - I'm gonna throw a pea at your knee," Ribowsky quotes Paige telling Gibson before striking him out.
Paige was a unique character in many respects. For one thing, his fame was larger than the Negro Leagues well before World War II, when he went barnstorming in search of money. He played against white ballplayers as well as in other parts of the world where baseball was popular, impressing legends like Bob Feller and Dizzy Dean who spoke in open wonder of his talent. Dean went so far as to question why the sport wasn't making use of Paige in white ball, a comment which Ribowsky suggests had a good deal of cynicism to it.
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| Satchel Paige in the uniform of his best-known team, the Kansas City Monarchs. Paige played on a number of Negro League teams, as well as teams in Latin America, before the Major League color bar fell. Ribowsky's book charts Paige's meandering career. [Image from ebay.com] |
The book's biggest problem is a lack of Paige himself at the center. Ribowsky was too late to interview the subject, and seems wary of the things Paige was quoted as saying. Either he was too bitter or too polite, so Ribowsky sounds off instead, noting Paige's difficulties both with women and his teammates in building his case of a fractured man.
Paige certainly had critics, black and white. "Double Duty" Radcliffe, who earned his moniker by both pitching and catching in the Negro Leagues, spoke of Paige's chronic failure to show up:
He's bigger than the game, man. You can't find him and you can't fire him. What are you gonna do with him?
Other Negro League players were similarly withering in their takes on Paige. Ribowsky calls him a "semipariah" and gives plenty of space to a strange spectacle that took place during the 1942 East-West Game when Paige stopped the proceedings to claim he was misquoted in the press when he made remarks critical of Major League integration.
"I want you to know that I did not say anything against the use of Negro players in the big leagues," Paige told 45,000 spectators that night. Recalling a question about whether white players would play with them, "I told him I thought they would, but they if they wouldn't it might be a good idea to put a complete team in the majors." Paige won the night, as Ribowsky reports it, even though he lost the game.
Other Negro League players were similarly withering in their takes on Paige. Ribowsky calls him a "semipariah" and gives plenty of space to a strange spectacle that took place during the 1942 East-West Game when Paige stopped the proceedings to claim he was misquoted in the press when he made remarks critical of Major League integration.
"I want you to know that I did not say anything against the use of Negro players in the big leagues," Paige told 45,000 spectators that night. Recalling a question about whether white players would play with them, "I told him I thought they would, but they if they wouldn't it might be a good idea to put a complete team in the majors." Paige won the night, as Ribowsky reports it, even though he lost the game.
When Ribowsky leaves aside Paige, which he does for long stretches at a time, to discuss such matters as the precarious finances of the Negro Leagues or the shady characters who ran thing in "blackball," Don't Look Back becomes engaging, centered, and vibrant. Gibson, a heavy drinker and drug user who was tormented by demons, is in many ways this book's most compelling character, even if he only makes occasional walk-on appearances here.
Ribowsky also spends time on the Negro League magnates, hard fellows like Cum Posey and Gus Greenlee whose reputations for toughness weren't enough to stem the tide of encroaching irrelevance. It wasn't so much that Negro League baseball was second-class sport (they played night games before the Majors did and drew white fans while making players like Paige stars) so much as the basic flaw in the set-up, which Dizzy Dean pointed out when he noted the need to bring black players to the majors. Once they did, the Negro Leagues were living on borrowed time, ironic victims of their positive legacy.
When Don't Look Back makes its roundabout way back to Paige, the book becomes more particular, either dunning Paige for his bad attitude (he resented Jackie Robinson for getting in the Majors before him) or else calling out white journalists for telling his story in the patronizing tones of the day. Both are easy targets, but neither approach really gives us a feeling for Paige as anything other than someone we are better off knowing less about.
Ribowsky also spends time on the Negro League magnates, hard fellows like Cum Posey and Gus Greenlee whose reputations for toughness weren't enough to stem the tide of encroaching irrelevance. It wasn't so much that Negro League baseball was second-class sport (they played night games before the Majors did and drew white fans while making players like Paige stars) so much as the basic flaw in the set-up, which Dizzy Dean pointed out when he noted the need to bring black players to the majors. Once they did, the Negro Leagues were living on borrowed time, ironic victims of their positive legacy.
When Don't Look Back makes its roundabout way back to Paige, the book becomes more particular, either dunning Paige for his bad attitude (he resented Jackie Robinson for getting in the Majors before him) or else calling out white journalists for telling his story in the patronizing tones of the day. Both are easy targets, but neither approach really gives us a feeling for Paige as anything other than someone we are better off knowing less about.
That's not the book I was hoping to read here. Paige could be ornery, selfish, and a pill, but he was also an amazing character who changed the game he played like few before or since. Sometimes that Paige shows up to make a brief appearance, but "Don't Look Back" doesn't produce him nearly enough.
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