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at massmutual.com. This

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is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. A

0:24

recent New York Times Sports Page

0:26

headline reads, did Page throw nearly

0:28

eight times as many no-hitters as

0:30

Ryan? That would be

0:32

Negro Leagues pitcher Satchel Page and Major

0:34

League pitcher Nolan Ryan. That's

0:37

the kind of a question that's come

0:39

up recently since Major League Baseball announced

0:41

it would, for the first time, officially

0:43

include player statistics from the Negro Leagues

0:45

and its historical record. You

0:47

can get an argument about it, but some

0:50

believe the greatest pitcher who ever lived

0:52

was Leroy Satchel Page. In

0:54

his prime, it said his fastball was

0:56

so terrifying, some opposing batters would call

0:59

in sick. Our guest,

1:01

author Larry Ty, writes that in the 1940s, no

1:04

one was better known or more beloved

1:07

among black Americans, not Joe

1:09

Louis, not Count Basie, or Duke Ellington,

1:11

because Satchel was unstoppable on the

1:14

mound and because he played

1:16

and lived with such style and charm.

1:19

Satchel Page played his best seasons before

1:21

baseball was integrated, so he didn't get

1:23

the years and records in

1:25

the big leagues he might have, but he is in

1:27

the Hall of Fame and holds the record for being

1:29

the oldest player ever to throw a pitch in the

1:31

majors at age 59. Ty

1:34

says there's another story in Satchel's

1:36

rich and colorful life about

1:38

race in America and how Satchel's

1:41

barnstorming through American towns brought black

1:43

and white fans and players together

1:45

long before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's

1:48

color barrier. I spoke

1:50

to Larry Ty in 2009 when his biography was

1:54

called Satchel, The Life and Times of an

1:56

American Legend was first released. Larry

1:59

Ty, welcome back. to fresh air, I thought we

2:01

might begin by asking you

2:03

to just paint a little bit of a

2:05

picture of Satchel Paige in his prime. If

2:08

someone went to the ballpark, say in the

2:10

30s, when he really

2:12

had his career going,

2:14

just give us a little bit of a sense

2:16

of sort of what they would see, what made

2:19

him distinctive and special. Before

2:21

the game even started, everybody knew that you

2:23

wanted to come out early and watch Satchel.

2:25

And what you wanted to watch was he

2:28

would set up on home plate a

2:30

set of matches. And

2:33

he'd set up this tiny little matchbook

2:35

and he'd proceed to throw eight out

2:37

of ten pitches directly over the book.

2:40

Some days it might have been a postage

2:42

stamp, some days it might have been a

2:44

gum wrapper. It was tiny objects and he

2:46

did that for two reasons. One

2:49

was to delight fans and it always delighted

2:51

fans and they always showed up early to watch him

2:53

do something like that. The other was

2:55

he knew that opponents, whether it was

2:57

a Negro League team or local barnstormers

3:00

who had never seen him before, were

3:02

there early as well. They knew this was

3:04

the legendary Satchel Paige and they were watching

3:07

what he was doing. And when you watched

3:09

him burn these fastballs in

3:11

with this pinpoint accuracy that he could

3:13

actually get it directly over a book

3:16

of matches, it started

3:18

giving you precisely the second thoughts that Satchel

3:20

knew these shows would do. So he was

3:22

somebody who came early to watch and

3:25

you always got the show before the

3:27

show. His walk to the mound

3:29

was even distinctive, right? It

3:31

was. He actually did what was more

3:35

like a shuffle than a walk. He knew

3:37

that the game couldn't start until he got

3:39

there and he was darn well going to

3:41

take his time getting there, even

3:43

letting fans absorb this magic of this

3:46

guy who had arms so long that

3:48

it looked like they were touching the

3:50

ground, who had legs so

3:53

long that he had to take really

3:55

large steps just to avoid tripping over

3:57

his own legs, and who was

3:59

distinctive. and elegant enough

4:01

that anybody who watched had

4:04

to pay attention and had to be struck by him. And

4:07

his windup and delivery was like no one

4:09

else's too, right? It was indeed.

4:12

It was the famous

4:14

Satchel page pose, which

4:16

was winding up. It could

4:18

be a single, a double, or

4:20

a triple windmill windup. And imagine

4:23

what a windmill does turning over

4:25

and over. Satchel could

4:27

pitch underhanded. He could

4:29

pitch sidearm, and he could pitch his standard

4:31

overhand. Whatever he was doing, it

4:33

looked like his leg went so

4:35

high up into the air that it blacked out

4:37

the sky. His arm was so long

4:40

that it looked like it was in the pitcher's

4:42

face by the time he released the ball. And

4:44

he had a kind of catapult release

4:47

that sent the ball in at speeds that

4:50

people, they had no radar guns

4:52

then, but that people said had to be at least

4:54

100 to 105 miles an hour. So,

4:58

amazing athlete, but a real performer, and almost

5:01

a circus act. Yeah,

5:03

a circus act that understood that there

5:05

was a thin line between entertaining a

5:07

crowd and demeaning himself. And he would

5:09

never take it to the point where

5:11

he was doing anything to demean himself,

5:13

but he also understood that Negro League

5:15

Baseball was something that to attract fans,

5:17

and he attracted extraordinary numbers of fans,

5:19

record numbers of fans. To attract fans,

5:22

you had to be more than just

5:24

a brilliant pitcher. You had to be

5:26

a showman as well. He was as

5:28

sensational a showman as

5:30

I've ever seen or read or heard about

5:33

in the entire game of baseball. All

5:35

right, let's talk about his early life. He was

5:37

born, what, 1906? Is

5:40

that the established date now? That

5:42

is the established date. He was actually born on July 7, 1906.

5:46

In Mobile, Alabama, coastal city where it's –

5:48

and it's interesting that you describe in the

5:50

book that it was a place of considerable

5:52

racial tolerance before the turn of the century,

5:54

but became a hard-bitten and segregated place. Tell

5:56

us a little about kind of his family

5:59

and early life. Sure.

6:01

He was one of 12 children.

6:04

He was the seventh of 12 children. And

6:06

his early life was a situation where his

6:09

dad was almost never around. His dad was

6:11

somebody who liked to call himself a landscaper.

6:13

And what he in fact was, was

6:16

a gardener and generally an unemployed gardener.

6:18

His mom was a washer woman who

6:20

took in laundry from white families across

6:23

Mobile and tried to make a living,

6:25

but with 12 mouths to feed and

6:27

with no real help from her husband,

6:30

his mom had a really difficult time. So all the

6:32

kids from a very early age were taught that they

6:35

had to A, get

6:37

used to having nothing and B, for whatever

6:40

they did have in terms of food or

6:42

anything else, they had to go out and

6:44

earn it themselves. And he was out there

6:47

at the age of 9, 10, 11

6:49

at the railway station doing things that a

6:54

red cap would do. He was actually

6:56

pulling people's bags. He was collecting a

6:58

dime or a quarter per bag. And

7:00

that's where his name satchel came from. He had

7:03

discovered a system that he could

7:05

use pulleys and ropes to

7:08

carry two, three, sometimes even four bags at

7:10

a time. And the way that

7:12

he talked about where his name came from was

7:14

that friends looked at him and said, you look

7:17

like a walking satchel tree and

7:19

the name stuck immediately. But

7:21

as with everything with him, there were three or four versions

7:23

of the story. There were also

7:25

stories that you found of his skill

7:28

at hurling things, even as a young kid.

7:30

And this sort of brings up something that

7:32

you run into, I'm sure again and again

7:34

when you're researching his life is that he

7:38

did such prodigious things

7:41

at a time when there weren't the kind of

7:43

records and videos and internet stuff that there are

7:45

now to document them. It must be hard to

7:48

separate legend from fact. But

7:50

what did you come to believe about what

7:53

he'd done as a kid that proved

7:55

he had an amazing arm? I

7:58

came to believe that the stories that people...

8:00

people told, enough of them came from his

8:02

friends who were eyewitnesses and even taking account

8:04

for all the embellishments Satchel did and other

8:07

people did, I think he had an extraordinary

8:09

ability to aim

8:11

a rock or

8:13

a brick or a baseball and

8:16

get it to its target with the kind

8:18

of speed that was just beyond the pale.

8:21

One of the things that he was able to

8:23

do as a kid was with a rock he

8:25

was able to, at the distance

8:27

of a pitching mound, knock down a

8:29

chicken, he was able

8:32

to hit a squirrel, he was able

8:34

to do extraordinary things but he was best

8:36

and he really showed his skills as a

8:38

young boy when he was part

8:40

of a group of kids who lived near him

8:43

and they'd take on rival gangs

8:45

of kids and Satchel was

8:47

famous not just for being able to

8:50

hit the kid just where he wanted to

8:52

but in developing something that became his style

8:54

when he became a pitcher later on, what

8:56

he called the hesitation pitch. If

8:59

you were looking at the kids

9:01

who you were trying to have this rock throwing

9:04

contest with and if you threw

9:06

the rock at them it

9:09

was natural that they would duck and

9:11

you'd often miss them so what he

9:13

did was he'd lift his arm and

9:15

start to fling it and

9:17

he'd stop midway through and they ducked and

9:19

he'd wait for them to duck and then

9:21

they were literally a sitting duck and he'd

9:23

hit them and that was what he did

9:25

with batters over the years. His

9:27

hesitation pitch was hesitating mid delivery and then throwing

9:30

it in a way that threw the batter off

9:32

stride the same way it did the kids he

9:34

was throwing rocks at. Trevor Burrus Now a

9:36

critical turning point in his life was he

9:39

got into some petty crime, stole enough

9:41

stuff that he was finally sent away to

9:43

a reform school, Mount Migs, am I saying

9:45

that right? Robert Neff You are. Trevor Burrus

9:47

Yeah. Now tell us about this institution and

9:49

its place in the sociology of America at

9:51

the time. Robert Neff Sure. The

9:53

shortened name for the school was Mount Migs because that's

9:55

where it was in Mount Migs, Alabama. The

9:58

actual title of the school to me settled lot

10:00

about what was going on behind

10:02

its walls. It was called the

10:04

Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro

10:06

Lawbreakers. And the

10:08

school was set up along

10:11

the style dictated by Booker

10:13

T. Washington, which was the

10:15

movement of black self-help. Booker

10:17

T. Washington believed that segregation

10:20

was going to last, that there was

10:22

no point in contesting this Jim Crow

10:24

system. It was incumbent upon

10:26

young boys like Satchel Page to learn

10:28

how to get along with it. And

10:30

so it taught them industriousness. He was

10:32

working in the fields. He was milking

10:35

cows. He was working from

10:37

the time he got up in the morning to the time he

10:39

went to bed at night. But what he also got to

10:41

do in that time was do some

10:44

athletics. And they had the

10:46

kids doing everything from playing baseball to running

10:48

around just to burn off steam. And Satchel

10:50

learned during that time at Mount Migs that

10:53

he had an extraordinary ability to throw a

10:55

baseball. And he had a coach there who

10:58

recognized that ability and saw that this

11:00

could be the key to saving Satchel

11:03

from the life of crime that he had

11:05

entered into as a teenager and that had gotten him

11:07

into Mount Migs. So Satchel

11:10

Page gets out of this reform school with

11:12

a new sense of sort of discipline, self-worth,

11:15

and some more disciplined baseball skills

11:17

than he'd gone into. And soon he's getting

11:20

paid to play ball in Negro

11:22

League teams in Chattanooga and Birmingham. Tell us

11:24

a little bit about that life. He was

11:27

away from home as a young man. What

11:30

was the life like? Sure. He

11:32

spent his life partly in that

11:35

Negro League's world pitching against other

11:37

teams with extraordinarily skilled black

11:40

athletes. He spent the week,

11:42

often during the week when there weren't Negro

11:45

League games going on, he'd be out there

11:47

barnstorming around the country. And what that meant

11:49

was going to any small town that would

11:51

have him and playing against whether

11:53

it was a semi-pro team or whether it was

11:55

just a bunch of farmers who took an evening

11:57

off and put on a baseball glove.

12:00

and picked up a bat, they all wanted

12:02

to play. Satchel knew that was the way

12:04

to earn money, and he'd play anybody, anytime

12:07

he could. The normal top

12:10

athletes, normal top baseball players in the country

12:12

who were playing in the major leagues or

12:14

in the white minor leagues, might

12:17

play, if they were pitcher,

12:19

pitch every third, fourth, fifth

12:22

day. Satchel was pitching every day.

12:24

He was out there exercising his

12:26

arm, trying to earn a living,

12:28

doing it perpetually, and this

12:30

was what life was like for

12:32

black ball players, and it was like what

12:35

life was like for Satchel Page, who was the best of

12:37

them. At this point, Satchel

12:40

was moving around the country,

12:42

he and other Negro League players, in

12:45

a segregated world. What kind of

12:47

hardships and discrimination did

12:49

that present? It

12:52

presented the risk that anytime you went

12:54

into a new town in

12:57

the South, where there was this

12:59

system of very strict Jim Crow

13:01

racial segregation, that if you

13:03

walked into the wrong restaurant, or

13:06

you used the wrong bathroom, that

13:09

you could, and they were, often

13:12

arrested players on

13:15

Satchel's team, and on lots of other Negro

13:17

League teams were shot at. They

13:21

watched lynchings happen. There was

13:23

the risk of having to put

13:25

up with extraordinary abuse in terms of

13:28

fans yelling racial slurs at them, all

13:30

the way to the risk of losing

13:32

their life, because it was a time

13:35

when blacks were afforded few legal

13:37

rights, and knowing

13:39

the particular byways of

13:42

Jim Crow in every small town you

13:44

went was essential for a guy like

13:46

Satchel to stay alive. Now,

13:48

you're right that he was known for moving around

13:50

a lot. He would go

13:53

on these barnstorming tours, he would go to Latin

13:55

America, and he would also walk out on contracts

13:57

if some other team offered him a better deal.

14:00

He was an early athlete entrepreneur.

14:03

And there's a fascinating point in his story where

14:06

he ends up in, of all places, Bismarck, North

14:08

Dakota. Tell us what brought him there. Richard

14:10

S. Bismarck, Jr. – Sure. What brought him there

14:12

again was what brought him anywhere that he went,

14:14

which was the enticement of money. He

14:17

had walked out on his owner

14:19

at the Pittsburgh Courier as one of the

14:21

great Negro League teams. He had

14:23

just gotten married. He was in

14:25

need of extra money. And

14:28

a white owner named Churchill in

14:31

this town where there might have been

14:33

two or three blacks living in an

14:35

entire state of North Dakota, maybe

14:37

a handful, Satchel came in

14:40

and was extraordinary. He did exactly

14:43

what this guy Churchill had wanted.

14:45

He led the Bismarck team to

14:48

an extraordinary number of victories,

14:51

particularly over this nearby town,

14:53

Jamestown, North Dakota. And

14:55

Satchel was not the first Negro Leaguer to go to

14:57

Bismarck, but he was the one who brought attention of

15:00

the Negro Leagues, of the national press, and of everybody

15:02

else to what was going on in

15:05

these faraway communities. There was great

15:07

baseball happening in out-of-the-way parts of

15:10

America, and there was great integrated

15:12

baseball happening a decade and

15:14

more before the major leagues ever became integrated.

15:17

It was part of, for

15:19

him it was a way of earning money,

15:21

for the country it was a way of

15:23

testing out how integration might look on a

15:25

ball field long before the major league owners

15:27

were ready to integrate their teams. Trevor Burrus

15:29

And how did it work? How did he

15:31

get along with his white teammates? How did

15:33

the white fans in Bismarck react to him?

15:36

Robert L. Everybody

15:47

in Bismarck knew him. He was a celebrity

15:49

in town. He started out having

15:51

no idea how people would really react to

15:53

him. And he actually, when he first came

15:56

to town, he had to rent out an

15:58

old box car that was on

16:00

the side of the railroad tracks as

16:02

a place to live, because finding housing

16:05

was a really difficult thing for him to do there. Very

16:07

soon he became a celebrity in town. People would

16:09

rent their homes to him and open

16:12

up their hearts and their

16:14

wallets. They bet on him. The owner

16:16

of the Bismarck team made a lot of money by making

16:18

side bets on whether Satchelwood win or not, and he always

16:20

won. And he took Bismarck

16:22

to this regional tournament

16:25

that Bismarck at that time

16:27

was the best team semi-pro

16:29

level in the country, in large part because

16:31

of Satchel Page. Now,

16:34

as his fame grew and as

16:36

this barnstorming, these sort of ad hoc

16:38

games and tours, which

16:41

would pit him sometimes against white teams or

16:43

local teams, grew, he ended

16:46

up getting some white major leaguers involved,

16:49

collaborating on some of these barnstorming

16:51

tours. How did that happen? It

16:54

happened first with Dizzy Dean who was

16:57

the most famous of the

16:59

great white star athletes

17:03

who decided to team up with Satchel. And

17:05

Dizzy and Satchel realized that if they traveled

17:07

around the country and they did travel all

17:09

over the country playing games against one another,

17:11

that it would attract two kinds of people.

17:13

It would attract all the people who just

17:15

wanted to see the greatest of black and

17:17

white baseball play against one another. And it

17:19

also attracted people who had a problem with

17:23

the notion of integration and wanted to see

17:25

a face-off

17:27

between black heroes and white

17:29

heroes and saw it almost as a

17:31

little bit of a race battle or war. They

17:34

were willing to tap into whatever people's motivations were

17:36

for coming. What they knew was that they could

17:38

draw large numbers of fans and they made a

17:40

fortune on the thing. So these

17:43

white players and black players played out of

17:45

mutual self-interest. There was money to be made,

17:47

but it had social implications and impacts, and

17:49

I wanna talk about that a little bit.

17:51

I mean, one

17:53

thing was that the white players got, they

17:56

had to at least have some interaction with these ball

17:58

players as they planned the trips. as they

18:00

played. Did

18:03

that change, do you think, white attitudes

18:05

about black ballplayers among the players, among

18:07

the umpires, among the coaches? I

18:10

think it changed them extraordinarily. I think that you

18:13

don't have to look any further than Dizzy Dean

18:15

to see that. Dizzy Dean was a good old

18:17

boy who wasn't beyond all

18:20

kinds of racial slurs that were a

18:23

part of his natural language. He

18:26

grew to adore Satchel. They

18:29

would try to outdo one another, not just

18:31

pitching on the field but telling stories. There

18:34

was a great story once in

18:36

Dayton, Ohio, where Dizzy hit a

18:39

blooper to first base and ended

18:41

up making his way eventually to third base

18:44

with nobody out. Fans

18:46

started yelling for

18:49

Dizzy when he was on

18:51

third base and wanted him to score. Satchel,

18:53

in his wonderful way, he would always decide

18:56

to just sort of take a temporary respite

18:59

from his time on the mound and go out

19:01

and talk to people who were on the bases.

19:04

Umpires let him get away with extraordinary things. He

19:06

walked over to Dizzy and he said, I hope

19:08

your friends brought plenty to eat, because if they're

19:10

waiting for you to score, they'll be here past

19:13

dark. You ain't going no further.

19:16

Nobody out at the time, and Satchel proceeded like he

19:18

always did. He would boast and then he would

19:20

back up his boast. He fanned the next

19:22

three ballplayers and Dizzy was stranded there on

19:24

third base. Dizzy said,

19:26

and again, this is this good

19:28

old boy who had no

19:31

love for blacks generally and really had

19:33

never known any black the way he

19:35

did Satchel, Dizzy said that if

19:37

Satchel and I played together, we'd clinch the

19:39

pennant by the 4th of July and we

19:41

could go fishing till the World Series. He

19:43

said between us, we'd win 60 games. So

19:47

they had this extraordinary friendship and yet there was

19:50

another dimension to it and the

19:52

dimension that essentially when

19:54

they got done with their barnstorming games,

19:57

Dizzy would go back to Broadway and Satchel

19:59

would. go back to outer Mongolia playing in

20:01

the Negro Leagues where very few people were

20:03

watching him. And Satchel said,

20:06

they used to say that Diz and I

20:08

were about as alike as two tadpoles,

20:11

but Diz was in the majors and I was

20:13

bouncing around the peanut circuit. And

20:15

he watched all of these guys who he made friends with,

20:18

whether it was Dizzy Dean or Bob

20:20

Feller or Joe DiMaggio, he watched

20:22

them take off and

20:24

their careers soar. And he

20:27

watched himself stuck playing in this shadow world

20:29

when he knew he was their equal. He

20:31

had proven it on the baseball field. Larry

20:34

Tye recorded in 2009 when

20:37

his book, Satchel, A Life and Times

20:39

of an American Legend, was first published.

20:42

We'll hear more after a break. And

20:44

Justin Chang will review the new film

20:46

Inside Out 2, the sequel to Disney

20:48

Pixar's animated film about the emotional life

20:50

of a girl named Riley. This

20:53

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22:22

eyes. What

22:25

about the interaction among fans and

22:27

the fact that, you know, these Negro

22:30

ball players would move into town, to

22:32

go through towns, and they constantly confronted

22:34

finding places to eat, finding places to

22:36

stay. Did their

22:38

interactions with fans and others who knew they were,

22:41

after all, you know, guys of some note, in

22:43

some cases celebrities, did that help to break down

22:45

or at least soften any racial barriers

22:47

in the towns they played? It

22:50

did two different kinds of things. In

22:52

some towns, it absolutely softened the racial

22:54

barriers. One, part of his condition

22:56

for bringing his barnstorming team to a town, and

22:58

this is where I think he was, a quiet

23:00

racial pioneer, he said, I'm not going to bring

23:02

him to town unless there's somewhere for

23:04

them to stay and somewhere for them to eat.

23:07

And this was in these all-white towns, particularly when

23:09

he was barnstorming through the south. It

23:12

presented a huge challenge at that time because there

23:14

often weren't places where they could stay or eat.

23:16

But he wouldn't come unless they were. He sort of set

23:19

that as a condition. At

23:21

times watching him on the ball

23:23

field, I think had the effect

23:25

in terms of people that I talked to who

23:27

were part of those games and people in the

23:29

towns that watched him come through, had the effect,

23:32

the way he dazzled them off the field

23:35

ended up translating, if not breaking down their

23:37

racial stereotypes, at least softening things. And at

23:39

other times, it did nothing like that. At

23:41

other times, he would play on the field

23:43

with them and then try to go into

23:46

their store after the game. The very people

23:48

who were there watching him and cheering for

23:50

him wouldn't serve him. So

23:53

it was both. Being, sort of

23:56

pushing these racial limits at

23:58

times proved incredibly productive. and

24:00

other times it was amazingly frustrating for him

24:03

and for a guy who never let himself get

24:05

down, at times he just couldn't help it. And

24:08

he made quite a lot of money really

24:10

going back even to the 20s and spent

24:13

it just as quickly, right? He loved cars,

24:15

he loved great suits, right? He

24:17

did. In fact, in the 1940s he

24:19

was making $40,000 a year. And

24:22

to put that into context, it was four

24:24

times what the average player in

24:26

the New York Yankees was making. It

24:28

was precisely what the Bronx Bombers were

24:31

paying Joe DiMaggio. It was

24:33

twice what Ted Williams, the batting champ,

24:35

was making. He was making extraordinary amounts

24:37

of money. He was making enough money

24:39

that he actually had one

24:42

closet just for his shoes, four

24:44

closets for his suits. He

24:47

had a black Lincoln, a blue

24:49

Caddy, a Jeep, a

24:51

Chevy truck, two trailers for cameras,

24:53

15 shotguns.

24:56

It was amazing what he had

24:59

done in terms of the money that he

25:01

was able to accrue. The difference though between

25:03

what he was making and what the great

25:05

white stars of that era were making was

25:07

that he had to work year round and

25:09

pitch nearly every night. Whereas

25:12

if you were a white major leaguer like

25:14

DiMaggio or Williams, you took the winter off.

25:17

Let's talk a little bit about him as a ball player. We've

25:20

already described his unique delivery, huge

25:22

long arms, big legs, a huge

25:24

high leg kick and then a

25:27

delivery which had all different kinds of

25:29

variations. He actually had a lot of

25:31

colorful names for his pitches, right? He

25:33

did indeed. He

25:36

called his pitches everything from

25:38

bloopers, loopers and droopers to

25:41

his wonderful barber pitch which was where

25:43

he intended to give a batter a

25:46

razor shave if they stepped in too

25:48

close. He had what he called

25:50

his titty pitch where he nipped the chest of

25:53

the opposing hitter. He had a nightmare pitch which

25:55

he said he had stayed up all night dreaming

25:57

up. He had his fastest

25:59

pitch. was a long tom, his slightly

26:01

softer pitch was a little tom. He

26:04

could pitch a curve ball in his

26:06

later years with great accuracy. He could

26:08

pitch a knuckle ball. But the extraordinary

26:10

thing with all of his names, his

26:13

catcher said, they're all really the same thing.

26:15

He's got a faster pitch. He's

26:17

got a little bit slower pitch. And

26:19

in his early days, that was all he needed.

26:22

He then refined it later with his

26:24

curve ball and his knuckle ball. But in the

26:26

early days, it was fast, faster, and fastest. He

26:29

was also a real student of the game, right? He

26:32

was indeed. And he had an

26:34

amazing memory, not for the faces

26:37

of the opposing batters, but from

26:39

their batting stance. And

26:41

one day, Bill Vek, who was the owner

26:43

who brought him to the major leagues in

26:45

his Cleveland, for his Cleveland Indians team, and

26:47

later rescued him and brought him back to

26:49

other teams, Vek had a

26:51

photographer snap shots of 25 hitters standing

26:55

in a batter's box with just

26:57

their hips showing. He

26:59

painted out all the ID marks and

27:01

showed this pitcher of just these sort

27:03

of from the chest down to

27:06

all the pitchers on his team. Satchel

27:08

picked 18 of them out.

27:10

He could identify them just from their batting

27:12

stance. And the next best of Vek's pitchers

27:14

got just six. That was the way he

27:17

could identify how they were going to hit

27:19

against him and remember how to pitch them

27:21

so they couldn't hit against him. Somebody

27:23

with that kind of eye for detail and memory

27:25

would make a great coach or manager, which, of

27:28

course, he was never allowed to do because once

27:30

baseball was integrated, it was a long time before

27:32

blacks were allowed to manage. No,

27:34

he was only brought in as a pitching

27:36

coach briefly for the Atlanta Braves when they

27:38

had just moved to Atlanta. And this was

27:40

because the owner of the Braves was rescuing

27:42

him. He needed another year to qualify for

27:44

Major League pension. So he was brought in

27:46

for this time. But Satchel had always said

27:48

to baseball, you give me all these

27:51

honors, show what you really mean

27:53

if you are truly willing to integrate

27:55

and hire me as a manager. That

27:57

was his dream. And nobody ever offered.

28:00

had actually said at one point that he would

28:02

pay half the salary if somebody would bring Satchel

28:04

in as a manager and still he got no

28:06

offers. Larry Tei recorded in 2009.

28:10

His book is Satchel, The Life and Times

28:13

of an American Legend. We'll hear

28:15

more after this short break. This

28:17

is Fresh Air. David Lynch's

28:19

films explore dark themes, but

28:21

in a rare interview on Wild Card this week

28:24

he says he's remarkably content and

28:26

you can be too. We're

28:28

supposed to be like little dogs where the tail

28:30

is wagging and being happy. Little smiles on her

28:33

face all day long. This is the way it's

28:35

supposed to be. I'm Rachel Martin.

28:37

Join us on NPR's Wild Card

28:39

Podcast, the game where cards control

28:41

the conversation. What

28:43

does it sound like to record an album

28:45

inside a jail? On the

28:48

documentary podcast Track Change, you'll hear

28:50

four men make music inside Richmond

28:52

City Jail and hear how they're

28:54

trying to break free from a

28:56

cycle of addiction and incarceration. Listen

29:02

to Track Change from Narratively and VPM,

29:04

part of the NPR network. From

29:07

the campaigns to the conventions from now

29:09

through election day and beyond, the NPR

29:12

Politics Podcast has you covered. As Joe Biden

29:14

and Donald Trump square off again, we bring

29:16

you the latest news from the trail and

29:18

dive deep into each candidate's goals for a

29:21

second term. Listen to the NPR

29:23

Politics Podcast every weekday. For

29:27

many years, various major league owners

29:29

had expressed an interest in trying to get

29:32

Satchel into a big league uniform. It didn't

29:34

happen. Then

29:36

Jackie Robinson was the one who broke

29:38

the color barrier when the Brooklyn Dodgers

29:41

owner Branch Rickey brought him in. It

29:44

was a big moment for America and of course for baseball. First

29:47

of all, why wasn't it Satchel? It

29:49

wasn't Satchel for a number of reasons. One

29:52

reason was that he

29:55

was considered too unpredictable.

29:58

He was wonderfully quotable. things

30:00

were often outrageous and this is not the

30:02

kind of guy that Branch Rickey was looking

30:04

for when he was looking for the first

30:06

ball player to integrate. He wanted somebody who

30:08

was controllable. He also wanted somebody who was

30:10

cheap and Satchel was demanding the kinds of

30:12

dollars that Rickey didn't want to pay. But

30:14

maybe most of all it was because of

30:16

Satchel's age. When Rickey was looking around, Satchel

30:19

was 39 years old. He was in 1945

30:23

having for him what was a mediocre year and

30:25

it just didn't look like he was the guy to

30:28

come in and take this extraordinary

30:32

barrier bursting step of being the first

30:34

to integrate. Trevor Burrus So when Branch

30:37

Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers

30:39

brings Jackie Robinson in, how did Satchel

30:42

feel about it? Richard What

30:56

he said to start with, but that's not what he really

30:58

felt. Later his

31:00

reaction was, I'm the guy who

31:02

started all that big talk about letting us

31:04

in the big leagues. And he

31:06

said that being denied this chance to be

31:09

the first was, as he put it, when

31:11

somebody you love dies or something

31:13

dies inside of you. He

31:16

knew that the only reason Rickey

31:18

turned to the Kansas City Monarchs,

31:20

which is where he found Jackie

31:22

Robinson, was because Satchel had signed

31:24

a spotlight on the Kansas City

31:26

Monarchs. He knew that Jackie had

31:28

started out that year as a

31:31

second-string second baseman and was only

31:33

playing with the Monarchs as

31:35

a first-stringer because the second baseman had gotten

31:37

injured. And he felt that Jackie

31:39

had never put in his time. He

31:41

hadn't done the coast-to-coast barnstorming.

31:44

He didn't understand what it was

31:46

really like to take the incredible

31:48

abuse that Satchel had been suffering

31:50

for 20 years. And

31:52

he felt that it was something that he had

31:54

earned and Jackie hadn't. And

31:56

what did Jackie Robinson think of Satchel Page?

32:00

Not much. He thought that Satchel

32:02

was really old school and

32:05

that he was the kind of

32:07

guy who was unpredictable, who

32:09

was a drinker

32:11

and a womanizer. He thought all the things essentially

32:13

that Branch Rickey did and he didn't have a

32:15

whole lot of tolerance for the Negro Leagues generally.

32:18

Jackie had only been on the Negro Leagues for

32:20

a while and he was relatively disparaging of it

32:22

and he didn't think a whole lot of this

32:24

symbol of the Negro Leagues

32:27

legend Satchel Page. One

32:29

of the things you write when you're talking about this moment

32:32

in the story of Race

32:34

in America is that Satchel

32:36

Page looks a lot like

32:38

Steppenfetchit to many blacks of his

32:40

era and later ones. Now, I

32:42

guess for some listeners who don't

32:44

really remember Steppenfetchit, explain who he

32:46

was and why Satchel Page evoked

32:48

that character. Steppenfetchit

32:51

was a guy who

32:53

was a stage actor who's

32:55

whole routine was built around the notion

32:58

of a shuffling, subservient

33:00

black man. It was

33:02

something that at the time was popular

33:05

in the black community as well as the white community because

33:08

he was an

33:10

extraordinarily good actor and he was clearly

33:12

putting on this role, but blacks

33:15

were used to being in a

33:17

subservient position. This was an embarrassment

33:19

to a lot of younger blacks

33:22

just as Satchel Page was. It

33:25

was very sad to me because I

33:27

think that Satchel understood the limits

33:30

of his putting on a shuffling

33:32

personality and he understood that he

33:34

was first his attempt

33:37

was with white fans to disarm them,

33:39

to come in and look like he

33:41

was walking slowly, languidly to

33:43

the mound and to

33:46

maybe entertain them with throwing the balls over

33:48

a matchbook or all of these things, but

33:50

once he had disarmed them, he

33:52

dazzled them with his pitching.

33:54

Jackie didn't understand that

33:57

it was necessary to do both. The disarming part,

33:59

the idea of disarming idea of winning over an

34:01

audience to get white fans there in the first

34:03

place was something that Jackie had never had to

34:05

live through. He came up at a time at

34:07

the end of the Negro League era and he

34:10

helped open this door to integration that

34:12

he clearly had to suffer all kinds of abuse

34:14

Jackie did when he first integrated the major leagues.

34:16

But it was a very different world that he

34:18

was living in than the Jim Crow world that

34:20

Satchel had grown up in and spent

34:23

20 years as a star pitcher in.

34:25

So what he had to

34:27

do was to at first appear unthreatening and then

34:30

by being a great athlete, win them over. Absolutely.

34:33

He had to appear unthreatening and

34:36

to people of a later generation who were

34:38

unschooled in that whole era of Jim Crow, it

34:41

looked like that he was

34:43

bowing to white's expectations of blacks

34:45

when in fact he was exceeding

34:48

and defying those expectations. How conscious

34:50

was his act in that way?

34:54

I think that it looked like a natural

34:56

act and it looked like this was something

34:58

that sort of came easily to him. But

35:00

I think that he was very conscious about

35:02

what he was doing. When he said to

35:04

those teams that they were playing in these

35:07

small towns across America, I won't come there

35:09

unless you will serve me and my players

35:11

at your restaurants and find the place for

35:13

us to stay. He was in his

35:15

own quiet way very openly defying the

35:18

Jim Crow standards that he had grown up with

35:20

and it was very difficult to do at that

35:22

time. There were very few Negro Leaguers with the

35:24

statue or the courage to do it in the

35:26

way that Satchel did and it was just a

35:28

very difficult environment Satchel had come from. For

35:32

years, a few major league

35:34

owners had talked about trying to get

35:36

Satchel into a big league uniform. It

35:39

didn't happen until after Jackie Robinson broke the

35:41

color barrier. But then finally Satchel gets his

35:43

chance at the age of 42. Bill

35:46

Vek, the owner of the Cleveland Indians, signs him

35:48

to a contract. After all these years, how did

35:50

he measure up in the big leagues? Well,

35:53

I want to just give you a couple numbers. Baseball

35:56

is all about numbers and Satchel pitched for

35:58

half a season. He helped take... the

36:00

Indians to the pennant and eventually they

36:02

won the World Series that year. He

36:05

ended up with a six and one record which

36:07

was the highest percentage of wins

36:09

of anybody on that pennant winning staff

36:11

on the Indians. He had an earned

36:13

run average of 2.47 which

36:16

is extraordinary in these days or any

36:18

day. It's extraordinarily low. It means that

36:20

you score only 2.47 runs

36:23

on average for every nine innings you pitch

36:25

which means you're giving your team

36:27

a chance to win every time you're out there. That

36:30

was the second best ERA in

36:32

the entire American League and at age

36:34

42 he actually won

36:37

12 votes from Associated Press

36:39

writers as rookie of the year. He

36:43

played for several teams, did some

36:45

starting assignments and did some relief assignments and

36:47

did respectively and moved around, didn't always fit

36:50

in, didn't go by team rules as was

36:52

his want. And he was Satchel Paige. And

36:56

many years later in 1971 he

37:00

finally makes – is it inducted

37:02

into the Hall of Fame after a long, long

37:04

debate about whether black players who had

37:06

accomplished things in the Negro Leagues deserve to

37:08

be at Cooperstown. Tell us about what

37:12

it – what did it mean to Satchel to finally

37:14

make the Hall of Fame? Well, first

37:16

I got to tell you that when he finally in 1971 made

37:18

the Hall of Fame, he was

37:20

the first player in the country to make the Hall

37:22

based not on his record in the Major Leagues but

37:24

based on his record in the Negro Leagues. This

37:27

was an extraordinary honor. But the

37:29

Hall of Fame initially said, we're going to bring

37:32

you into the Hall of Fame but we're going to put you

37:34

in a separate corridor. And there

37:36

was such an outcry from the press and

37:38

from fans who said, geez, this guy had

37:40

to play his baseball in a segregated world

37:42

and you're now talking about segregating the Hall

37:45

of Fame. It's just amazing. You

37:47

mean there would be like there would be the regular Major League

37:50

players and then there would be a separate room for Negro League

37:52

players? There would be. They would

37:54

have had a separate and clearly

37:56

unequal room for Negro Leaguers.

38:00

Natural let other people at that point

38:02

protest that. What he said

38:04

was, this is the proudest moment of my life

38:06

and it's just amazing. He was finally

38:08

not just being able to play

38:11

in an integrated baseball world, but he was

38:13

being honored by the denizens

38:16

of baseball for all the years that he

38:19

had played in the shadow world of the

38:21

Negro Leagues. He eventually

38:23

was put into, they broke down

38:25

that notion of having a segregated

38:27

area for the Negro Leaguers and he was in

38:30

the real Hall of Fame with everybody else. But

38:32

he didn't care what part of it he was

38:34

in, he just cared that finally the white baseball

38:36

world was acknowledging how great he had been in

38:38

all those years when they didn't pay attention to

38:40

him. One

38:42

more baseball story we have to talk about and

38:45

this is something I've never seen. I've never seen

38:47

anything remotely like this in my life of watching

38:49

baseball and that is satchel for

38:52

to demonstrate how good he was or

38:54

to win a bet or to humiliate

38:56

an opponent would actually have his fielders

38:59

leave the game and let him finish

39:01

off the batter alone. He

39:03

did indeed. The first time he did

39:05

it was when he was in Mobile playing with

39:07

a semi-pro team called the Down the Bay Boys

39:10

and his teammates had made three straight

39:12

errors and he basically wanted to show

39:14

them up. Even though the bases were

39:16

loaded and he was leading just one

39:18

to nothing, they were two outs

39:21

in the ninth inning and he said, come on

39:23

in to the outfielders and they

39:25

sat around in the infield while

39:27

he had these batters facing

39:29

him and the knowing that any pitch

39:31

hit out of the infield was

39:33

an automatic home run. So

39:36

two outs in the ninth batter up, three

39:39

strikes, point made. He

39:42

did it again and again. Sometimes with

39:44

Jesse outfielders they'd sit around in the infield talking

39:46

to one another, playing poker

39:48

or at least pretending to. Sometimes

39:51

he actually had not just his outfielders sit

39:53

down but he brought in his infielders and

39:55

left the entire field with just he and

39:58

his catcher and he did it. not

40:00

just when he knew he was playing

40:02

second-rate opponents, but he did it against

40:04

big leaguers like Jimmy Fox and

40:07

other people who he knew had

40:10

extraordinary hitting prowess. But he was out there to make

40:12

a point, whether it was a point to the opponents

40:14

on how good he was, a point

40:16

to his teammates on how good he was, or

40:18

a point to people who had made a racial slur, which

40:21

is often when he did this. He

40:23

did it in a way that nobody else had

40:25

ever conceived of doing it in these situations before.

40:27

And he talked about it more often, and he

40:29

fanned his own legend with it. Larry

40:32

Tei, thanks so much for spending some time with us. Thanks

40:34

for having me. Larry

40:37

Tei recorded in 2009 speaking about his book, Satchel,

40:40

The Life and Times of an American

40:43

Legend. Tei's latest book

40:45

is The Jazzman, How Duke

40:47

Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count

40:49

Basie Transformed America. Coming

40:52

up, Justin Chang reviews the new film,

40:54

Inside Out II, the sequel to Disney

40:56

Pixar's animated film about the emotional life

40:59

of a girl named Riley. This

41:01

is Fresh Air. There's a lot to

41:03

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42:08

Nine years after Inside Out became

42:10

one of Pixar's most successful animated

42:12

features, a new sequel takes us

42:14

back inside the mind of a girl named

42:17

Riley. In Inside Out 2,

42:19

Riley is now 13, and

42:21

she and her five emotions —

42:23

joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust

42:25

— are about to experience puberty.

42:28

The movie opens today in theaters, and

42:30

our film critic Justin Chang has this review.

42:34

As Inside Out 2 gets underway, things

42:37

are looking up for Riley, the hockey-loving

42:39

kid who moved with her parents from

42:42

Minnesota to San Francisco in the first

42:44

Inside Out. She's adjusted

42:46

to her new life, school and friends, and

42:49

her five personified emotions, who

42:52

share the high-tech headquarters of her

42:54

brain, have learned to work together

42:56

in relative harmony. Joy,

42:58

voiced by Amy Poehler, is

43:01

still mostly in charge, but now

43:03

she and sadness, the

43:05

incomparable Phyllis Smith, make a

43:07

great team, along with the

43:10

other key emotions — anger, fear, and

43:12

disgust. But now Riley

43:14

is 13, which means

43:16

pimples, growth spurts, and a much

43:19

more complicated emotional life. The

43:22

director Kelsey Mann, taking over

43:24

for the first film's Pete Docter, cleverly

43:27

dramatizes the onset of puberty

43:29

as a huge disruption for Joy and

43:31

company, who don't know why

43:34

their usual routine is suddenly

43:36

causing Riley to undergo wild mood

43:38

swings. In this scene,

43:41

Joy sees that the team's command

43:43

console has turned an unfamiliar color,

43:46

and learns that a new emotion has joined

43:49

headquarters — anxiety, voiced

43:52

by a terrific Maya Hawk.

44:00

Hello, everybody. Oh, my gosh.

44:03

I am just such a huge fan of yours. And

44:06

now here I am meeting you face to

44:08

face. OK, how can I help? Uh, I

44:11

can take notes, get coffee, manage your calendar, walk your

44:13

dog, carry your things, watch you sleep. Wow,

44:15

you have a lot of energy. Maybe

44:18

you could just stay in one place. Anything.

44:21

Just call my name and I'm here for you. OK, love

44:23

that. And what was your name again? Oh, I'm

44:25

sorry. I can get ahead of myself. I'm anxiety. I'm

44:27

one of Riley's new emotions, and we

44:29

are just super jazzed to be here. Where can

44:31

I put my stuff? Uh, what do you mean,

44:33

we? Yes, anxiety has

44:35

brought along her own team of emotions.

44:38

They're basically the three E's, envy,

44:41

unwee, and embarrassment, voiced

44:44

by Ayo Edebiri, Adele Exarchopoulos,

44:47

and Paul Walter Hauser. Some

44:49

of this stretches conceptual credibility. Surely

44:52

this isn't the first time in her life that

44:55

Riley has experienced some of those

44:57

feelings. But that's part of

44:59

the whimsical pleasure of the Inside Out

45:01

films. It's fun to feel

45:03

your own brain arguing with how it's represented.

45:06

It's also fun to see new regions

45:08

of Riley's mental landscape, like

45:10

the giant ravine that fuels her

45:13

contemptuous side. Naturally, it's

45:15

called the S.A.R. Chasm. The

45:18

story kicks into gear when Riley is

45:21

sent to an elite three-day hockey camp,

45:23

where she's forced to make some tough decisions, like

45:26

whether to stick with her two closest friends

45:29

or hang out with the cool older kids.

45:32

As the pressure on Riley mounts and

45:35

the competition gets more cutthroat, it's

45:37

anxiety who emerges as the

45:40

movie's villain. Hawk does

45:42

a great job of making the character's polite

45:44

bundle of nerves routine a little

45:46

more annoying and sinister in

45:49

every scene. Anxiety

45:51

basically engineers a hostile takeover

45:54

of Riley's mind, banishing

45:56

joy, sadness, fear, anger, and

45:58

disgust. to the

46:00

outskirts of consciousness, and

46:02

setting out to mold Riley into a more

46:05

successful version of herself. What

46:07

she's unwittingly doing is making

46:09

Riley more ambitious and

46:11

conniving. Inside

46:13

Out 2, in other words, is

46:16

something of an anti-stress movie, where

46:18

unchecked drivenness can destroy a person's

46:21

true sense of self. It's

46:24

hard to argue with that, but it's

46:26

also hard not to push back a little. This

46:29

isn't the first Pixar movie that's tried to teach

46:31

us to lighten up and let things go, a

46:34

lesson that dates as far back as the

46:36

first Toy Story. But it's

46:38

always struck me as a bit rich

46:40

coming from Pixar, given the

46:43

hyper-ambition and perfectionism that have

46:45

long defined the studio's brand.

46:48

Fortunately, there is a better, deeper

46:50

message at the heart of Inside

46:52

Out 2 that encourages

46:54

us to take a more expansive view

46:56

of ourselves, to acknowledge

46:58

that we all have the capacity for

47:01

good and bad. As

47:03

in the first movie, the goal is

47:05

to strive for balance, embrace complexity, and

47:08

learn to be okay with imperfection.

47:12

I'm trying to do that myself with Inside Out

47:14

2, which despite its many

47:16

pleasures is a pretty imperfect

47:18

movie. It isn't nearly

47:21

as emotionally overwhelming as its predecessor, but

47:23

how could it be? The

47:25

first Inside Out was a piercing

47:28

lament for childhood's end, with

47:30

joy and sadness as frenemy

47:32

dynamic as its irresistible core.

47:35

Now, Riley's older and

47:37

maturing, and it's natural

47:40

that her latest adventure should hit us differently.

47:43

But there are also some bewildering choices

47:45

here that suggest the story could

47:47

have used, well, a rethink. There's

47:50

one overlong sequence in

47:52

which Joy and her friends encounter

47:54

memories of old cartoon and video

47:57

game characters buried deep in Riley's

47:59

mind. It's a cheap gag,

48:01

and it almost pulled me out of the

48:03

movie entirely. And

48:05

there's a recurring joke involving Riley's

48:08

sense of nostalgia that strikes a

48:10

weirdly sour note. Ironically,

48:13

it made me feel a little

48:15

nostalgic myself, for the

48:17

days when Pixar would have known to leave a

48:19

bit like that on the cutting

48:21

room floor. Justin

48:23

Chang is a film critic at The New

48:26

Yorker. He reviewed the new Pixar animated feature

48:28

Inside Out 2. On

48:30

Monday's show, we speak with comic and

48:32

actor Hannah Einbinder. She's co-starred

48:35

in the hit show Hacks for the

48:37

last three seasons, playing a young writer

48:39

in a love-hate relationship with her boss,

48:41

a veteran comedian played by Gene Smart.

48:44

Einbinder also has a new special

48:46

on Max called Everything Must Go.

48:49

I hope you can join us. Fresh

48:59

Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

49:01

Our senior producer today is Roberta

49:03

Shorrock. Our technical director

49:05

and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with

49:07

additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman,

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Julian Hertzfeld, and Al Banks. Our

49:12

interviews and reviews are produced

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and edited by Amy Sallett,

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Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam

49:19

Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman,

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Theresa Madden, Taya Chaloner, Susan

49:23

Yakundi, Joel Wolfram, and Kayla

49:25

Lattimore. Our digital media producer

49:27

is Molly Seavey and Esper. For

49:29

Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm

49:31

Dave Davies. Hey,

49:35

this is Elsa Chang from NPR,

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