Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend

Written by Larry Tye

Narrated by Dominic Hoffman

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The superbly researched, spellbindingly told story of athlete, showman, philosopher, and boundary breaker Leroy “Satchel” Paige

“Among the rare biographies of an athlete that transcend sports . . . gives us the man as well as the myth.”—The Boston Globe

Few reliable records or news reports survive about players in the Negro Leagues. Through dogged detective work, award-winning author and journalist Larry Tye has tracked down the truth about this majestic and enigmatic pitcher, interviewing more than two hundred Negro Leaguers and Major Leaguers, talking to family and friends who had never told their stories before, and retracing Paige’s steps across the continent. Here is the stirring account of the child born to an Alabama washerwoman with twelve young mouths to feed, the boy who earned the nickname “Satchel” from his enterprising work as a railroad porter, the young man who took up baseball on the streets and in reform school, inventing his trademark hesitation pitch while throwing bricks at rival gang members.

Tye shows Paige barnstorming across America and growing into the superstar hurler of the Negro Leagues, a marvel who set records so eye-popping they seemed like misprints, spent as much money as he made, and left tickets for “Mrs. Paige” that were picked up by a different woman at each game. In unprecedented detail, Tye reveals how Paige, hurt and angry when Jackie Robinson beat him to the Majors, emerged at the age of forty-two to help propel the Cleveland Indians to the World Series. He threw his last pitch from a big-league mound at an improbable fifty-nine. (“Age is a case of mind over matter,” he said. “If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”)

More than a fascinating account of a baseball odyssey, Satchel rewrites our history of the integration of the sport, with Satchel Paige in a starring role. This is a powerful portrait of an American hero who employed a shuffling stereotype to disarm critics and racists, floated comical legends about himself–including about his own age–to deflect inquiry and remain elusive, and in the process methodically built his own myth. “Don’t look back,” he famously said. “Something might be gaining on you.” Separating the truth from the legend, Satchel is a remarkable accomplishment, as large as this larger-than-life man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
• Release date: Jun 9, 2009
• ISBN: 9780739384640

Larry Tye

Larry Tye is the New York Times bestselling author of Bobby Kennedy and Satchel, as well as Demagogue, Superman, The Father of Spin, Home Lands, and Rising from the Rails, and coauthor, with Kitty Dukakis, of Shock. Previously an award-winning reporter at the Boston Globe and a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, he now runs the Boston-based Health Coverage Fellowship. He lives on Cape Cod.

Reviews for Satchel

[mhanover10 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a baseball fan this was a very enjoyable book for me. I enjoyed learning about Satchel Paige who was a fantastic ball player who pushed the boundaries his entire life.

Living in Kansas City and knowing the President of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, I've heard stories over the years about the Monarchs, Satchel Paige and Buck O'Neil. Buck was a supporter of the organization where I work and I missed meeting him by a few months. So, I recognize several names in this book. If you are in Kansas City, love baseball, stop by the Museum, it has a lot of fascinating history.

This book does jump around a lot but it has so much history and information that I want to know more about Satchel and about the Negro Leagues. Glad I found this on the shelf at the library. If you like baseball and the history of baseball, definitely pick this up.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A pretty good biography about Satchel Paige. I would have liked more about Paige's and other Negro League players' struggles with racism and Jim Crow, though.

[johnhastie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Finally!... A fully-satisfying bio of the greatest pitcher in baseball history. Accurate info on Mr. Paige is notoriously scarce, but Tye peels away the mythology to give us a flesh-and-blood portrait of a man who was ultimately worthy of his larger-than-life stature. The truth about Satchel's exploits is often better than the glorified re-tellings.

The book is an amazing look at life in Jim Crow America and the fascinating sub-culture of barnstorming and the Negro Leagues. It's also an excellent treatise on talent, race, publicity, loyalty, and sport. I found this book to be funny, exhilarating, heartbreaking, and poignant.

A remarkable achievement.

[tymfos · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Admittedly, Larry Tye had a difficult task in writing a biography of Satchel Paige. While on the one hand, the subject himself is so fascinating that instant interest is generated, it's difficult to pin down many facts of the man's life and career. The old "Negro League Baseball" didn't keep the kinds of statistics MLB did; and Satchel Paige did a lot of barnstorming baseball, of which there are even fewer records. And then, the man was a bit of a yarn spinner himself, frequently embelishing some aspects of his life, and creating mystery around others. He was one of those rare persons whose first name (or, rather, nickname) creates immediate recognition in many listeners. But few people really knew him; he was, at heart, a loner. He was a complex character who refused to be "owned" by any team in an era long before baseball had heard of the concept of free agency. He was no saint; he spent big, bigger than he could afford to; at one point, he was apparently a bigamist. He was larger than life and possibly more talented than any baseball pitcher who walked the planet.

I think Tye does a pretty good job with this book, all things considered. There were times when I got confused about the "when" of some things, as he didn't keep to a strict chronological order. There were times when I felt the writing dragged a bit, that he repeated certain information too often.

The main things I walk away with are a sense of how awesome Satchel Paige's talent truly was, and wonderment that he could pitch so well so long, and dismay at how bigotry denied this man the kind of career he should have had, both in his prime days as a player and in later years when his baseball knowledge could have nurtured young players through coaching.

[n2funstuff · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Excellent biography of one of the greatest pitchers of all-time.

[delphica · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was decent enough, and certainly an interesting subject. I have a lot of sympathy for the author, for it was apparent that he was caught up in a very understandable quandary involving how much background to include. Can you understand the career of Satchel Paige without understanding the Negro Leagues and can you understand the Negro Leagues without understanding Jim Crow and on and on. It landed in one of those places that is probably too much for some readers and not nearly enough for others, but what do you do?

I felt this was a good overview of Paige's career and it offered a Satchel-centric view of the desegregation of modern major league baseball, which I would say was 80% thoughtful and only 20% whiny, not a terrible split although it skated a little close to calling Branch Rickey an opportunist and Jackie Robinson an ingrate.

I was also somewhat alarmed at the willingness to lump together Paige's tall-tales about his early days in baseball, his dissembling about his age, and his willingness to marry someone when he was already married to another person as several examples of the self-creation of a folksy mythology. Hey, maybe they are are aspects of a folksy mythology, but Tye should have made some sort of case for this. In the absence of any convincing argument, I'm going to go with the tall-tales (throwing a ball so far that the catcher caught it the following day) being, you know, stories told for entertainment value that were clearly not intended to be believed; the age issue being evidence that he needed to lie about his age in order to continue making an income, which could start up a discussion about whether lying is an acceptable way of avoiding discrimination; and the getting married more than once thing, oh, let's call that one bigamy. Maybe I'm crazy but these seem like three very different things.

Baseball-wise, there is a lot of good information and you get a great mental picture of Paige's career, especially the barnstorming years, and you are left with a real churn about the absolute unfairness of it all.

[rocketjk · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a particularly interesting biography about a seminal figure in American history. Not just baseball history, but American history as a whole. Paige was a larger than life figure throughout his incredibly long baseball career, hurling thousands of games both in the Negro Leagues and in barnstorming exhibitions across the country and into Latin America for decades, before finally making a belated entrance into the Major Leagues in 1948 while in his 40s. Although most of us have heard of Paige and his famous saying, "Don't look back, somebody might be gaining on you," I wasn't really aware of how famous a figure Paige was throughout the Depression and through the war years.

Tye obviously did lots and lots of research and interviews, and he goes as deeply as he can to separate fact from legend when it comes to Paige. The fact that we can't ever know, in places, how successful he's actually been at this is part of the book's charm. When he can't do any better, he simply relates the different versions of particular stories as supplied to him by the different sources he's found. At any rate, legend aside, I learned a heck of a lot about Paige and came to realize just how influential a figure he was to baseball history and how famous he was across the country during his heyday, how he pushed back racial boundaries simply by being himself and insisting on living life by his own rules.

This book is just full of intriguing information about Paige, about the history of the Negro Leagues and even about the ultimate integration of the Major Leagues. For example, I was fascinated to learn that Paige and many of the other Negro League veterans had very little use for Jackie Robinson, although they said all the right things to reporters, and he had very little respect for them or all that they had accomplished and endured. This book will go a long way toward shining a light on a compelling figure in American history before he recedes too far into the mists of time to make such research feasible. I'm giving it 4 1/2 stars, due to the fact that, occasionally, Tye's writing style goes a little dry. Overall, though, wow.