Satchel Paige

While Satchel Paige was playing baseball, many ages and birthdates were reported, ranging from 1900 to 1908.

Paige himself was the source of many of these dates.

Leroy Robert "Satchel" Paige (July 7, 1906 – June 8, 1982) was an American professional baseball pitcher who played in Negro league baseball and Major League Baseball (MLB).

His career spanned five decades and culminated with his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

His actual birthdate, July 7, 1906, was determined in 1948 when Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck traveled to Mobile, Alabama, and accompanied Paige's family to the County Health Department to obtain his birth certificate.

Paige's birth certificate is displayed in his autobiography.

On July 24, 1918, just seventeen days after his 12th birthday, Paige was sentenced to six years—or until his 18th birthday, whichever came first—at the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers in Mount Meigs, Alabama, owing to his truancy in school along with his tendency to steal.

The person who taught Paige to pitch while in reform school was the Reverend Moses Davis.

It was Davis, who was also a trustee of the school, who devoted the long hours coaching the boys in baseball, and it was he who struck the deal with the sporting-goods store in Montgomery to secure the team's first uniforms.

Davis was African American, as was the entire teaching staff at Mount Meigs, including the school's founder, Cornelia Bowen, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute.

Lula and her children changed the spelling of their name from Page to Paige in the mid 1920s, just before the start of Satchel's baseball career.

Lula said, "Page looked too much like a page in a book," whereas Paige explained, "My folks started out by spelling their name 'Page' and later stuck in the 'i' to make themselves sound more high-tone."

The introduction of the new spelling coincided with the death of Paige's father, and may have suggested a desire for a new start.

According to Paige, his nickname originated from childhood work toting bags at the train station.

He said he was not making enough money at a dime a bag, so he used a pole and rope to build a contraption that allowed him to cart up to four bags at once.

Another kid supposedly yelled, "You look like a walking Satchel tree."

A different story was told by boyhood friend and neighbor Wilber Hines, who said he gave Paige the nickname after he was caught trying to steal a bag.

At the age of 10, Paige was playing "top ball", which was what got him into baseball.

"Top ball" was a kids' game that used sticks and bottle caps instead of baseballs and bats to play a variation of the diamond sport.

Satchel's mother, Lula, would even comment on how Paige would rather "play baseball than eat. It was always baseball, baseball."

Paige was released from the institution in December 1923, seven months short of his 18th birthday.

He summed up his years of incarceration: "I traded five years of freedom to learn how to pitch. At least I started my real learning on the Mount. They were not wasted years at all. It made a real man out of me."

After his release, Paige played for several Mobile semi-pro teams.

He joined the semi-pro Mobile Tigers, for which his brother Wilson was already pitching.

He also pitched for a semi-pro team named the "Down the Bay Boys", and he recalled an incident in the ninth inning of a 1–0 ballgame when his teammates made three consecutive errors, loading the bases for the other team with two outs.

Angry, Paige said he stomped around the mound, kicking up dirt.

The fans started booing him, so he decided that "somebody was going to have to be showed up for that."

A right-handed pitcher, Paige first played for the semi-professional Mobile Tigers from 1924 to 1926.

He began his professional baseball career in 1926 with the Chattanooga Black Lookouts of the Negro Southern League and became one of the most famous and successful players from the Negro leagues.

On town tours across the United States, Paige would sometimes have his infielders sit down behind him and then routinely strike out the side.

At age 42 in 1948, Paige made his debut for the Cleveland Indians; to this day, this makes him the oldest debutant in National League or American League history.

Additionally, Paige was 59 years old when he played his last major league game, which is also a record that stands to this day.

Paige was the first black pitcher to play in the American League and was the seventh black player to play in Major League Baseball.

Also in 1948, Paige became the first player who had played in the Negro leagues to pitch in the World Series; the Indians won the Series that year.

He played with the St. Louis Browns from 1951 to 1953, representing the team in the All-Star Game in 1952 and 1953.

In 1959, Paige's mother told a reporter that he was 55 rather than 53, saying she knew this because she wrote it down in her Bible.

Paige wrote in his autobiography, "Seems like Mom's Bible would know, but she ain't ever shown me the Bible. Anyway, she was in her nineties when she told the reporter that, and sometimes she tended to forget things."

Paige was born Leroy Robert Page to John Page, a gardener, and Lula Page (née Coleman), a domestic worker, in a section of Mobile, Alabama, known as Down the Bay.

He played his last professional game on June 21, 1966, for the Peninsula Grays of the Carolina League, two weeks shy of 60.

In 1971, Paige became the first electee of the Negro League Committee to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.