He became the major draw of his day, during an era when baseball was the undisputed national pastime. Satch was good, and he didn’t hesitate to do all he could to inflate his own stature. A typical declaration: “It got so I could nip frosting off a cake with my fastball.’’ He was a showman, that’s for sure. No one barnstormed more, and he claimed to have pitched for 250 teams, earning as much as $500 for a few innings in each. Tye, a onetime Globe reporter, also says Paige walked out on more signed contracts than any player in history. He became such a good pitcher that white sportswriters began to cover his games, so dominating a personality that one writer declared him winner of a 1-1 tie game. At one point, Negro Leagues star Buck O’Neil said, he “might have been the most famous black man in America.’’
At times, he joined teams of black ballplayers that crisscrossed the country playing exhibition games against teams of white major leaguers, organized by someone such as pitcher Bob Feller - and often won. From 1924-39, the California Winter League pitted black players against white, and the Negro Leaguers won 13 of the 16 championships. The only integrated baseball being played was in Bismarck, N.D., so Satchel played there for a couple of seasons, proving that American family values wouldn’t collapse if baseball were more colorblind.
