The Soul of Baseball (12 page)

O
ver chicken wings, Buck O’Neil talked about the yellow juice. This was my favorite story of the Negro Leagues. The yellow juice story, of course, involved Satchel Paige. I had asked Buck about it many times, but he had not remembered much. Something about that night—the wings and blue cheese dressing, the aftershock of the Star interview, the buzz of New York City—something triggered his memory.

 

Sometimes I remember

Clear as yesterday

But other times

I have to wait

Until the fog clears.

It’s something growing old.

The fog hangs around longer

And you wonder if it will ever blow away.

 

Here, in a smoky New York hotel restaurant, the fog lifted and the yellow juice story came back to him like a plane descending from the clouds. It was 1939. Satchel Paige had hurt his arm in Mexico the previous fall. The way Satch told it, the blistering hot food down there angered up his stomach, and the high altitude in Mexico played tricks with his mind. Satch had tried to throw curveballs. Understand, Satchel was a fastball pitcher all his life. He had learned how to throw by flinging stones at birds. He threw baseballs and stones the same way—hard and straight. They call it “control” in baseball. Satch had control. He threw the ball exactly where he wanted it to go. For show, he would warm up before games by throwing baseballs over sticks of chewing gum he had placed near home plate.

The one thing Satchel Paige could not do, though, was make a baseball curve. No matter how he gripped the ball, no matter how much he twisted his wrist, the ball went pretty straight. Hitters mocked him and dared him to throw a curveball. Satchel Paige laughed. “Don’t need a curveball to get you out,” he used to say. And he did not.

Well, way down in Mexico, Satchel Paige decided to show the people he could throw a curveball after all. He contorted his arm, coiled his arm, wrenched his arm, all in an effort to throw curveballs in the light air. The ball did curve, much to Satchel’s delight. The crowds cheered. Soon, though, Satchel could not lift his arm over his head. Pain sizzled. One doctor said he was through pitching. The second-opinion doctor agreed. So did the third. A
Kansas City Call
reporter wrote this: “The great one owned a wing that was as dead as a new bride’s biscuit.”

Kansas City Monarchs owner J. L. Wilkinson signed Paige more or less as a publicity stunt. Wilkie loved publicity stunts. Ten years earlier he had hocked everything he owned and bought a set of portable lights that could be transported on trucks. The Monarchs played night baseball games under those lights all over the country, and this was long before any team in the Major Leagues played night baseball. Those lights made a hideous sound. A million moths fluttered around them. The towers were so short that baseballs routinely flew above them, disappearing into the black sky, and panicked outfielders from opposing teams covered their heads as fly balls crashed down like hail. “We knew the secret,” Buck said. “We would follow the ball up into the lights and then run to the spot where the ball was going to land. I remember every time a runner would get a hit and stand on first base, he would ask me: ‘How do you guys catch fly balls under these lights?’ Of course, I never told them.” People came from miles around to see the Monarchs play at night.

Wilkinson told Paige they could be good for each other. He didn’t have to sell Paige—nobody else wanted to give him a chance. Paige had infuriated just about everybody else in the Negro Leagues by skipping out on contracts and demanding a huge portion of the gate whenever he pitched. Wilkie was his hope. In the black newspapers, the signing of Paige was hailed as a move that would lead the Monarchs to become the best team in black baseball and perhaps all of baseball. But Wilkinson had no intention of putting Paige on the Monarchs, not with his dead arm. He created a new team instead. It was called the Baby Monarchs at first, though after a while, for publicity purposes, the team became known as the Satchel Paige All-Stars. The All-Stars often outdrew the Monarchs themselves. It was some team. The catcher, Slow Robinson, sang gospels during games. His brother Norman slid with his spikes high. The shortstop, Mex Johnson, quit in the middle of the season to go back home to Texas and teach school. A once-great old ballplayer, George Giles, kept showing up for games, though all he ever did was complain and threaten to quit. Cool Papa Bell played now and again. The team’s manager, Newt Joseph, shot rabbits out the window of the bus as it rode along from town to town.

The star attraction, Satchel Paige, threw such soft pitches that for the rest of his life he would talk about one boy in the stands who asked his father: “How’d he ever get anybody out?” Even those soft pitches sparked excruciating pain. Wilkie fixed the games so that most of the opposing hitters swung and missed Satch’s slow fastballs. It was a living. Of course, this was Satchel Paige—the man Joe DiMaggio had called the best pitcher he ever faced—and so every once in a while one of those opposing hitters, looking to prove a point, would break the deal and hammer a Satchel Paige pitch to the wall or over it. Buck never knew what made him sadder—the men who hit Satchel Paige’s pitches or the men who missed on purpose.

Then, Jewbaby Floyd started to travel with the All-Stars. Nobody knew for sure why they called him Jewbaby. It might have been because he looked old enough to have been one of the Israelites wandering the desert with Moses. Jewbaby was a trainer of sorts. He had been giving massages at the Belleview Motel for years. He also worked with the Monarchs players. He rarely spoke. One day he told Wilkinson, “I can fix Satchel Paige’s arm.”

There’s no telling if Wilkie believed him. But he did send Jewbaby on the road with the team. Sometimes, during games, he became part of the act. Satchel Paige would bend over in apparent pain, and Jewbaby would rush out with a cup of bicarbonate of soda. Satchel would drink it down very slowly while the batter waited. He would then unleash a mighty burp that could be heard all through the stadium. After games, people did not talk about Satchel’s disappointing fastball. They talked about his awe-inspiring burp.

Between games, Jewbaby worked over Satch’s arm. He poured scalding hot water over Satch’s shoulder and then dabbed it with an ice-cold towel. He poured freezing-cold water on the arm and then wrapped it in a boiling-hot bandage. He dug his fingers deep into Satch’s shoulder, as if trying to touch the bone, and then he poured more hot water and then more cold. He pulled out his medicine bag, which was filled with bottles and flasks of homemade potions. Some of the potions were dark as oil, some clear as water. Some were thick as tar, others poured easy as scotch. Each day, Jewbaby tried a different potion, and then attacked Satchel Paige’s shoulder. More hot water. More cold. On his own, Satchel Paige took to taking showers with water as hot as he could stand.

Nothing worked. Satchel Paige kept throwing pillows. He kept saying the pain was too great for him to go on. He talked about quitting the only thing he knew how to do. That’s when Jewbaby Floyd brought out the bright yellow juice. Jewbaby rubbed it into Satchel Paige’s shoulder. The juice smelled so ripe, Buck said, that mosquitoes would not get near him.

As soon as Satch started using that yellow juice, he said his arm felt a little stronger. And then a little stronger. And then, finally, he was in Chicago, pitching a game, and he said to his manager, Newt Joseph, “Turn ’em loose tonight.” He wanted the other hitters to play it honest.

“You sure?” Joseph asked.

“Yes. Satch is back.”

Like that, the fastball was back. Slow Robinson wrote in his book
Catching Dreams
that Satch had a no-hitter going into the eighth inning when, for fun, he lobbed a pitch to his friend Pep Young. “See if you can hit that one, Pep,” he shouted with the ball still in the air. Pep hit it off the wall, a triple. He stood at third base and smiled. “I can hit that one, Satch,” he said.

“You just sit there,” Paige said, “’cause you ain’t going no further.”

Satch struck out the next three men. He would pitch for another twenty-five years.

“Of course, I don’t think the yellow juice did it,” Buck said. “We didn’t know anything about arm injuries then. Satch probably just had a dead arm, and he needed rest. But I don’t know. People always think there are simple explanations for everything. Sometimes there are miracles. Doctors today want to cut you up. Sometimes you just need a little something that makes you believe.”

The waitress brought Buck a salad, and talk shifted to other things, to steroids and politics and women in red dresses. Buck kept waiting for the waitress to come back and fill up his iced tea. Instead a tall man walked up to the table. He looked vaguely familiar. He softly said, “Hi, Buck.”

Buck looked up at the man’s face, jumped to his feet, and started laughing. He said, “Come here, boy. Come here.” They hugged for a long time, each one laughing. Buck stepped back and looked in the man’s eyes for a long time and finally said, “My God, you look just like him. You know that, right? You look just like him.”

The man nodded. Then Buck turned to us at the table and said, “Do you know who this is? This is Satchel’s boy.”

R
OBERT
P
AIGE DROVE
trucks for Roadway. He told us it was a good life. He had driven more than a million miles without having an accident—that put him in the “Million Mile Club.” He was proud of that. He had never had a speeding ticket, which made him very different from his father. Satchel Paige drove fast. Players refused to ride in the car with him. Mex Johnson, the ballplayer and schoolteacher, rode cross-country with Buck one time and was so scared that he finally asked Satch to just drop him off in the middle of the country. “I’ll find my own way home,” he said. Another time Satch almost missed a Negro Leagues World Series game because he got pulled over for speeding in a small Pennsylvania town. The police officer took him to the judge, who was getting his hair cut. Satchel Paige waited until after the judge had finished. “How do you plead?” the clean-shaved judge asked.

“Guilty, here’s my money,” Satchel said, and he hopped back into his car and drove twice as fast the rest of the way. He made it to the game by the second inning and pitched the rest of the way.

Robert remembered his father getting pulled over often when he was a kid. One time, Robert was in the car with his mother, father, and sister and they saw the familiar red lights flashing. The officer took Satch’s driver’s license and told everyone to stay in the car. As he headed back to his police car, Satchel said, “I’ll be right back.” He stepped out, walked back to the police car, and got in. An hour or more passed. When Satchel returned, he said, “It’s okay, we worked it out,” and they drove off, faster than ever. “Give him enough time, he could charm anybody,” Robert said.

Robert seemed to enjoy talking about his father here in this hotel bar. He had been called many times by writers to talk about Satchel Paige, and Robert mostly had avoided them. Here, with Buck, it seemed like there was no one he would rather talk about.

“People always get the driving thing wrong,” Robert said as he ordered another beer. “My father was not a bad driver. He was a very good driver. He just drove really fast. Whenever my mother would drive, he would say, ‘Hold on, let me out, I can make better time walking.’”

W
E WERE JUST
talking about your dad,” Buck said. Robert Paige nodded. He figured people talked about his father all the time. Buck relived the yellow juice story and a couple of others, and Robert said, “Have I ever told you about the keys?”

Buck shook his head.

“I know I have,” Robert said, but he went on. He said Satchel was a great collector of junk. He had an astounding assortment of garbage and gadgets scattered around the house—guns that would never fire, weather vanes that had fallen off of rooftops, busted watches, car parts of various shapes and sizes, chains and pulleys from mysterious devices. More than anything, Satchel Paige loved locks and keys. He had piles of locks, and buckets of keys, and he never used any of them. He liked having locks and keys.

One day he handed a lock to Robert and said: “You want to make a dollar? Go through this bucket and find the key that fits this lock.”

“A dollar was a lot of money then,” Robert said, because you have to say that, it is required by law, when telling an old story. Robert Paige spent the day digging through the buckets, pulling out keys, and trying to stick them into the lock. For a while he felt certain that none of the keys would fit, that it was all just an intricate gag. His father was always pulling jokes like that. It was one of the many things that made him hard to know. After a couple of hours, though, Robert found the key that opened the lock.

“I found it!” he shouted, and Robert brought the lock and key to his father.

“All right, then,” Satchel Paige said, and he looked impressed. He handed his son a sheet of paper. Robert looked at the paper curiously.

“What’s this?” Robert asked.

“It’s paper,” Satchel said. “Go ahead. Make as many dollars as you want.”

“That was my father,” Robert said. “In time, he gave me the dollar. But not before he scared me into thinking he wouldn’t.”

R
OBERT
P
AIGE BROUGHT
up Dan Bankhead. Baseball fans assume that Satchel Paige was the first black pitcher in the Major Leagues. He was not. That was Dan Bankhead. He was one of five baseball-playing brothers from Empire, Alabama. Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager who signed Jackie Robinson, personally scouted Dan Bankhead.