Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And the other
Speaker 1: day I was on Atlanta's public transit system and I
Speaker 1: noticed this guy who's wearing a jacket and it's for
Speaker 1: the Negro leagues, the baseball teams. And what specifically caught
Speaker 1: my attention was the logo and it said for the
Speaker 1: brothers who played but didn't get paid. And we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about that today. I missed so much by
Speaker 1: not writing Marda. This is the second installment in our
Speaker 1: series on Black History Month, and today we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about Satchel Page. And when you think of
Speaker 1: the Negro leagues and the integration of baseball, you're probably
Speaker 1: thinking of Jackie robinsoner at least Sarah and I were.
Speaker 1: He was the first to break a sixty year color
Speaker 1: line and he went on to be a star, but
Speaker 1: he was not that huge star when he wing the
Speaker 1: Brooklyn Dodgers in ninety seven. He was young, and he
Speaker 1: was chosen for his promise but also for his ability
Speaker 1: to withstand the inevitable racial slurs. Yeah, he was a
Speaker 1: safe public face for the integration of baseball. The big
Speaker 1: star at the Negro leagues at the time was Statchel Page,
Speaker 1: and he had been working in these subtle ways to
Speaker 1: integrate baseball decades before Robinson was ever signed, and he
Speaker 1: played with and against some of the most talented players
Speaker 1: in baseball, white and black. He entertained people across the country,
Speaker 1: and he eventually earned one of the highest salaries in baseball.
Speaker 1: But because of this unspoken segregation of the major leagues,
Speaker 1: he doesn't become a big leaguer until he's forty two
Speaker 1: years old, which makes him the oldest rookie in history.
Speaker 1: So let's get started on this career. Because his prime
Speaker 1: seasons were spent before baseball was integrated, we don't have
Speaker 1: a bunch of fantastic stats to throw at you, or
Speaker 1: we don't of the saber metrics um, but a few
Speaker 1: to get us started. He was reputed to have pitched
Speaker 1: two thousand, five hundred games during his career. He won
Speaker 1: two thousand of them, so think about that for a second.
Speaker 1: And he pitched fifty five no hitters by his own estimate,
Speaker 1: which is pretty impressive. Insane, absolutely insane. So consequently, some
Speaker 1: people call him the best picture in history. And a
Speaker 1: bunch of our details, we'd like to say, come from
Speaker 1: a Fresh Air interview with author Larry Tie, who wrote
Speaker 1: a book called Satchell, The Life and Times of an
Speaker 1: American Legend. If you'd like to pick it up, yeah,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna start at the beginning. Satchell was born
Speaker 1: July seven, nineteen o six, in Mobile, Alabama as Leroy
Speaker 1: Robert Page, and his family changed their name to Page
Speaker 1: with an Eye in the middle from Page with no
Speaker 1: Eye because he said it's made them sound more high toned.
Speaker 1: Mom thought it looked too much like a page in
Speaker 1: a book. I think so. He's the seventh of twelve kids,
Speaker 1: and because his father isn't really a major presence in
Speaker 1: their life, the children learn early on that they're going
Speaker 1: to be poor and they have to earn what they can.
Speaker 1: And Um, just one thing though that he does appreciate
Speaker 1: from his father. He gets his approval to be a
Speaker 1: baseball player, even as a kid, instead of a landscaper.
Speaker 1: This is something that his mom never approves of. No,
Speaker 1: she said that she thought baseball was sent in always
Speaker 1: plan and never working. Dad. So by the age of nine, Um,
Speaker 1: Satchels working at a railway station and he's toting bags
Speaker 1: or satchels specifically, so he develops the system of pulleys
Speaker 1: and ropes so he can carry multiple bags and make
Speaker 1: more money. And his friends tell him that you look
Speaker 1: like a walking Satchell tree. So that's how he gets
Speaker 1: his nickname. And this is one of my favorite quotes
Speaker 1: from Sarah's outline. She says, young Satchel has a knack
Speaker 1: for hurling things, and not just baseballs. But it's true.
Speaker 1: He could throw a rock or a brick and take
Speaker 1: down a chicken or a squirrel at tremendous speeds, and
Speaker 1: he can also hit kids. He fights with rival gangs
Speaker 1: of kids and um he would psych out his his
Speaker 1: opponents by throwing what he later called the hesitation pitch. Basically,
Speaker 1: he'd lift his arm and start to pitch and his
Speaker 1: opponent would duck, and after they had ducked and they
Speaker 1: couldn't move, he'd nail him with the rock or whatever
Speaker 1: he was throwing. But in his youth, Satchell turned to
Speaker 1: petty crime and was sent to reform school, the Alabama
Speaker 1: Reform School for Juvenile Negro lawbreakers, and the school was
Speaker 1: set up along the Booker tea model of Negro self help.
Speaker 1: So they work hard and they also do athletics, which
Speaker 1: is a lot like Babe Ruth. Sarah was telling me
Speaker 1: earlier that he also went to reform school and that's
Speaker 1: where he learned how to play. Yeah, and this ends
Speaker 1: up being a good thing for Satchel. He has a
Speaker 1: coach who recognizes his ability and um he leaves the
Speaker 1: school with not only athletic prowess, but discipline and baseball skills.
Speaker 1: And by nine he pres ends himself to Candy Jim Taylor,
Speaker 1: who manages the Mobile Tigers, and uh, there are a
Speaker 1: semi pro black team. He gets the job by sending
Speaker 1: him ten fastballs and that's it. He's one of them.
Speaker 1: How I got my job here at how Stuff Works
Speaker 1: a little known story. He joined the Negro leagues in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty six for the Chattanooga Black Lookouts, and he
Speaker 1: pitched for a bunch of teams in both the Negro
Speaker 1: Southern Association and the Negro National League, um the Birmingham
Speaker 1: Black Barons, the Baltimore Black Sox, the Cleveland Cubs, Pittsburgh Crawfords,
Speaker 1: Kansas City Monarchs, the New York Black Yankees, and the
Speaker 1: Memphis Red Sox. His career really kind of takes off
Speaker 1: with the Crawfords. But we're gonna talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about what the Negro leagues are all about, because I
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't think we knew very much about
Speaker 1: them before. No, I definitely didn't. So they're actually professional
Speaker 1: black ballplayers as far back as the nineteenth century. But
Speaker 1: Rube Foster is the guy who really brings um a
Speaker 1: functioning Negro league together in the nineteen twenties, and he
Speaker 1: actually dreams of having this black major league that would
Speaker 1: play the best of the white big league clubs, and
Speaker 1: they come together in a multi racial World Series at
Speaker 1: the end of the year, black versus White. And there's
Speaker 1: some major financial instability in the league's but by World
Speaker 1: War Two, Negro baseball was a two million dollar a
Speaker 1: year industry. Journeyman players are making about four hundred dollars
Speaker 1: a month, but someone who's a star like Satil Page
Speaker 1: could get a thousand dollars a month. But there's a
Speaker 1: little more to it than that. Yeah, the black players
Speaker 1: are playing a lot of games, like up to a
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty games in a season, and they're working
Speaker 1: all year pretty much most of them. They're having to
Speaker 1: go out in barnstorm, which is something that we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about later. But another thing we should mention
Speaker 1: is that they're not always going up against other Negro
Speaker 1: league teams. You think today major league baseball player plays
Speaker 1: other major league teams, right, But the majority of these
Speaker 1: guys games are actually against white or non league team,
Speaker 1: so they're playing outside of their own league. And Negro
Speaker 1: league baseball games were a huge part of the social
Speaker 1: life of black Americans at the time. People would dress up,
Speaker 1: and the biggest games run Sunday afternoon, so a lot
Speaker 1: of people would just go after church. According to Tie,
Speaker 1: the men we've mentioned earlier who wrote the book on
Speaker 1: Satchel Page, ministers would even let out church early so
Speaker 1: you could go. Yeah, and Satchell becomes the star attraction
Speaker 1: of these big Sunday matchups. He's always in them. He's
Speaker 1: always the feature draw. And he's a real showman too,
Speaker 1: in addition to being a great baseball player, and that's
Speaker 1: part of the job for a Negro league player. You
Speaker 1: have to be showy enough to attract a white audience
Speaker 1: as well as a black audience, and to disarm them enough.
Speaker 1: So that um, so that they're willing to watch you,
Speaker 1: and he was good at it. One offense, little tricks
Speaker 1: he'd like to do before the game. He'd set up
Speaker 1: some teeny tiny object like a matchbook on the home plate,
Speaker 1: and then he'd proceed to throw pitches right over the
Speaker 1: place ridiculously fast, pitious, so the fans would go completely
Speaker 1: crazy and the opponents would think, what did I get
Speaker 1: myself into? You? You can just imagine sitting there watching
Speaker 1: this guy warm up basically um. And he also shuffles
Speaker 1: his six ft three frame out to the mound. He
Speaker 1: knows that the game can't start without him, so he
Speaker 1: takes his time and really milks it for everything it's worth.
Speaker 1: He's he's funny, but he also is kind of elegant,
Speaker 1: and he never crosses a line to degrading himself. He
Speaker 1: did have a crazy wind up. Sometimes he did a single,
Speaker 1: a double, or a triple windmill before he threw. And
Speaker 1: he did this high kick when he sling shots the
Speaker 1: ball forward. Um. There are a bunch of pictures off
Speaker 1: If you do like a Google image search for Satchel page,
Speaker 1: you're probably gonna find this picture of him with his
Speaker 1: foot about up to his face. Um, and he names
Speaker 1: his pitches too. He calls them bloopers, loopers, and droopers.
Speaker 1: He's got a barber pitch. He has a nightmare pitch,
Speaker 1: which he says he'd dreamt up in a nightmare. He
Speaker 1: has the long tim and the little tom. Uh. It's
Speaker 1: funny those catchers say that they're all really the same pitch.
Speaker 1: It's he's got a fast pitch, and he has a
Speaker 1: really fast pitch, and then later he eventually has a
Speaker 1: curve ball. And there were, of course no radar guns,
Speaker 1: but he people think he pitched at about a hundred
Speaker 1: to a hundred and five miles per hour. So back
Speaker 1: to the barn storming we mentioned earlier. Um, he pitched
Speaker 1: in these big Sunday matchups, but during the week he
Speaker 1: did barnstorming, which was basically playing in any small town
Speaker 1: that would pay him. He traveled as many as thirty
Speaker 1: thousand miles a year, and sometimes he's going up against
Speaker 1: semi proteins, white, black, whatever. Um. Sometimes they're just country
Speaker 1: boys who have pulled together their money and they want
Speaker 1: to play against a great baseball player. UM. In the winter,
Speaker 1: he goes to the Dominican Republic and to the Mexican
Speaker 1: leagues to play, and someone is good as Satchel could
Speaker 1: even work out special deals where say he pitched one
Speaker 1: inning or three innings for a team UM either black
Speaker 1: or white as a guest star. But the crazy thing
Speaker 1: here is Satchel pitched every day and pictures don't do that.
Speaker 1: I mean, we were thinking about today. You'll see a
Speaker 1: picture after you after he's done a few innings with
Speaker 1: ice on his shoulder in the locker room, and then
Speaker 1: he goes on rest for a while. But this guy
Speaker 1: is out there pitching every single day and he just
Speaker 1: gets better and better. But the barn storming can be
Speaker 1: a little scary, especially in the Jim Crow South, because
Speaker 1: I mean, you never know what's going to happen. So
Speaker 1: Satchel did have some conditions for when he was barn storming.
Speaker 1: There was no game unless he had somewhere to sleep
Speaker 1: and eat afterward, which you know fair enough. It's basically
Speaker 1: like we're not going to play baseball with you and
Speaker 1: then risk getting driven out of town after this, UM
Speaker 1: I liked to t I actually called him a quiet
Speaker 1: racial pioneer for this, just putting down his foot to
Speaker 1: a certain extent. Uh. One thing he would also do
Speaker 1: and sometimes this was just to show his own team
Speaker 1: or audience how good he really was. But oftentimes it
Speaker 1: happened after a racial slur. But he would dismiss his fielders,
Speaker 1: like in the middle of a game with loaded bases,
Speaker 1: he would dismiss his fielders. And sometimes he'd just bring
Speaker 1: in the outfield. Um, so if you if you hit
Speaker 1: a ball into the outfield, you'd have an automatic home run,
Speaker 1: and they just sit around pretending to play poker with
Speaker 1: the infielders. Sometimes he'd bring in all of his fielders,
Speaker 1: send them all, you know, off, And he'd do this
Speaker 1: against big league people to not just second rate opponents
Speaker 1: who was trying to even the playing field a little.
Speaker 1: This was against legitimate competitors. I think he proved his point.
Speaker 1: But all of this barn storming. Part of it was
Speaker 1: exposing white audiences to black players and maybe perhaps making
Speaker 1: some of them a little more open minded about the
Speaker 1: idea of an integrated league. Yeah, this is definitely paving
Speaker 1: the way for the ultimate integration of baseball. He played
Speaker 1: in a lot of places where there were practically no
Speaker 1: black people at all, like in Bismarck, North Dakota. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he actually walks out on a contract to go play
Speaker 1: on this white semi pro team in Bismarck. And it's
Speaker 1: integrated baseball, a decade before it's integrated in the majors.
Speaker 1: And it's almost a test too, you know, like what
Speaker 1: does a integrated baseball field look like? And it looks good.
Speaker 1: Satchel becomes a big star in Bismarck. After a few games,
Speaker 1: you know, he's not ultimately welcome there, but it ends
Speaker 1: up working out really well for him. He takes the
Speaker 1: team all the way to a regional tournament. As Satchell's
Speaker 1: reputation grows, he starts collaborating with some white major leaguers
Speaker 1: who are also barn storming. He teams up with Dizzy
Speaker 1: Dean for a while because they both know that they'll
Speaker 1: make money from people who want to see the greatest
Speaker 1: of the great face off, but also from people who
Speaker 1: just want to see a race battle. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: of course changes opinions with some white players too. If
Speaker 1: you play with someone and you get to know them,
Speaker 1: you might come to respect them a little more. And
Speaker 1: this happens with Dizzy. He actually says stuff like if
Speaker 1: Satchel and nine teens up together, we'd clenched the pennant
Speaker 1: by the fourth of July and we could go fishing
Speaker 1: until the World Series. So this is a guy who
Speaker 1: comes to respect someone who who we didn't ultimately converted.
Speaker 1: Good old boy, and these matches proved that Satchel is
Speaker 1: just as good as anybody else. He struck out Roger's
Speaker 1: hornsby five times in one game. Um, in a nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty four game that went into thirteen innings with Dizzy Dean,
Speaker 1: he got a one oh victory. Pretty amazing stuff. He
Speaker 1: makes a lot of money too, Satchel does. By nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: he's making forty thou dollars a year and um, according
Speaker 1: to Tie, that's four times what the Yankees were making,
Speaker 1: which I thoroughly approve of. Yes, Um, it's exactly what
Speaker 1: DiMaggio was making. And it's twice what Ted Williams was making.
Speaker 1: And he lives it up too. He's got a closet
Speaker 1: just for his shoes, four for his suits. He's got
Speaker 1: all these cars, fifteen shotguns and cameras. He's uh, living
Speaker 1: the good life here. But he has to work year
Speaker 1: round and pitch every single night, and he doesn't get
Speaker 1: a winter break. So you know, after barn storming with
Speaker 1: these great white players, he sees them go off to
Speaker 1: the big leagues, but he can't. So Sarah and I
Speaker 1: were saying earlier, how hard would it be to watch
Speaker 1: someone like DiMaggio go off to great fame and you're
Speaker 1: still stuck where you are. Well, you know, you're just
Speaker 1: as good as them, and you should be playing with them.
Speaker 1: Would be so frustrating. But the segregation of baseball is
Speaker 1: coming to an end. By the War, managers of white
Speaker 1: teams are starting to consider bringing in black players. Some
Speaker 1: of it is just to show the Red Sox hold
Speaker 1: these ridiculous kind of fake tryouts in and we do
Speaker 1: love the Red Sox, but this is not a good
Speaker 1: period of history for them. But some managers really are
Speaker 1: serious about it. By the Brooklyn Dodgers President General manager
Speaker 1: Branch Ricky has put into motion the secret plan to
Speaker 1: in an African American player, and he of course finds
Speaker 1: and signs Jackie Robinson October nine, who at the time
Speaker 1: was the first gear short stop for the Kansas City Monarchs.
Speaker 1: It's a black team, obviously. Um Robinson spends the forty
Speaker 1: six season in the minors before he's promoted to the
Speaker 1: Dodgers in n So the question here is why wasn't
Speaker 1: it Satchell who was the huge star who broke the
Speaker 1: color barrier? What? There are a few reasons to start.
Speaker 1: He was old or on the older side for a
Speaker 1: starting baseball player, and the year that Ricky is hunting
Speaker 1: for this person, he wasn't having a great year. He
Speaker 1: was also expensive, he never would have conceded to starting
Speaker 1: in the minors like Jackie did. And he's really unpredictable.
Speaker 1: He says these crazy things and puts on these shows,
Speaker 1: and he's a bit too much of a loose cannon
Speaker 1: for the people who wants someone, you know, who will
Speaker 1: be very correct in front of all the cameras. So
Speaker 1: Satchel gives a real PC and or when Robinson starts
Speaker 1: and he says, you know, they couldn't have picked a
Speaker 1: better man than Jackie. But later he does show a
Speaker 1: little injury from from this decision, and he says that
Speaker 1: he should have been signed first. He was the one
Speaker 1: who was seriously integrating baseball even back in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: and said that it killed something inside of him not
Speaker 1: being picked. And Jackie Robinson wasn't very sympathetic to his
Speaker 1: plight in his mind. Satchel was from a different era.
Speaker 1: He was unpredictable, he lived to access. He just wasn't
Speaker 1: the kind of man that Jackie Robinson wanted to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I actually think this is one of the sadder
Speaker 1: aspects of the story, and that one of the sadder
Speaker 1: sides of segregated baseball is that you should have these
Speaker 1: two men on the same side. You know. You imagine
Speaker 1: if they played today, it would be a situation where
Speaker 1: Jackie Robinson coming up would admire someone like Satual Page
Speaker 1: and hope to play within some day. But instead you
Speaker 1: just have these guys who are arepably different from each other.
Speaker 1: Satchell does end up in the big league, though, he's
Speaker 1: signed to the Cleveland Indians in nineteen forty eight by
Speaker 1: Bill Back when he's forty two, but he's introduced pretty
Speaker 1: slowly and carefully since he is old and people are
Speaker 1: skeptical about him, and people think vac might be just
Speaker 1: pulling a publicity stunt. Yeah, he's used as relief six
Speaker 1: times before he starts. But when he does start, the
Speaker 1: team beats the Washington Senators five to three, which he
Speaker 1: follows up with two shutouts, and he helps the Indians
Speaker 1: get to the Pennant and they win the series that year,
Speaker 1: and Satchell has the second best E r A in
Speaker 1: the American League and he gets twelve votes for Rookie
Speaker 1: of the Year, which I love that. How could you
Speaker 1: not vote for acul year. A year later, though, Bill
Speaker 1: Vack loses his controlling interest in the Indians and Satchels
Speaker 1: let go UM, but he joins up again with back
Speaker 1: later when he buys the St. Louis Browns, who today
Speaker 1: they're the Baltimore Orioles. And he's a relief pitcher through
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty three and a pretty good one. UM. He
Speaker 1: makes it onto the Major League All Star Team in
Speaker 1: fifty two and fifty three UM, and after fifty three
Speaker 1: he's released and goes on to play in the minors again.
Speaker 1: Barnstorms even appears with the Harlem Globe Trotters as a guest,
Speaker 1: but he comes back briefly in n one game with
Speaker 1: the Kansas City Athletics, and he really hands it up.
Speaker 1: He's got a rocking chair in the bullpen. Nurse is
Speaker 1: attending to him just in case, but he pitches three
Speaker 1: scoreless innings, which makes him the oldest person to pitch
Speaker 1: in the majors at fifty nine. So I think this
Speaker 1: is classic Satchel here kind of hamming it up, but
Speaker 1: ultimately he has the goods to back Yeah, you can
Speaker 1: back it up. At the end, he calls this game
Speaker 1: the end of his hundred year career in baseball, which
Speaker 1: I also think is funny. So later he's brought in
Speaker 1: briefly as a pitching coach for the Atlanta Braves in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, but the owner of the Braves was
Speaker 1: um giving him a favor. Actually, he needed one more
Speaker 1: year to qualify for his pensions, so he didn't really
Speaker 1: do much. Yeah, and the owner also wanted to draw
Speaker 1: up a little support for the Braves. They just moved
Speaker 1: to Atlanta, and Satchell's a big name, obviously. Um Satchell's
Speaker 1: inducted into the Hall of Fame in nine and this
Speaker 1: makes him the first player to make the Hall based
Speaker 1: on his Negro League record, And there was some dispute
Speaker 1: over this, because you know, Satchell's got a good major
Speaker 1: league baseball record, but it's not very long and it's
Speaker 1: not the kind of thing that's going to get you
Speaker 1: in the Hall of Fame. It's obviously his previous experience
Speaker 1: that would qualify him as a great baseball player. But
Speaker 1: the Hall initially says, uh, you know, okay, we'll induct
Speaker 1: him into the league, but we're going to put him
Speaker 1: in a different hall, a different place. And there was
Speaker 1: just this huge outcry over it. People do not want
Speaker 1: to segregated Hall of Fame after decades of segregated baseball.
Speaker 1: Now and when he is inducted in the same everyone
Speaker 1: he said it was the proudest moment of his life.
Speaker 1: His real dream, though, is to become a manager after
Speaker 1: his playing days were over here, and he even says
Speaker 1: in his Hall of Fame speech that he's ready. He's
Speaker 1: ready to manage, and he probably would have been pretty good.
Speaker 1: He had an amazing memory for batting stance, he um
Speaker 1: when he was a player. When he was shown pictures
Speaker 1: of unidentified players, just chest down, no faces shown, he
Speaker 1: could recognize most of them just from just from their
Speaker 1: batting stance. But no one takes him up on this
Speaker 1: whole manager thing, and so instead he goes on to
Speaker 1: other things. He's got seven kids in middle age with
Speaker 1: his second wife, so he's got a family to support,
Speaker 1: and he tries some other jobs. He runs for public
Speaker 1: office and is briefly a deputy sheriff, but again he
Speaker 1: knows that pitching is what he's good at. It's what
Speaker 1: he's meant to do. Yeah, he just works for anyone
Speaker 1: who will hire him. He's still barn storming. And this
Speaker 1: is where it gets a little sodder. You know, you
Speaker 1: have this increasingly elderly guy who's out there barnstorming, always
Speaker 1: on the road. Um. But he did give some famous
Speaker 1: advice on how to stay young, and most of it
Speaker 1: is just sort of funny, like avoid fried meats which
Speaker 1: angry up the blood. Katie and I have actually been
Speaker 1: posting these on our on our Twitter page this week. Yes,
Speaker 1: if you'd like to find us where it missed in history,
Speaker 1: there are a whole bunch of them. But that was
Speaker 1: something he didn't even adhere to himself. He would actually
Speaker 1: cook catfish on a Coleman stove like in his room,
Speaker 1: and when he was finally in the Major League, his
Speaker 1: roommate couldn't stand being in the room with him because
Speaker 1: of these weird smells and scary cooking apparatus he had.
Speaker 1: I think we've all had that experience in the dorms,
Speaker 1: at least I did. But he's most famous for his
Speaker 1: final tip, which was don't look back, as somebody might
Speaker 1: be gaining on you. And Satchel Page does June eight
Speaker 1: of heart trouble and emphysema um. But we should wrap
Speaker 1: up the Negro leagues too, because that's what star this
Speaker 1: whole story, and integration is obviously the beginning of the
Speaker 1: end because black fans start focus on black players who
Speaker 1: are playing in the major leagues, and the young talented
Speaker 1: players like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron sign onto major
Speaker 1: league teams. So it's essentially over by ninety but not
Speaker 1: officially over until nineteen sixty, although the Indianapolis Clowns with
Speaker 1: whom Aaron made his debut, continued barn storming through ninete.
Speaker 1: So that brings us to the question that we started
Speaker 1: this off with, was Satchel Page the greatest picture in history?
Speaker 1: And we have one person who definitely thinks so, and
Speaker 1: that's Joe DiMaggio, and he said that Satchel was the
Speaker 1: best I've ever faced and the fastest. So I think
Speaker 1: we're gonna close it out with Joe's quote there that
Speaker 1: if you have an opinion you'd like to send us,
Speaker 1: please email us at History Podcast and how stuff works
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Speaker 1: bit more about baseball statistics and all that sort of goodness,
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Speaker 1: home page.