Master Entertainers

Negro Leaguers were pros at using charm and humor to deflect tension on and off the diamond. They had to be.

Half their life was spent playing in the backwaters of the racially-segregated baseball universe that prevailed in America during the first half of the 20th Century, where Black players wore home-stitched uniforms, played on fields with makeshift fences, and earned enough for room and board but not to support their wife and kids back home. The other half they barnstormed the country and the continent, spending so much time dueling with second-rate white teams and dodging the minefields of Jim Crow that they had to laugh to keep from sobbing.

Sluggers like future Hall of Famer Josh Gibson learned to hit one-handed or on their knees. Hurlers like the incomparable Leroy “Satchel” Paige – another player destined for Cooperstown – took his warm-up throws sitting down, with his catcher stationed behind the plate in a rocking chair. Best of all was a riff called Shadow Ball, perfected by a traveling team Satchel later played for: The Indianapolis Clowns. The hitter swung so hard, fielders reacted so convincingly, and the runner tore down the line so fast that fans could hardly tell that it was pantomime. It was baseball so brilliant it could be played without the ball.

Another way Negro players coped with their wayfaring life in racist surroundings was to dream up their own lexicon – born from necessity, nurtured by humor. Most outsiders never knew because players never used it with them, and even if they overheard they would not have understood. Which was the point. It let players talk about fans, foes and anything else without worrying about being overheard, the way immigrant parents used Yiddish, Polish or Italian to keep things from their English-speaking children. For the baseball men, their language was about more than secrecy. It fostered intimacy. It was a shorthand for making their world make sense.

Fans loved it, so this bard of baseball gave them more. There was his Barber Pitch, which furnished batters who leaned in too close with a razor-like shave. The Bow-Tie snipped their Adam’s Apple. He stayed up all night dreaming up his Nightmare Pitch. His fastball came in several sizes: Long Tom was the hardest, Little Tom slightly softer. The Trouble Ball was so slow that hitters thought it might never arrive; the Wobbly Ball was how a knuckleball looked from home plate. The more reaction his names drew, the more creative he got, giving birth to the Four-day Rider, Slow Gin Fizz, Butterfly, Step-n-Pitch-It, Eephus, Thoughtful Stuff, Two-hump Blooper, Midnight Creeper, Submariner, Sidearmer, Alley-oops, Drop Ball, Single Curve, Double Curve, and Triple Curve.

Sportswriters had trouble keeping track of his labels. Catchers did not try. “I don’t know what they meant,” admitted Joe Greene, Satchel’s receiver for eight years with the Monarchs. Slow Robinson also caught him, and said, “He had a way of naming pitches because it made a good story. People loved it... But as far as separate signals for Long Tom and the rest, that was just Satchel talking. He loved to tell stories. To this day, I still don’t know which one Long Tom was.”

Much of that language, however, survives in today’s baseball vernacular. Paige and the other Negro Leagues legends understood that the game was entertainment, and laughter was a huge part of entertaining.

It was funny. But it was also a business. And that balance is what made Paige and his contemporaries masters at their craft.

“A lot of people might not understand how a man who talked and carried on the way Satchel did could be brilliant,” said Henry Aaron. “But coming from the same background, I understood him. Believe me, Satchel Paige had life figured out.”

Larry Tye, a former reporter at the Boston Globe, is the author of the Casey Award-winning biography, Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend.