AMERICA AT LARGE:A new book celebrates the life of legendary American baseball pitcher, Leroy Paige, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

HE DEBUTED with the Cleveland Indians on July 9th, 1948, and pitched two scoreless innings in a 4-1 loss to the St Louis Browns. A week later in Philadelphia, pitching in relief of fellow Hall of Famer Bob Lemon, he recorded his first major league victory in an 8-5, comeback win over the Athletics.

He didn’t start a game until August 3rd of that year, but when he did, more than 75,000 people packed into Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium for the occasion, a 3-2 win over the Athletics.

By the season’s end he was 6-1 with an earned run average of 2.48, second-best in the American League. Though instrumental in helping the Indians win their first pennant in 28 years, he only pitched once as Cleveland took four of six games from the Braves to win the ’48 World Series. (The Indians haven’t won one since.)

In part because he had joined the team so late in the season he only finished fourth in the balloting for Rookie of the Year honours, but he said he would have been embarrassed to accept the honour even if he had won it. Two days before he took the mound to throw his first big-league pitch, he had celebrated his 42nd birthday.

For those who saw him in his prime (including dozens of major leaguers who faced him in post-season barnstorming tours), Leroy Robert (Satchel) Paige may have been the greatest pitcher ever to pick up a baseball. The velocity of his fastball has been estimated to have been between 100 and 105 mph, but he augmented blinding speed with an astonishing repertoire of pitches:

“I got bloopers, loopers, and droopers,” he once explained. “I got a jump ball, a be-ball, a screwball, a wobbly ball, a whipsy-dipsy do, a hurry-up ball, a nothin’ ball and a bat-dodger. My be-ball is a be-ball because it be right where I want it, high and inside. It wiggles like a worm.”

As demonstrations of his legendary control he routinely hit targets as small as chewing-gum wrappers, matchbooks, and postage stamps from the regulation pitching distance of 66 feet, six inches, and on occasion in Negro League games he deliberately loaded the bases by walking three batters and then, after directing all of the fielders save his catcher to come in and take a seat on the infield grass, proceeded to strike out the side.

Paige is believed to have been the winning pitcher in as many as 2,000 baseball games. (The all-time major league leader, Cy Young, won 511.) He played not only for at least half a dozen Negro League teams, but for unaffiliated clubs in the independent California Winter League and in Bismarck, North Dakota, as well as stints for teams in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico.

Many of of these entities weren’t too careful in their record-keeping, and the corroboration process is further complicated by the fact in a career that spanned four decades, Satch rarely lasted a whole season with the same club.

Free Agency didn’t arrive in the major leagues until 1975, but Paige had pioneered the practice decades earlier. As readily enticed by a better offer from a rival owner as he was by a pretty girl’s smile, he regularly jumped from one team to the next.

During his lifetime Paige (1906-1982) co-operated in producing two ghost-written autobiographies. Published 12 years apart, they contained so much contradictory information that, they only further obfuscated the tangled details of of his remarkable life. (Paige left false trails to throw potential biographers off the track: “I want to be the onliest man in the United States that nobody knows nothin’ about,” he once said.)

But former Boston Globereporter Larry Tye has done a fine job of separating fact from fiction in Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, published by Random House. Combing through back issues of black-audience newspapers of the day and the memoirs of Paige's contemporaries, he has produced a book that may not solve the riddle, but is the nearest thing to a definitive account possible.

Satchel Paige's legend had previously inspired the Hollywood film The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, as well as for Don't Look Back, an equally-fanciful made-for-TV movie (starring Lou Gossett as Satch) that came out a year before the pitcher's death. Don't Look Back, the title of Richard Pennebaker's 1967 Bob Dylan documentary, also took its name from the most famous of Satchel's "Rules for Staying Young", to wit: "Don't look back. Something may be gaining on you."

Although he was denied the opportunity to practice his trade in major league baseball until he was well into middle age, Paige faced big-leaguers on numerous ex-officio occasions, and almost always got the better of it.

For several years he assembled a collection of Negro League stars for a barnstorming tour on which the opposition came in the form of a similar aggregation of major leaguers captained by Jay Hanna (Dizzy) Dean. Dean was an Arkansas-born redneck given to frequent deployment of the “n” word, but he was also a capitalist and a baseball player, and described Paige as the best pitcher he’d ever seen.

On those tours, as well as throughout his career in the Negro Leagues, Paige insisted proper accommodations and a decent place to eat for himself and other black ballplayers be included in the bargain.

Reared in the south, he belied his “Stepin Fetchit” public persona with a quietly effective, one-man crusade against the Jim Crow laws of his day, and while his proponents have argued he and not Jackie Robinson should have been the major league’s first African American player, Tye makes it clear how unsuited Satch would have been for that role.

Robinson spent a two-year indoctrination period preparing him for the anticipated hostility he would face from many of his contemporaries. Satchel would not have been as willing to turn the other cheek. Paige’s relationship with Robinson seems to have been conflicted, their differences came in part because Satchel seemed to view the colour issue not as one of black and white, but of green.

He not only spurned contracts when a better offer came along, but when his Negro League team-mates were travelling in rickety buses he moved from town to town in a new Cadillac. And when the still-remote possibility of playing in the big leagues was broached to him in 1942, Paige replied the majors probably couldn’t afford him anyway. As the Negro Leagues’ biggest drawing card, he was making $37,000 a year. The average major league salary was $6,400.

Just 28 of Paige’s wins came in a major league uniform, but in 1971 he became the first Negro League player elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. A wonderful postscript to his storied career had come late in the 1965 season. Aware Satchel needed one more turn on a major league roster to qualify for baseball’s pension plan, Kansas City A’s owner Charles O Finley signed him to a contract and used him in a September 25th game against Boston. The cameo role was partially a publicity stunt, but the Red Sox batters were not eager to be faced a geriatric pitcher.

They were duly embarrassed as Satchel allowed just one hit in recording three shutout innings. He was 59 years old.