This 6-pillar curriculum teaches the basic literacy we need to be personally and financially successful and to do so in a manner in which together we evolve a culture that supports the emergence of an advanced human civilization.
The 54-minute 2009 documentary Pitching Man: Satchel Paige – Defying Time, produced and directed by documentarian and baseball historian Craig Davidson and narrated by Billy Dee Williams, looks at pitcher Satchel Paige’s extraordinary contributions to baseball over an unprecedented five-decade career—a career belatedly capped in 1971 when he became the first Negro League Player inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
The famed athlete was born Leroy Robert Page in 1906. He acquired the nickname “Satchel” (sometimes spelled “Satchell”) from childhood jobs carrying bags for train passengers, and the “i” in his last name arose when his mother modified the family name in the mid-1920s to differentiate it from a “page in a book.”
Paige grew up poor in Mobile, Alabama, and the film explains that were it not for an early brush with the law at age 12, which resulted in a five-year stint at the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers, he might never have become a baseball player. The school’s African American trustee, the Reverend Moses Davis, was also the resident boys’ baseball coach. Paige later commented, “I traded five years of freedom to learn how to pitch…. They were not wasted years at all. It made a real man out of me.”
Pitching Man features interviews with fellow players, sportscasters, team owners, and others—who all unanimously emphasize Paige’s charisma and showmanship on the field (he was a fan favorite throughout his career), the “lightning-fast” speed of his pitches, and his standout control of the ball. Hall of Fame baseball owner Bill Veeck had a close and fruitful relationship with Paige, and his son Mike laughingly describes how his father persuaded skeptical club manager Lou Boudreau to sign Paige:
“Dad took a pack of gum and put it on the plate and invited Mr. Boudreau to watch Satchel Paige throw seven out of eight pitches across that pack of gum. Well, it wouldn’t matter if Attila the Hun had been trying out for that club; anybody with control like that, Boudreau was going to sign.”
In addition to highlighting Paige’s athletic prowess and numerous milestones while playing in the Negro Leagues, on Latin American teams, and later in Major League Baseball (when he made his MLB debut at age 42, he became the oldest rookie in MLB history), the documentary conveys respect for Paige’s willingness to “walk outside the lines” and be his own person without compromise or loss of integrity. As Paige’s biographer Mark Ribowsky says toward the close of the film,
“We have to cherish people like Satchel Paige for what they did, for what the game has become. Guys have played for the purity of the game but also a man like Satchel Paige realized what it could do for him as a man…. Doing that as a black man in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s was probably the hardest thing any American could do, yet he did it with such elan and such style that he’s remembered today, and he’ll be remembered 1000 years from now.”
Paige was often evasive about his age (finding this to be an effective strategy against naysayers who thought he should stop playing). His delightful attitude toward aging is reflected in the quote at the top of this post, as well as his comment that “Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
