Just two days after the
record books said he turned 42, Satchel
Paige made his major league debut with the Cleveland Indians on
July 9, 1948 in front of a crowd of 34,780 at Cleveland Stadium. The sheer
magnitude of the situation shouldn’t have fazed the legendary hurler, who once
while pitching in the championship game of dictator Rafael Trujillo’s league in
the Dominican Republic, was ordered to win the game under the threat of the
machine gun toting militia. Yet, for Paige, toeing the rubber on major league
soil brought a sense of high drama, shaking one of baseball’s most experienced
moundsmen. “I felt those nerves … they were jumping every which way,” Paige
recalled.
Standing at the plate for
the St. Louis Browns was 29-year-old first baseman Chuck
Stevens, who entered the game sporting a .252 batting average with one home
run, certainly not the type of numbers that would rattle fear into opposing
hurlers. While Paige admitted his nerves, Stevens on the other hand saw a
familiar target. Back in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, Paige would come out
to Stevens’ California hometown of Long Beach to play winter ball. The two
squared off many times before that fateful day. “I played against him about ten
times before that night. I played against him when he could really smoke it,”
said the 94-year-old Stevens from his home in California.
“When Satch relieved against us [in
Cleveland], he was just spotting the ball around. [It seemed like] he had lost
60 mph off of his fastball. He threw his breaking stuff and he had great
control so you knew he was going to be around the plate all the time. He wasn’t
going to overpower you like I had seen him in his earlier days,” he said.
Stevens wasted no time
against his old friend and promptly laced Paige’s offering into left field.
“The ballgame in Cleveland was not a big deal for me because I was just hitting
off of Satch. I singled into left field, between [Ken] Keltner and [Lou]
Boudreau. … I always had pretty good luck off of him.” Stevens dates his
success against Paige back to a meeting they had a few years prior, just as he
returned from his service in World War II. “One of the longest home runs I had
ever hit in my life was off of Paige. I had just gotten out of close to four
years in the service, and we played an exhibition game in Long Beach and Satch
pitched against our ballclub. The ball I hit, I guess it must have been well
over 400 feet. I wondered where all that power came from when I was rounding
the bases.”
Stevens’ teammate Ned
Garver was a 22-year-old rookie relief pitcher. Only in the major leagues
for two months, he found himself right in the middle of this historical event.
“There was never a time when there wasn’t a bunch of hoopla around Satchel
because he was such a colorful guy,” said the 85-year-old Garver from his home
in Ohio. Garver pitched two and one-thirds innings of scoreless relief for the
save that day, but his clearest memories from that game started before a pitch
was even thrown.
“We had a man on our team
who hit cleanup and played left field [Whitey
Platt]. He was from Florida. He told the manager he wasn’t going to play,”
Garver recalled. “Zack
Taylor was our manager, and you know back in those days, you didn’t tell
somebody you weren’t going to play. You didn’t get away with that kind of crap.
[Taylor] said, ‘No, you’re gonnna play.’ So he put him in the lineup.”
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