Back when the Hardball Times was still in its infancy, Steve Treder wrote a wonderful article about the wide-ranging baseball career of Bobo Newsom, a man who pitched nearly 6,000 innings of professional baseball over 25 years.
Impressive, true, but I wonder how a similar article about the legendary Satchel Paige would go? Satchel Paige not only pitched a lot—from local professional ball to traveling squads to the Dominican Republic to the Negro Leagues and finally to the majors—but he was an extraordinary hurler, possessing a combination of speed and control very rarely seen, with an outsized personality to match. Paige’s story is one of the archetypal stories of 20th century baseball. What an article that would be.
Not just an article, as it turns out, but a book. Larry Tye has written that book, Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend, and I wouldn’t hesitate to call it a baseball fan’s must-read. …
BTW, here’s NPR’s 44 min interview with the author of the book, Larry Tye.
