Book Review: Satchel – The Life and Times of an American Legend

Written by: jimmyscott on 25th September 2009

Book Review: Satchel - The Life and Times of an American Legend | read this item

77 pages. There are 77 pages of notes and bibliography at the end of Larry Tye’s Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend. Before I read one page, I was impressed. Thoroughly researched, I thought this book might be the answer to so many poorly written biographies of baseball players. I thought Satchel would be the page-turner my summer reading list was missing. Alas, it was not. (Note to self: Look up the word “alas” and promise self never to use it again in public.)

Dan Brown, who wrote The DaVinci Code (and just released its sequel, The Lost Symbol), came to mind while reading Satchel. The DaVinci Code was a page-turner. But it was also one of the worst written page-turners I’d ever read. The greatness of the story was what overcame a pretty lousy book. Make sense?

With Satchel, we have a great story as well. Here’s arguably one of the greatest pitchers of all time, Satchel Paige. Here’s an American Legend who rose from poverty to stardom during the Jim Crow Era, a period of time in our history when blacks were considered inferior to whites and segregation wasn’t just a way of life, it was the law. Here’s a personality who would be unrivaled even today for his quotes, his actions and his baseball skills. Yet even with the research and the backdrop and the man, the book never took me to a place good writing can transport a reader to. Instead, I found myself thumbing ahead (or behind) to look at the pictures again and again to give myself a break from reading.

Why?

null It’s not that Tye can’t write. Mr. Tye has won writing awards while with The Boston Globe. He’s written other books and runs a Boston-based training program for medical journalists. The problem with Satchel isn’t the writing itself most of the time (we’ll come back to a few issues I did have with the writing). My problem was with the editing.

Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend isn’t just about Satchel Paige. It’s about America in the 20th century. It’s about integration in baseball and, more important, in the country’s culture. Satchel is about how one man, a black man, was able to live the life of a star in a white man’s world and, in effect, help to change that world to where we are today, with an MLB filled with players of all colors, an absence of legal segregation and even a black President of the United States. If you read Satchel, you will be able to indirectly trace President Obama’s rise to power back to Satchel’s rise to glory.

It’s how we see all of this happening that makes the reading of Satchel, at times, difficult. There is time-jumping and place-jumping. At times, you get used to being in one time during Satchel’s life and, after reading that section, you’re suddenly back, three or four years earlier. It made this reader feel like he’d done a lot of work to suddenly be back where he started.

There is a lot of good in Satchel. Reading about Satchel Paige’s life is reading about the history of black baseball, not just in America, but in the Northern Hemisphere.

Paige played in the United States. He played in Mexico. He played in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Venezuela. He played nearly every day of every year from the 1920s to the 1950s. He was the first real free agent, loaning himself out to the highest bidder for a Sunday afternoon game, then jumping into the car and speeding to another game that night.

Tye does a good job of describing the barnstorming life of Paige. He describes the car rides, the bus rides, the train rides, and the one plane ride. He writes of how certain players were assigned to Paige to make sure he’d make it to the day’s game on time and not spend the afternoon catching catfish for his dinner. The money was always coming in for Paige, and it was always going out. He played for a love of the game. And he also played because that was his job. He knew of no other way to earn income, except to play baseball. His spending habits as they were, Paige had to play a lot of baseball in order to pay the bills.

Satchel Paige is a man to be admired, but Tye describes a man who was loved by fans but “admired” by his teammates. He was such a big star, it was difficult for Paige to be one of the guys. He played by his own rules and his owners tolerated the behavior. (Did Pedro Martinez study Satchel Paige while he played for the Red Sox?) There were always women, and there were two marriages the ran concurrently for a time.

Satchel Paige wasn’t a model citizen. It was because of Paige’s personality that Branch Rickey chose Jackie Robinson to be the first African-American player to break baseball’s color barrier. How did Paige feel about this? He was older than Robinson and more experienced. He’d been playing against white Major Leaguers for years in the off seasons, in leagues run by future Hall of Famers Dizzy Dean or Bob Feller. He thought for sure that when the barrier fell, it would be because of him. Larry Tye does an in-depth analysis of this time and shows the reasons why Paige wasn’t chosen and how he felt not even being the second African-American after Robinson (Paige would become the first black pitcher in the Major Leagues).

There is history when reading about Satchel Paige, both baseball and American history. Larry Tye’s Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend covers that history with precision and authority. It is clear that Tye deeply admires Paige. The style of writing near the end of the book shows that far too well as Paige’s post-baseball life is skimmed over. Tye writes about Paige being a father and raising his kids with, at best, high school book report ability. This is too bad, because the quality of the research over the first two-thirds of the book overcomes any writing or editing issues. The end of the book is similar to the end of Satchel Paige’s career. The desire never faded. The quality just couldn’t keep up anymore.

Topics: American Legend, Backdrop, Baseball Players, Baseball Skills, Book review, Boston Globe, Dan Brown, Good Writing, Greatest Pitchers Of All Time, Greatness, Jackie Robinson, Jim Crow Era, Larry Tye, Medical Journalists, Page Turner, Page Turners, Pitchers, Satchel Paige, Segregation, Stardom, Summer Reading List, Who Wrote The Davinci Code

* Bits and pieces « Ron Kaplan’s Baseball Bookshelf says:

October 21, 2009 at 9:18 pm

[...] BaseballDigest.com’s review of Satchel, by Larry Tye. Upshot: “Before I read one page, I was impressed. Thoroughly researched, I thought this book might be the answer to so many poorly written biographies of baseball players. I thought Satchel would be the page-turner my summer reading list was missing. Alas, it was not.” [...]