King of the Mound: My Summer With Satchel Paige (14 page)

Bismarck lost the next day to a traveling team from Grand Forks. Satch pitched pretty well, giving up only two runs, but the bats were quiet and Barney Morris allowed a three-run triple in the ninth to make the final score 6–1. The players were grumpy after the game, probably because they weren’t used to losing, and most of them left the park almost as quickly as the fans. Nick was cleaning up garbage in the stands when he was surprised to see Satch walk back onto the field, still wearing his uniform. When he noticed Nick, he waved.

“Get down here,” he said, his voice echoing around the empty park. “I need someone to catch for me.”

Nick walked down to the edge of the field before responding: “I don’t have my glove.”

“In the dugout,” Satch said, flicking his head. “Take your pick.”

There were two gloves on the bench. One was an outfielder’s mitt,
so large and floppy that it covered Nick’s hand like a sleeping cat. The other was smaller and stiff in the pocket—it probably belonged to someone who played second base or shortstop. Nick chose that one and then slowly walked out to home plate.

“I’m not a catcher,” he said as he crouched, his bad leg stuck out to the side.

“I’m not going to throw you the Rising Tom,” Satch said. “Just plain old fastballs. All you gotta do is hold that glove out and tell me if you have to move it. Okay?”

“Okay,” Nick said.

Satch started his easy windup and Nick tried to hold the glove perfectly still. From this angle Satch’s leg kick looked impossibly high—Nick’s eye focused briefly on the sole of his shoe—and then the ball smacked into the webbing of the glove, hard enough that Nick’s entire body shifted with the impact.

“How was that?” Satch called from the mound.

“Good,” Nick said. “I don’t think I moved it at all.”

“Five more,” Satch said.

The next four were exactly like the first, but the fifth was outside and Nick tried to stab the white blur with the glove. He was a little too aggressive and the ball smacked into his palm rather than the webbing. The sting came a moment later—a sharp, hot pain that felt like when his teacher at school whacked him with a ruler—and Nick instinctively dropped the glove. As he rubbed his hand, Satch wandered in from the mound.

“Sorry,” Satch said. “That’s exactly what was happening during the game. I kept missing my spot.”

“Is something wrong with your mechanics?” Nick asked. That was something his father used to say when he was teaching him how to pitch: “Imagine that you’re a car and your arm is the engine. If the mechanics of the motion are sound, everything else will fall into place.”

Satch shrugged. “Nah, it’s just pitching. Some days it goes okay and some days you start thinking too much and it all falls apart.” He picked up the glove and tossed it to Nick. “You want to throw for a minute?”

Nick glanced at the pitching rubber. “From the mound?”

“You’re a pitcher, aren’t you?”

“Not anymore. My dad saw me pitching yesterday and said that I didn’t have any power in my legs.”

Satch was silent for a long moment, a dark shadow passing across his face. “What about the deer oil?” he finally asked. “Is that helping?”

“I put on a little every morning,” Nick said. “And I haven’t been using the brace much anymore.”

“Well, that’s good. Which leg is it?”

“Left.”

“Then when it comes to pitching, you got no excuses,” Satch said. “Power comes from the back leg. . . . All that front leg does is help you balance at the top and make sure you don’t land on your face after you throw.” He turned and pointed at the mound. “So get out there and show me your stuff.”

Nick slowly walked toward the center of the diamond. The mound was much taller and firmer than the little bump Emma had dug in their backyard, and the divot in the earth where the pitcher’s foot landed after he strode forward
seemed impossibly far from the rubber—this was a mound for men, not boys. As Nick got into position and took a deep breath, Satch sank into a deep crouch, his bony knees sticking out on either side of the plate like oars on a rowboat.

“Fastball,” he shouted. “Right in the glove!”

For a moment Nick was paralyzed by the idea that he was about to throw a ball to Satchel Paige, but then he forced the air from his lungs and focused on the target. His body moved, controlled by instinct, and suddenly all his weight was on his bad leg, his torso perpendicular to the ground, and a sharp snap came from home plate. Satch stood, shaking his hand.

“Lord almighty,” he said. “You got a live arm, Hopalong.”

Nick wanted to respond, but instead he just smiled like an idiot. Satch tossed the ball back to him. “Ten more,” he said. “Just like that.”

Nick overthrew the third pitch and bounced it in the dirt, but the rest were good. When Satch caught the last ball, he stood and walked toward the mound. Nick met him on the infield grass.

“You’re accurate, too,” Satch said. “You practice a lot?”

Nick shrugged. “I drew a target on the wall at the hospital.”

“Good. When I was your age, I’d throw rocks at signposts or anything else I could find. Probably a couple hundred a day. That’s how you get so you can put the ball wherever you want.” Satch paused for a long moment, his dark eyes locked on Nick. “You know, I give folks advice all the time—anything under the sun. But if you held my hand to the Bible, I’d swear that I only know one true thing on this earth. You want to hear it?”

“Of course,” Nick said.

“I’ve got a brother with more talent than me. Arms like a circus strongman and fast as the wind. And, boy, could he throw—he could stand on home plate and toss a ball out of most parks. But when folks told us that we’d never be worth nothing, he listened. And that’s why he’s living in a shack back home and I’m traveling the world. You understand?”

Nick nodded. He understood exactly what Satch meant and why he was saying it—in fact, his mother used to say a version of the same thing: “There’s nothing you can’t do if you believe in yourself.” When Nick was younger, that had seemed like one of those sweet, bland things that mothers say, but now he wasn’t sure whether it was true. You could want to be a major-league pitcher more than anyone else on earth, but if you had a weak arm . . . well, it was going to be pretty close to impossible. But maybe that wasn’t Satch’s point; maybe he was just saying that you shouldn’t let fear get between you and what you want.

Nick was still lost in that thought when Mr. Churchill appeared on the field and waved at Satch. “I’m going over to that meeting now,” he called. “You sure you want to come?”

Satch nodded curtly. “I make a point of always negotiating for myself.”

“Okay,” Mr. Churchill said. He looked at Nick. “Wild Bill thought you were funny, so you’re coming too.”

“Back to the hotel?” Nick asked.

“Nope,” Mr. Churchill said with a flicker of a smile. “Somewhere else.”

Somewhere else turned out to be the tallest building in North Dakota. The State Capitol, also known as the Skyscraper on the Prairie, towered nineteen floors above Bismarck, and as the elevator whirred upward Nick felt an exhilarating combination of nerves and excitement. The highest he had ever been was either the third floor of the hospital or the time he climbed a giant oak tree near the river.

“How come we’re meeting Wild Bill in the Capitol if he’s not the governor anymore?” Nick asked as the elevator doors opened onto a hallway on the sixteenth floor.

“Because he still runs this state,” Mr. Churchill said, his tone unusually short. “And because he’s likely to be governor again as soon as they hold an election.”

They pushed their way through a glass door stenciled
TOM MILLS, MAJORITY LEADER
. A secretary glanced up at them from behind a big desk, and when Mr. Churchill identified himself, she waved them to a small sitting area. Satch put his big feet up on a table and picked his nails as he waited, as calm as if he were sitting on the bench between innings. Mr. Churchill, on the other hand, looked like a slug in the sun. At last the secretary led them into a large room with giant windows. Wild Bill and two other men were sitting in modern-looking chairs, but Nick was mesmerized by the view—beyond the window stretched the tops of roofs and the curl of the Missouri River and the vast expanse of brown fields that eventually faded into the horizon. He was staring down at the nearest street, where the cars looked like toys, when Wild Bill spoke.

“Is that boy Satchel Paige?” he asked. He was ignoring Satch and looking at Mr. Churchill, who just nodded. “What’s he doing here?”

“You’ll have to ask him,” Mr. Churchill said.

Wild Bill turned to Satch, who looked back at him as if he were staring down a batter. “I’m not pitching in that tournament down in Kansas,” Satch said after a long moment. “Not unless they put up more than chicken feed for prize money.”

Wild Bill wagged a finger at Satch. “Don’t get uppity with me,” he said. “I promised my friend who runs that tournament that you were going to show up, so you and your team are going to go down there and win one for the state of North Dakota. Like it or not.”

“My contract didn’t call for no tournaments,” Satch said. “If they want me to pitch, I need an appearance fee.”

“There is an appearance fee. One thousand dollars. To be split by the team.”

Satch shook his head. “We’re going to get a thousand dollars for every game we win. To split. Plus an extra thousand dollars to me personally just for showing up.”

Wild Bill sputtered for a moment, his face red. “That’s highway robbery!”

Satch shrugged. He still looked perfectly calm. “Your friend will still make plenty of money. We’ll sell out every game in that brand-new stadium, and he’ll get all kinds of free publicity because every newspaper in the country will write a story about how an integrated team from North Dakota somehow managed to win a national tournament.”

The room was silent again for almost thirty seconds. Mr. Churchill was shifting uncomfortably on his feet as Satch and Wild Bill stared at each other, the only sound the monotonous ticking from a grandfather clock on the far side of the room.

“I know you’re not from around here,” Wild Bill finally said. “But
ask anyone about me. I run this state and I don’t like to be crossed. So I suggest that you and your team get down to that tournament. You understand?”

Another long moment passed and then Satch smiled. “It’s real easy,” he said. “Your man wants Satch because Satch can fill that new ballpark of his. And if his ballpark is full, he’ll make his money. So tell the man to pay me, and I’ll put on a show at that tournament that folks will remember for a long time—and fill his pockets while I’m doing it. And if he don’t want to pay me . . . well, that’s fine. But I don’t pitch for favors. Just money.”

Satch turned and walked to the door, and as he opened it he glanced over his shoulder. The smile was still on his face.

“I know you’re a big man in North Dakota,” he said. “But I’m the king of barnstorming baseball. And there ain’t nobody who can make the king play if he don’t want to play.”

Bismarck won nine of the ten games it played over the next two weeks. Satch continued to pitch brilliantly, and according to Nick’s unofficial statistics he now had a 26–2 record with 299 strikeouts and only 14 walks. Sometimes Nick would stare at the numbers and shake his head—it seemed impossible that any pitcher, even one as supernaturally gifted as Satch, could be so consistently dominant. People always talked about his trick pitches or the speed of his fastball, but Nick thought that the secret of his success was his control. When he wanted to hit the inside corner, he hit the inside corner. When he wanted to throw a high fastball, it was perfectly at the numbers. And he did it game after game after game without complaining and without losing his good stuff.

Nick’s life at home was also going relatively well because his father seemed to be settling into coaching. At practice he generally worked with the younger pitchers on the team, and during the games he would pace the bench and stare at the opposing
dugout, trying to crack their signals. About half the time he would be successful, and the players learned to trust him when he warned them about pitchouts or trick plays. He also was familiar with most of the pitchers from the local teams, and before most games he would be surrounded with Bismarck batters who wanted a scouting report.

After a noontime game on a Saturday—an 8–1 blowout of a traveling team from St. Cloud, Minnesota—Mr. Churchill gathered the team in the center of the diamond.

“I have good news and better news,” he said, half shouting to be heard over the clamor of the departing crowd. “The good news is that we’ve been invited to play in the National Baseball Congress. The better news is that the people who organize the tournament have agreed to pay us a bonus of one thousand dollars for every victory!”

The players stared at one another for a stunned moment and then broke into loud cheers. Mr. Churchill watched them, a satisfied smile on his face, and then waved his hands for silence.

“We leave on Thursday,” he said when everyone was quiet. “Same travel plans as usual. And make sure you get some sleep, boys. It’s going to take seven wins to take home that trophy.”