Satchel Paige was 59 years old – or something close to it – when he walked off a Major League mound for the last time.
Pitching for the Kansas City A’s on Sept. 25, 1965, the legendary Negro Leagues star who had hurled countless thousands of innings across a career that spanned five decades, had just tossed three scoreless frames against the Boston Red Sox. He was more than twice as old as some of the other players.
Paige began to walk off the mound to give way to a relief pitcher.
“Stand up!” a man in the upper deck yelled to his two grandkids seated next to him. “Stand up and clap for the man.”
As the ovation swept through the crowd, that’s when one of the two boys – 9-year-old Rick Sutcliffe – felt it.
“I think it was the first time I ever got goosebumps,” Sutcliffe said in a recent interview with MLB.com. “It was like something happened in my body that was just like … WOW!”
Sutcliffe, who went on to pitch 18 big league seasons with the Dodgers, Indians, Cubs, Orioles and Cardinals, is now 68. And all these years later, he’s certain that one moment changed his life.
“It might have been the moment I fell in love with baseball,” he said.
Paige’s exploits on the baseball field were well known all over the country, but especially in Kansas City, where he starred for the Monarchs of the Negro American League for nearly a decade in his prime. This time he had come back for an encore.
It was partially a publicity stunt for the lowly A’s – they were last in attendance among the 20 Major League teams. It was also to help Paige qualify for a Major League pension, just one of the many things denied him and other Black stars before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947. A’s owner Charlie Finley signed Paige in early September, kept him on the active roster for two weeks, and then announced he would start Kansas City’s next-to-last home game of the season.
Sutcliffe, the 1984 National League Cy Young Award winner, was born and raised in Kansas City. In 1965, he lived with his grandparents only a short drive from the old Municipal Stadium. He had just started fourth grade that month when his grandfather’s neighbor, a food salesman whose company had A’s season tickets, offered them seats to the game in which Satch would make his triumphant return.
“I remember the neighbor told my grandpa, ‘You need to take the boys to watch this guy pitch, because he may be the greatest pitcher of all time,’” Sutcliffe said.
Sutcliffe’s grandfather, Bill Yearout, worked as a carpenter and didn’t generally have extra money for treats like this. But Bill loved sports and loved his grandkids, so he eagerly accepted his neighbor’s generous offer to take Rick and his younger brother Terry to the game.
They were among 9,289 fans in the ballpark that night. While that surely doesn’t sound like much, it was almost 3,000 more fans than the last-place A’s had drawn to their previous four games combined. The fans were showing up this night for one reason – to see and honor Ol’ Satch.
Of course, nobody really knew exactly how old Satch was – his birthday was listed as July 7, 1906, but it’s still unclear if that date is accurate. One thing was certain: Paige, the ageless wonder, was considerably older than everyone else in uniform that night – Red Sox shortstop Eddie Bressoud (33) was the next-oldest player in either starting lineup – and it only added to the evening’s mystique.
Sutcliffe, a future three-time All-Star, was fixated on Paige and his presence on the mound.
“His windup was so unique,” Sutcliffe said. “I watched how he got his whole body into every pitch that he threw.”
Velocity was no longer in Paige’s bag of tricks, but control and deception sure were. With an assortment of pitches that were described by catcher Billy Bryan as “slow and slower,” Paige faced 10 batters and gave up just one hit, a first-inning double to 26-year-old future Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski.
“After the first inning when he didn't give up a run,” Sutcliffe remembered, “my grandpa looked at my brother and I and said, ‘You realize that man out there is older than I am?’”
Paige went out to warm up for the fourth inning when A’s manager Haywood Sullivan (25 years younger than Paige) walked to the mound for the pitching change. Then came the ovation.
“I just thought it was really cool,” Sutcliffe said. “He waved to the crowd, and I think my brother and I thought he was waving at us.”
Sutcliffe, who would go on to win 171 Major League games, took it all in and vividly remembers it almost 60 years later.
“That had an impact on me,” Sutcliffe said. “How it made me feel inside. I guess you start thinking, ‘I wish that was me.’ Oddly enough, years later I got a few of those.”
Nine years after seeing Paige pitch in the Majors for the last time, 18-year-old Sutcliffe was a senior at Van Horn High School in Independence, Mo., and had become one of the top high school pitching prospects in the country. One of the scouts who came to visit him was Ed Charles of the New York Mets.
Charles, a member of the 1969 World Series champion team, chatted with Sutcliffe and his grandfather when the conversation somehow turned to Satchel Paige. They were there at his last game in Kansas City, Sutcliffe said. As it turned out, so was Charles. He was the A’s regular third baseman that year but had that night off.
Sutcliffe became a first-round pick by the Dodgers in the 1974 MLB Draft, made his big league debut at age 20 and won NL Rookie of the Year in his first full season in 1979. He carved out an outstanding career that included winning the prestigious Roberto Clemente Award in 1987.
His connection to Paige and Kansas City remains strong to this day. Sutcliffe became so close to Paige’s old Monarchs teammate Buck O’Neil that he stood by O’Neil’s hospital bedside when he passed away in 2006. He became a longtime supporter of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and won its Buck O’Neil Legacy Award in 2013.
And every so often there would be reminders of watching Paige that long ago night in Kansas City.
When Sutcliffe joined the Orioles in 1992, one of his teammates was David Segui. The pitcher who relieved Paige after that wonderful ovation in 1965 was David’s father, Diego Segui.
And it just so happened that Yastrzemski, who got the only hit off Paige that night, hit his 452nd and final career home run off Sutcliffe in 1983.
Maybe most important of all is simply the fact that a future Major Leaguer was there to witness one last magical performance by one of the game’s greatest showmen. The feeling of that moment has never left Sutcliffe, and the legend of Satchel Paige lives on.