Skip to footer

8 new baseball books for Opening Day

Here are excerpts from eight new titles on baseball.

8. ‘The Pitcher and the Dictator: Satchel Paige’s Unlikely Season in the Dominican Republic,’ by Averell “Ace” Smith

  • By Ross Atkin

The baseball career of flamboyant pitcher Satchel Paige stretched from 1926 and his days in the Negro leagues to 1965 with the Kansas City Athletics. Author Averell “Ace” Smith has chosen to focus on one little-known, bizarre chapter in this never-dull baseball life: Paige’s 1937 decision to skip out on spring training with the Pittsburgh Crawfords to make some easy money playing in a baseball tournament in the Dominican Republic. This was long before first Dominican (Ozzie Virgil Sr.) suited up in the American major leagues in 1956. What made this trip to play alongside other Negro League greats Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell for the Ciudad Trujillo all-star team especially unusual was that the the tournament was supportive of Rafael Trujillo, who had a reputation as one of the Caribbean’s cruelest dictators. 

Here’s an excerpt from The Pitcher and the Dictator:

“As Satchel and [catcher] Cy [Perkins] walked onto the airplane and headed for the Dominican Republic, Satchel nervously queried José Aybar to find out if they needed passports for the trip. Flashing a no-worries-just-relax-my-friend smile, the little dentist assured him that everything had been handled. During the winter of 1929-30, Satchel had played in Cuba on the Leopardos de Santa Clara, so he had a feel for the Caribbean flavor of baseball. He wasn’t worried about the baseball part of things; it was just like the Negro Leagues – fast, aggressive, and showy. 

“When the trio reached the Dominican Republic, Satchel and Cy marveled that they ‘weren’t put out no place to let other passengers on. No sir.’ Satchel recalled, ‘We had the right of way. And what’s more, we didn’t even have passports. Not having passports kind of made me uneasy anyway but that president he fixed it up someways.’ ” 

8 of 8
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.