Love your Satchel-Babe faceoff.

It is more than fantasy, however. As I wrote in my new bio of Satchel (Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend/Random House), the titans did face off, possibly repeatedly. Here, for anyone who is interested, is what I wrote about the battle of the white home run king against the black strikeout king:

“I saw Satchel play in an exhibition game with daddy and daddy commented on the fact that he’s quite a pitcher,” Julia Ruth Stevens recalled from her home in Conway, New Hampshire, in 2007. Stevens, who was 91 then, had sharp recall of events from her father’s playing days although she was not sure how he fared in the exhibition appearance against Satchel. That game was in New York, she added, but “they may have had more than one game together. This was a long, long time back, in the 1930s.”

Two more versions come from Satchel himself. He said he played against Babe but offered no details in a 1943 story carrying his byline in the Pittsburgh Courier. Five years later he told writer and publisher Bennett Cerf that during an exhibition game in Phoenix he intentionally walked three men to get to Babe, then struck him out on four pitches. Bob Feller, who one day would replace Dizzy as Satchel’s barnstorming sidekick, said he heard and believed similar stories about Satchel striking out Babe, as did Cool Papa Bell.

The last Babe-Satchel account is the least flattering to the pitcher, which may be why he chose not to recall it. Baseball’s most powerful hitter matched skills with its most overpowering pitcher in 1938 or thereabouts in a battle of barnstormers on the South Side of Chicago. Ruth would have been about forty-three then, and officially retired for three years. “Babe comes up and the first pitch Satchel throws he hits over some trees, 500 feet,” Buck O’Neil remembered in an interview in 2006, repeating a story he told eleven years earlier during a seminar at Hofstra University. “You know who greets him at home plate? Satchel. He held up the ballgame for 10 minutes while a kid got the ball and brought it back for Babe to autograph. That’s the only time Satchel faced him.”

Larry Tye

www.larrytye.com