This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 11/12/2021
While he played baseball as a boy, it was in reform school that he became a player. Two weeks before his 12th birthday Satchel was sentenced to the Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers. It was partly that he missed school so often. And at the L&N station he stopped pulling and started purloining suitcases, along with anything else that was easy to grab. Now court officials were telling him he would not see freedom again for six long years. It seemed like a bad dream until they shut the door on him. That is when he knew it was real. The good news was that his new home gave him endless time for his favorite pastime: pitching a baseball. There was a coach, too, Edward Byrd, who for the first time taught Satchel the fundamentals, and for the first time Satchel paid attention. Byrd’s young protégé had an anatomy that was all up and down. Rising more than six feet and weighing barely 140 pounds, Satchel joked that if he stood sideways you could not see him. His wiry arms and stilt-like legs were aerodynamically perfect to propel a ball from mound to plate. They gave him motion. Momentum. Strength. And he had the ideal launching pads: hands so huge they made a baseball look like a golf ball, with wrists that snapped with the fury and flash of a catapult. Byrd understood what God had given this manful boy with his outsized appetites, limbs, and talents, and the coach was determined that it not be squandered. He showed Satchel exactly how to exploit his storehouse of kinetic energy. The first thing was to kick his foot so high before unleashing the baseball that it blacked out the sky and befuddled the batter. Then the novice pitcher swung his arm far enough forward that it seemed like his hand was right in the batter’s face when he let go of the ball. So was born the Paige pose. Offered is without question one of if not the most difficult mainstream released cards of the post WWII period! The featured 1948 Leaf Satchel Paige card provides the enthusiast a bright colorful rendition of this legendary short print with a fairly well centered perimeter framing this attractively focused image of its Hall Of Fame subject. Each of the four corners show wear commensurate with its opined grade while it also appears there are two or three exceptionally minor areas of ever so slight paper loss with two of them being in the name plate while the other resides at the top of his cap. The surface does show some exceptionally minor wrinkling towards the bottom portion of the card. The reverse is a splendid presentation with the appearance of a higher graded example. A boastful offering in a rightful grade of VG.