‘Satchel Paige wrote this’: One-person show at Carnegie Hall features legendary pitcher

NEW YORK — One hundred years after he made his professional pitching debut, the extraordinary baseball career and life of Satchel Paige will be presented on stage Monday in a theatrical production at Carnegie Hall.

“A Pitch From Satchel Paige,” a one-person show at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, traces the Paige saga going back to reform school. From the 1920s until the ‘60s, Paige — believed to have been born in 1906 — performed in settings renowned and obscure throughout the Americas.

A father and son team from Buffalo, N.Y., co-wrote the play, which premiered there in 2024 at the Paul Robeson Theatre. Loren Keller proposed the idea to his son Jim some 30 years ago, the younger Keller told Andscape this week.

Jim Keller said there were fits and starts in the writing process and he was living in Connecticut, a six-hour drive away from his father, as the duo got close to the finish line in 2010. They decided to meet in Cooperstown, N.Y. – the approximate midpoint between them — to apply the final touches to the script.

To commemorate its completion, they posed in the statue garden of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum alongside its life-size bronze depiction of the 6-foot-3 Paige in the righthander’s trademark pitching motion, with his left foot high in the air near his left hand and his right hand down by his right knee.

The play is an homage to Paige’s perseverance in the face of racial injustice and opportunities denied, his accomplishments and wisdom, his showmanship and wit.

“I like to say that Satchel Paige wrote this, and we adapted it for the stage, because these are all his stories,” Keller said. “There’s nothing made up.”

The approach, he added, has been to give plenty of discretionary latitude in how to stage and perform the play to its director and actor – in the case of this production, and the one in 2024, fellow Buffalo area natives Verneice Turner and Russell C. Holt.

“Being an African American woman who is very mindful about how our culture is portrayed, I really appreciated the liberty and belief in what I could bring,” Turner told Andscape.

One of her innovations for Monday’s iteration at the world-famous music mecca is the introduction of familiar musical period pieces for transitions, punctuating different eras in the story.

Holt, 36, is a decade into his acting career. He said his biggest challenge in playing the role of Paige is to portray him as a much older man, “embodying that elderly persona, but also having that confidence and swagger and personality that he still had.”

Paige’s milestones and musings – and commitment to effect change – will likely be familiar to some, but new to many more.

“He never lost sight of who he was and what his mission was — and that was to entertain people and to educate people — and my goal is to do the same thing,” Holt said.

How Paige, Black baseball’s transcendent pitcher and a living legend, evolved in dealing with being passed over in favor of Jackie Robinson to integrate the major leagues in 1947 is what Holt said is the most important thing he learned about Paige. Holt lauded Paige’s “growth and maturity to understand … to recognize and give Jackie his props.”

Also especially meaningful and poignant, Holt said, is how the play honors Josh Gibson, who never got a shot in the majors. In 1947, three months before Robinson broke the color barrier, Gibson, the Negro Leagues’ greatest catcher and slugger, died at 35.

The next year, at 42, Paige finally got his chance to appear and excel in the majors, as he had in the Negro Leagues and in barnstorming exhibitions with many of the best white players. In 1965, after a dozen years out of the majors, he came back and became the oldest player ever to appear in a major league game, throwing three scoreless innings, displaying remarkable accuracy and allowing just one hit. Six years later, he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

When producer Gene Fisch Jr. pitched “A Pitch” to Carnegie Hall, he said, “I told them about a superhero we can all rally around and cheer for. When you look at what he went through, how do you not feel good about seeing his success?”

According to Fisch, a self-described theater-lover who isn’t a producer by trade, the one-night run is close to an advance sellout, and numerous Broadway show producers are expected to attend.

“Is there a life [for the play] after Carnegie Hall? I think there is,” Fisch said, citing Off-Broadway and going on tour as two possibilities.

Fisch and director Turner emphasized that the 90-minute play about Paige can deliver a unifying message for people of all backgrounds, at a time of deep and troubling divisions.

“We don’t allow our hopes to become dim in spite of it all,” Turner said. “We still can keep the light shining.”

If Paige, who died in 1982, were still around, he’d presumably embrace the notion of a solo show about him. He was the ultimate drawing card, welcomed the limelight with bravado, and famously put on occasional de facto one-person performances, telling his fielders to sit down and merely watch him mow down opposing hitters.

According to “The Satchel Paige Project,” baseball historian Mark Armour’s ongoing effort to map the multitude of locales for Paige’s 2,000 or so pro pitching appearances, he took to mounds in Buffalo 17 times from 1941-1958.

Jim Keller said he never asked his dad, who died in 2021 of complications from COVID-19 at age 89, whether anything from Paige’s local games inspired him to pursue writing a play about him. But a poster promoting a 1942 Buffalo exhibition game starring Paige hangs on a wall in Jim’s home.

Asked what his late father and collaborator might say if he could be with him at Carnegie Hall, Jim, 68, paused to reflect.

“He’d be very proud,” Jim said of Loren a moment later. “And he’d say something like, ‘We knew it — we knew it was a good story — and now everybody will know it.’ ”

The post ‘Satchel Paige wrote this’: One-person show at Carnegie Hall features legendary pitcher appeared first on Andscape.