The Soul of Baseball by Joe Posnanski

Author:Joe Posnanski
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061752575
Publisher: HarperCollins

MY FATHER BELIEVED in every superstition you ever heard of,” Robert Paige said. He said Satchel believed in lucky clothes, lucky days, and lucky signs. He believed that a man had to be the first to cross through your door on New Year’s Day—if a woman entered your house first, it could trigger twelve years of bad luck. Robert could remember a woman standing outside their house on New Year’s Day one year, banging on the door, but Satchel Paige would not let her in. Of course, Robert said with a small smile, Satch may have had other reasons than bad luck.

Satch avoided black cats and broken mirrors. He never once in his life walked under a ladder. He believed that if a broom swept over your foot it led to some vague sentence of bad luck, Robert forgot how many years. Satch would never put his hat on his bed, and Robert still shuddered over his father’s wrath when he did it by mistake.

More than anything, Robert remembered his father’s fear of tornadoes. Nothing scared the man more. This was a geographical problem because Satchel settled in Kansas City, and tornadoes had a long season in Kansas City.

In time, Satchel worked out his fear this way. He got himself a two-sided ax. When the dark clouds came, Satchel sent Robert out into the rain. He ordered Robert to bury that ax in the ground right in the line of where the tornado might head in. It was important to put the ax in precisely the right place. Satchel would lean his head out the open window and direct Robert—a little to the left, no, a little to the right, no, more to the right. And, on Satch’s word, Robert would raise the ax high, drive it into the soil, and leave it there until the tornadoes had passed.

“What was that supposed to do?” I asked.

“The ax was supposed to split the tornado in two,” he said.

Buck laughed hard. “Split it in two. There was nobody like Satch.”

Robert took a long sip of Corona. “No tornado ever got to the house,” he said.

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