Right Hand of God… by Whitney Farmer – Un Pop Culture

April 13, 2011 Whitney Farmer 22 Comments

Whitney runs a rock music venue on the beach in L.A. She has an M.B.A, and used to live by Dodger Stadium.

During a power outage on June 8, 1982 in Kansas City, the heart of the hardest thrower in the history of baseball stopped. Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige died one month shy of his 76th birthday. It hadn’t been very long since he had played his last inning in organized ball at the age of 60. In that game, he pitched a scoreless second inning before giving up the mound.

Satchel Paige had been the oldest rookie in the history of Major League ball, being brought not ‘up’ from the minors but ‘over’ from the Negro Leagues. He said that baseball turned him from a second-class citizen to a second-class immortal. Paige signed a contract with the Cleveland Indians on his 42nd birthday. As Paige said, “Age ain’t nothing but mind over matter: If you don’t mind, it don’t matter.”  In a 2010 article in Sports Illustrated, it was noted that for the majority of his 15 year Major League career, Satchel Paige threw fastballs almost exclusively, but he would just make up imaginative names for them. They were said to be ‘ludicrously fast’, and he didn’t step in for one inning in a game for a dazzling performance. He threw for entire games, hundreds and hundreds of innings. Joe DiMaggio said that he was the best he had ever seen. Dizzy Dean, Bob Feller, Hack Wilson, and others would concur. In 1969, after technically retiring and becoming a pitching coach for the Atlanta Braves, he pitched an exhibition game and struck out Hank Aaron and Don Drysdale. Paige was 63 at the time.

I write phrases on mirrors that need to be remembered. What better place to put them than a place that gets too much face time already? It might as well be made useful.  When I first came to L.A., the one I put on my kitchen mirror was from an unknown author.  I learned recently that it was Satchel Paige:

“Work like you don’t need the money. Dance like nobody’s watching. Love like you’ve never been hurt.”

When I tore my rotator cuff last year at the club, I couldn’t believe that pain could be so intense and last so long. Weeks became months in a sling, and I faced living in a body that I didn’t know anymore. Pressing through pain led to more damage rather than progress. I couldn’t bet on my strength. I had to ask for help. Humility began as a necessity, then a new path that gave me freedom. I was the bread that had been cast onto the water. After the surrender, the tides take you on adventures.

Paige tore his rotator cuff in 1938 when he was in Venezuela pitching for the Mexican League:

“My stomach got sick with the pain that shot up my right arm. Sweat popped out all over me. The pain wouldn’t quit. I tried lifting my arm. I couldn’t. I just sat there, sweating, hurting enough to want to cry, getting sicker in the stomach and getting scared – real scared. My arm. I couldn’t lift it.” He was told that he would never pitch again. Ten years later, he became a rookie pitcher in the Majors.

Players who had faced Paige both before and after his injury noticed a difference. The speed of repeated pitches dipped from around 100 mph to around 90 mph. But the pitches were thrown after his injury with more cunning, changing up and dropping off. And they could still rip the mitt off a catcher’s hand.

In the Second Book of Kings, King Sennacherib of the Assyrians taunted the people of Jerusalem, recounting all of the nations who worshipped other gods who had fallen before him, and asking who was Jehovah that the city should be delivered out of the strong right hand of Sennacherib? The people of the city remained silent and powerless before the taunts, but they prayed to God for help. Exactly one chapter later down to the exact same verse, it says that an angel of the Lord went out in the night and struck 185,000 of the Assyrians dead. When Sennacherib woke in the morning to find his army decimated by a right arm stronger than his, he returned home in defeat only to be assassinated by his sons while he worshiped in the temple of his god.

The right hand of a king is where the beloved favorite sits. It is where the authority rests. But there comes a time when raising our own right arm and flexing our muscles against fate will bring failure. We fail or are wounded. This might be when things get interesting. Dining on humble pie can make our pitches wise. Casting our brokenness and cares on the water like bits of bread lets us heal while we drift on new tides to new lands. And in all human stories, as in baseball, the comeback stories are always the best.

QUOTE OF THE BLOG,  from Satchel Paige: I never threw an illegal pitch. Trouble is, once in a while, I would throw something that ain’t never been seen by this generation.