Why wasn't this guy the one to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball ?

[Elwood P Dowd]

I remember as a kid in the 1950s listening to CBS announcer Dizzy Dean tell Satchel Paige stories and say Satch was the greatest pitcher he had ever seen. Why did the Dodgers choose Jackie Robinson instead? A former Negro Leagues player once said, "Jackie may have opened the door, but Satchel gave him the key".

http://espn.go.com/sportscentury/features/00016396.html

He threw more pitches for more fans in more places for more seasons than anyone else did. Black or white. Then or now.

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His barnstorming back home also had its share of thrills in exhibition games against white major leaguers. It was reported that Paige once struck out 22 of them in a game.

Joe DiMaggio called him "the best I've ever faced, and the fastest."

In 1934 and 1935, Paige opposed baseball's best pitcher, Dizzy Dean, in six exhibition games, winning four.

"My fastball looks like a change of pace alongside that pistol bullet old Satch shoots up to the plate," Dean said. "If Satch and I were pitching on the same team, we'd clinch the pennant by the fourth of July and go fishing until World Series time."

Dean and other major league challengers, such as Bob Feller's All-Stars, were dazzled by Paige's bag of pitches, each complete with its own nickname: bee ball, jump ball, trouble ball, the two-hump blooper and Long Tom. His most famous delivery was the hesitation pitch, which he developed in the 1940s and threw after deliberately pausing as his left foot hit the ground.

<snip>

As the star of the Negro Leagues, he made more money than any other African-American player of his time, as much as $40,000 a year. He traveled the world and the country more times than he could count. For a while he even had a plane for his Satchel Paige All-Stars.

Finally, he was invited to play in the majors. It hurt him when Robinson was selected to be the first African-American to play this century, he said in his 1967 autobiography, "Maybe I'll Pitch Forever."

[Captain Hilts]

1. He was pretty old at the time. Robinson was a college grad, a veteran Army officer.

Paige is one of our country's greatest baseball players and great philosophers.

[Fuzz]

2. "Temperment"

They, being the white management, needed someone they thought could take all the abuse without saying anything back. Paige, they thought, could not do that.

[Gaedel]

3. Branch Rickey

Branch Rickey wanted to integrate major league baseball. He selected Robinson as the "perfect Negro" with just the right mixture of education, ability to speak, war record, etc. Satchel Paige was a "showman" who exaggerated his personality to put butts in the seats during the Depression. Paige was also getting long in the tooth and there wasn't that much future for him. He had one decent year with Cleveland and after that was just a box office novelty for some failing teams.

[WeDidIt]

4. Same reason neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton broke it with the presidency

The first had to satisfy white expectations as to what is proper.