Leroy “Satchel” Paige would probably not want this story written.
“I want to be,” he once said, “the onliest man in the United States that nobody knows nothin’ about.”
Paige relished the air of mystery that permeated his unique baseball life.
Because of the nature of a career that took place primarily in the Negro Leagues and the barnstorming circuit, guesswork surrounds the most significant statistics of his career.
The best stories about Paige -- like when he supposedly had his infielders sit while he struck out the side, or when he loaded the bases to strike out Josh Gibson on three pitches -- are anecdotal.
And even Paige’s birthdate -- possibly July 7, 1906, or 119 years ago today -- is open to conjecture. There was a birth certificate attributed to Satchel in his Mobile, Ala., hometown with that date on it, but the name listed was “Leroy Page,” so it was possibly another person.
The playful Paige never wanted anyone to know how old he really was, anyway.
“My birth certificate was in our Bible,” he once said, “and the goat ate the Bible with the birth certificate in it.”
In the world of baseball mythology, Paige was the GOAT -- a tall man who inspired some tall tales.
To try to put Satchel’s story in some kind of order, to nail down the details, might seem impossible ... and, perhaps, beside the point. The puzzlement surrounding Paige is, after all, an indelible part of his charm.
But in the most scrupulously studied professional sport, a player as pivotal as Paige deserves closer inspection. And a researcher and author named Mark Armour is on the case.
Armour, the outgoing president of the Society for American Baseball Research’s board of directors and a winner of the Henry Chadwick Award for his many years of baseball study, has always been fascinated and frustrated by Paige -- fascinated by his importance, frustrated by the dearth of details.
“As a baseball history nerd,” Armour said, “the thing that was unsatisfying to me in the books about Paige was there wasn’t the specificity that you would have in a book about Babe Ruth or Ted Williams. We know where Babe Ruth was on Aug. 4, 1931. We could find that out in minutes. But you don’t know that about Paige, because most of the stories about him are more vague.”
Armour wanted a better way to tell Satchel’s story, and he has spent the last couple years compiling what can only be described as, to borrow a phrase, the “onliest” timeline derived from every known piece ever published about Paige.
“I was sort of amazed,” said Armour, “by how much I was able to find.”
This is a recurring theme in the world of Negro Leagues research. It is living history. In 2024, MLB entered the best available Negro Leagues numbers into the official statistical record. And in 2025, some of those numbers were updated to include new information and correct some human error.
(In that update, Paige himself picked up two more wins, bringing his MLB-recognized total to 127.)
With Paige, in particular, to look at his career only through the prism of the available numbers from officially recognized Negro League games or his six American League seasons with the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns and Kansas City A’s, is to sell his story short.
The official games only scratch the surface.
Satchel was a showman, and he took his show wherever someone would pay him to pitch.
“He pitched for, essentially, 45 years,” Armour said.
That’s what makes Armour’s research, which he’s dubbed “The Satchel Project,” so fun and fruitful.
Beginning with newspapers from exactly 100 years ago (Paige first pitched professionally for the 1926 Chattanooga White Sox in the lower levels of the Negro Leagues) and continuing into the 1970s, Armour scoured a handful of different digital archives to slowly but surely piece together Paige’s whereabouts, day by day.
This was only possible for Armour because of the popularity of Paige. His many exhibition, independent and winter league outings would be previewed and then recapped in the press, and virtually his every appearance merited a mention in some fashion.
“That isn’t necessarily true for someone like Josh Gibson,” Armour said. “If Gibson goes 1-for-4 with a double, he might not get in the paper, if there’s no box score. But Paige was so famous that, even if there were only two paragraphs about a game that he pitched in, he would be mentioned.”
Paige pitched for a handful of Negro League teams (most frequently the Kansas City Monarchs), but he would often be loaned out to various semipro clubs as a gate attraction.
Consider this somewhat typical month in the life of the rubber-armed Paige in 1935:
Sept. 1: Pitched in relief for independent club Bismarck at Merchants Park in Denver
Sept. 2: Pitched in both games of a doubleheader for Bismarck, again in Denver
Sept. 4: Allowed just one run with 15 strikeouts in nine innings for Bismarck -- against his own Monarchs team -- at Muehlebach Field in Kansas City
Sept. 12: Two innings for the Monarchs in an exhibition in Casper, Wyo.
Sept. 13: Two more innings for the Monarchs in an exhibition in Scottsbluff, Neb.
Sept. 15: Nine shutout innings for the Monarchs in an exhibition in Denver
Sept. 20: Two innings for the Monarchs in an exhibition in Omaha, Neb.
Sept. 22: Five shutout innings in a Major League game for the Monarchs against the Chicago American Giants in Comiskey Park
Sept. 23: Two innings for the Monarchs in an exhibition in Des Moines, Iowa
Sept. 24: One inning for the Monarchs in an exhibition in St. Joseph, Mo.
Sept. 27: Two innings for the Monarchs in a Major League game against the Chicago American Giants in Omaha
Sept. 29: Seven shutout innings for the Monarchs in a Major League game against the Giants in Kansas City
One month. Twelve appearances. Six states.
“It was very unusual if he went more than five days without pitching in the summer,” Armour said. “He had incredible durability. He pitched extremely well against Major League competition and, against lesser competition, he was winning almost all the time.”
Armour’s research, to date, found 1,833 pitching appearances and 671 known wins for Paige in every kind of game imaginable, including some Old Timers tilts.
Compare that to the 400 appearances and 127 wins in Paige’s official MLB record, which is limited only to games considered to be Major League caliber.
“There are probably another 100 to 150 games where I have information that the game was supposed to happen, with no follow-up,” Armour said. “I believe that most of those games happened and that Paige pitched in them, but it could have rained or Satchel could have hurt his thumb and didn’t pitch.”
“The Satchel Project” covers Paige’s Negro League years, American League years, International League years, his age-59 (or thereabouts) return to MLB with the A’s in 1965 and various talk show and ceremonial appearances after he finally stopped pitching.
It even tracks every known instance of Paige touring in a public relations capacity with basketball teams, including the famous Harlem Globetrotters.
(Speaking of basketball, it is unclear if any of Paige’s appearances in exhibitions in South Dakota in the 1960s mark the exact date that Phil Jackson supposedly doubled off him.)
For each entry on his spreadsheet, Armour includes GPS data that allows him to map out all the games Paige pitched.
“I’m the type of person where, if I read a book about the Civil War, I want lots of maps,” Armour said. “Same here. It helps place Paige. You can see all the spots he visited.”
By this point, you’re probably wondering if you can see “The Satchel Project” for yourself.
And the answer is that no, you can’t. Not yet.
Armour reached out to MLB.com and let us take a look at his work because he is in the midst of finalizing it and wants to be sure he has exhausted every resource available. If anyone reading this is interested in viewing his game list, especially if they believe they have information or sources that could lead to additional games, they can contact Mark at markarmour04@gmail.com.
At a SABR's recent annual convention in Irving, Texas, Armour presented an overview of the project. He’s in the process of deciding how best to release it to the wider world, perhaps in a book or on a website.
“I’m kind of at the point where I think I have got all of the water out of the rag,” Armour said. “There was a time when I was finding eight or 10 games a week. Now I’m finding a game every two or three weeks. I have people looking for me, and I’m trying to get some volunteers to look at some stuff. I’m not trying to hide any information. I just want to make sure it’s good enough [to release].”
It's certainly more than we knew before, perhaps much to Paige’s dismay.
Paige once warned us, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” But in his research, Armour has done an awful lot of looking back and done a fine job of catching up with this restless pitching icon.
“I’m proud of the work, but it didn’t really feel like work because it was so much fun,” Armour said. “I think this tells a more accurate picture of who Satchel Paige was.”