Three shutout innings at 59: the oldest man ever to pitch in the majors

On the night of Saturday, September 25, 1965, the Kansas City Athletics gave the ball to a 59-year-old and sent him out to face the Boston Red Sox at Municipal Stadium. He pitched three innings. He allowed one hit, walked nobody, struck out one batter, and gave up no runs. 12

The pitcher was Satchel Paige, and the game was his last in the major leagues. He was 59 years and 80 days old that night, which makes him the oldest man ever to appear in a major league game. The record has held through the 61 seasons played since. 34

Most of the men who hold this kind of record were sent in for one at-bat and taken straight back out. Paige faced ten Boston hitters across his three innings, and nine of them made an out. The tenth, Carl Yastrzemski, doubled and was still standing on second base when Tony Conigliaro flied out to left to end the first inning. The one strikeout was Bill Monbouquette, the Boston pitcher. The pitch count that gets repeated is 28 for the three innings. 125

Charlie Finley bought the Athletics in December 1960. Kansas City finished the 1965 season 59-103, in last place, and drew 528,344 fans at home, the smallest gate in the club's eleven seasons in the city. Two nights before Paige pitched, 690 people came through the turnstiles at Municipal Stadium to watch the Athletics beat the Washington Senators. 1

Finley's answer was Satchel Paige Night. Paige had been a Kansas City Monarch in the Negro leagues, the segregated Black professional leagues where Black players spent their careers while the major leagues were closed to them, and he had settled in Kansas City. Finley signed him on September 10, 1965, for $3,500. 14

Finley asked Paige how many innings he could give him. "That depends," Paige said. "How many times a day?" 1

The club made a day of it: a lunch for former Monarchs and Kansas City Blues players, a three-inning exhibition game before the real one, and an afternoon with Buck O'Neil, Hilton Smith, Cool Papa Bell and Bullet Rogan in the park. Before the first pitch Paige sat in a wooden rocking chair in the bullpen while a nurse rubbed liniment into his pitching arm where the crowd could see it. The chair was then carried down to the dugout, which sat below field level, and Paige rocked in it while the Athletics batted. "At my age," he said, "I'm close enough to being below ground level as it is." 1

Asked about his age that week, Paige said: "I think I can still pitch and help this club. So what difference does it make what my age is if I can?" 16

Paige took the mound in the top of the first. Jim Gosger popped out to first base. Dalton Jones reached on an error by the Athletics' first baseman, Santiago Rosario, and was thrown out trying to take third on a pitch in the dirt. Yastrzemski doubled. Conigliaro flied out to left, and the inning ended with Yastrzemski stranded. 2

The Athletics had given him a lead in the bottom of the first. José Tartabull singled, moved to second on Wayne Causey's groundout, and came home on Billy Bryan's single. Bryan caught Paige's three innings that night, and his description of them was: "He threw slow, then he threw slower, and he just kept getting outs." 12

Paige retired the Red Sox in order in the second and the third. In the third he struck out Monbouquette. Then he walked back out for the fourth and began his warm-up tosses. The Athletics' manager, Haywood Sullivan, came to the mound with Diego Segui, the reliever who was taking his place. The crowd booed. Segui and Paige shook hands, and Paige walked off to a standing ovation, doffing his cap twice and bowing to the stands. 12

The radio men that night were Monte Moore and Red Rush. "Whether he is 23, 53, 63, or 73 as some say," Rush told the listeners, "he really showed a lot of people that he still has that ol' love of the game." The stadium lights were turned off, spectators lit matches, and the public-address announcer led the crowd in "The Old Gray Mare" as Paige reached the dugout. 1

Kansas City made it 2-0 in the sixth. Lee Thomas tied the game with a two-run homer in the seventh, and Conigliaro's inside-the-park home run in the eighth put Boston ahead. The Red Sox won 5-2. Monbouquette pitched the whole game for his tenth win of the season; Paige, who left with the lead, took no decision. 27

Paige's 59 years and 80 days is nine years and 74 days older than the next man on the list who kept a regular place on a major league roster. Jack Quinn was a working relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds in 1933, with fourteen appearances that season, and his last game came on July 7, at 50 years and 6 days. 3

Everyone above Quinn arrived for a single afternoon. Charley O'Leary was a coach with the St. Louis Browns when the club sent him up for one game on September 30, 1934, at 58 years and 350 days. 38 Nick Altrock had coached the Washington Senators since 1912 and had been making occasional pinch-hitting appearances since 1919; his last came on October 1, 1933, at 57 years and 16 days. 9 Minnie Miñoso, a star of the 1950s Chicago White Sox, was brought back for a token appearance on October 5, 1980, at 56 years and 311 days. 3 Jim O'Rourke was put back in for a single game in 1904, at 54 years and 21 days. 3

Since Paige, Miñoso is the only man to have appeared in a major league game at 55 or older, and nobody has come within two years of Paige's age. The 1965 season is the last in which any club put a man of 57 or older into a major league game. 3

For most of Paige's career his age was whatever he said it was. The reported birthdates ran from 1899 to 1908, and Paige himself was the source of most of them. The number was settled in 1948, when the Cleveland Indians' owner, Bill Veeck, traveled to Mobile, Alabama, and had Paige's family take him to the county health department for the birth certificate: July 7, 1906. 4

Paige's mother later told a reporter that her son was older than that, because she had written the date in her Bible. Paige wrote in his autobiography that his mother had been in her nineties when she said it, "and sometimes she tended to forget things." The 59 on the record is the figure from the certificate Veeck collected, and it is the figure that makes the record a record. 4

Paige had reached the major leagues at 42, in 1948, the oldest man ever to make a major league debut. He pitched two seasons for Cleveland, then three for the St. Louis Browns, where he was an All-Star in 1952 and 1953, and then he was gone from the league for twelve years. 410

What the night left behind is a record that took a particular set of conditions to make: a last-place club with an empty ballpark, an owner willing to put a 59-year-old on the major league mound to sell tickets, and a league with no rule against it. The men around him on the list arrived the same way, as a coach or a former star brought back for one afternoon. The Athletics released Paige on October 15, 1965. He pitched once more in organized baseball the next June, for the Peninsula Grays of the Carolina League, two weeks short of his 60th birthday, and in 1971 the committee set up for the Negro leagues made him the first player it elected to the Hall of Fame. 410

One person in the crowd of 9,289 was a nine-year-old from Independence, Missouri, named Rick Sutcliffe. Sutcliffe grew up to be a major league pitcher and a Cy Young Award winner, and years later he told the Kansas City Star that he had been in the bleachers that night, and that he was "quite sure that had something to do with me wanting to be a baseball player." 1