This is fresh air.
I'm Dave Davies.
A recent New York Times sports page headline reads, did page throw nearly eight times as many no hitters as Ryan?
That would be negro league's pitcher Satchel Page and major league pitcher Nolan Ryan.
That's the kind of a question that's come up recently since Major League Baseball announced it would, for the first time, officially include player statistics from the negro leagues and its historical record.
You can get an argument about it, but some believe the greatest pitcher who ever lived was Leroy Satchell Page in his prime, it said his fastball was so terrifying, some opposing batters would call in sick.
Our guest, author Larry Tighe, writes that in the 1940s, no one was better known or more beloved among black Americans.
Not Joe Louis, not Count Basie or Duke Ellington, because Satchell was unstoppable on the mound and because he played and lived with such style and charm.
Satchel Page played his best seasons before baseball was integrated.
So he didn't get the years and records in the big leagues.
He might have, but he is in the hall of Fame and holds the record for being the oldest player ever to throw a pitch in the majors at age 59.
Ty says there's another story in Satchell's rich and colorful life about race in America and how Satchel's barnstorming through american towns brought black and white fans and players together long before Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier.
I spoke to Larry Tighe in 2009 when his biography called Satchel the Life and Times of an American Legend was first released.
Larry Tighe, welcome back to Fresh Air.
I thought we might begin by asking you to just paint a little bit of a picture of Satchel page in his prime.
If someone went to the ballpark, say, in the thirties, when he really had his career going, just give us a little bit of a sense of sort of what they would see, what made him distinctive and special.
Before the game even started, everybody knew that you wanted to come out early and watch Satchell, and what you wanted to watch was he would set up on home plate a set of matches, and he'd set up this tiny little matchbook, and he'd proceed to throw eight out of ten pitches directly over the book.
Some days it might have been a postage stamp.
Some days it might have been a gum wrapper.
It was tiny objects.