![]() “But those hard hitters, I tried to keep them hitting the ball on the ground, let them hit singles or doubles on the ground and maybe have a chance to get the next man out.” Gibson himself is quoted as calling Streeter the smartest pitcher in the league. If it had been hit in the air, Streeter admits, it would have been a legitimate homer. When that ball came back in there, he was already back sitting on the bench.” “He hit it on the ground to center field and it bounced over the center fielder’s head. “He hit a home run off me once in Forbes Field, but it actually should have been a single,” Streeter claims. “And we had hard hitters in our league, just like they did.” “Foxx hit pretty good, but he didn’t get any home runs,” Streeter recalls. He also beat Rube Walberg and Jimmie Foxx of the Athletics, 7-6. You had to kind of loosen him up, use a change of pace.” Gehrig was one of those guys you couldn’t throw the ball by him. He pitched against Lou Gehrig in the 1920s. “We’d lose some, but we won more than we lost” against the whites, Streeter says. The next year he bested Casey Stengel’s all-stars, 5-4, defeating pitchers Fred Frankhouse and Bill Swift. In 1931in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park (later Connie Mack Stadium), he beat George Uhle of the Detroit Tigers, 18-0. Sam beat white major leaguers as well as blacks. I wasn’t big enough to scare nobody out there in the box, but when a batter came up and swung his bat, I could almost tell whether he could hit a high ball or a low ball. “At that time,” he says, “if a man didn’t weigh around 200, he didn’t hardly get a job pitching. “But when Sam got in a tough spot, he’d throw the spitball. Before you knew it, you were halfway to the pitching mound. You’d walk up on his pitches, and he kept breaking each one off a little shorter. He’d outsmart you.”Ĭrawfords outfielder Ted Paige, who also still lives in Pittsburgh, laughs that Streeter “kept breaking the curve off right in front of you. “He threw mostly curves, mostly slow on everything,” says Vic Harris, Streeter’s manager on the Homestead Grays later. Sam had a good drop ball, curve, knuckler, and fastball. Manager John McGraw of the old New York Giants is supposed to have said Streeter had the best control of any lefty he’d seen. Streeter topped him with a 14-7 mark, but fastballer Harry Salmon, another Pittsburgh resident who died in 1983, bettered them both with 15-9. The Negro Leagues played about 100 league games a year then. He got to the point where he had good control. “I told him to keep his eye on the plate, not to turn too far, to glance at the plate before he turned his ball loose. He’d look around, and when he’d come back, he didn’t know where he was throwing it. See, he’d wind up and wouldn’t watch the batter. “I worked with him, taught him a curveball, got him control. “He would throw hard, but he didn’t have any curveball,” Sams says. Streeter remembers Satch well, of course. “If there ever was another Sandy Koufax, it was him.” “Streeter was one of the best Iefthanders you’d ever want to see,” Paige himself declared. ![]() Streeter was the ace of the Birmingham Black Barons in 1927 when Satch, then a skinny kid, joined them as a rookie. It wasn’t the first time that Satch had played in the shadow of Sam. The top vote-getter, and thus honored with starting the first game, was a stocky little lefthanded spitballer who still lives in Pittsburgh – Sam Streeter, now 84 years old. When the first black All-Star Game was played in 1933, shortly after the first white classic, Satchel Paige came in third in the vote of the fans for starting pitcher.
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