‘To Canada with Love’: Satchel Paige and Baseball Diplomacy
Source Information
January 2015, Volume32(Issue2)Pages 238To 249 -Permalink
Abstract
Satchel Paige's gala baseball performances in Canada had meaning at multiple levels when assessed within the context of US–Canadian relations, individual and national identity, race, the struggle for equality and the place of culture – sport and baseball in particular – in international relations and diplomacy. Paige was one of baseball's foremost globetrotters, and the premier African-American baseball ambassador without portfolio. His pitching talents and economic importance ignited passions across the borders, commencing in the 1920s and continuing over four decades. He rarely travelled less than 40,000 miles a year throughout the USA and to foreign shores wherever duty called, and there was the promise of a good payday. The great fireballer for hire and other star black ballplayers relished playing south of the border because of the freedom from Jim Crow. It is often overlooked that they loved playing north of the border as well, in Canada in particular. That play, as argued here, had symbolic and substantive international significance.