Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige was born on July 7, 1906, in Mobile, Alabama. He possessed such a legendary, untouchable arm that even the great New York Yankees icon Joe DiMaggio famously noted that Paige was definitively the best and fastest pitcher he ever faced in his entire career.
Paige’s exact age was treated as a mythical, running joke in baseball because his birth certificate wasn’t officially unearthed until 1948. Because he played in the Negro Leagues for decades before integration, he didn’t debut in Major League Baseball until he was 42 years old—yet he was still so dominant that at the age of 59, he was signed by the Kansas City Athletics for a single game in 1965, where he pitched three scoreless innings and gave up only one hit.
Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
