After a lot of errors, the Hall of Fame's home run

When the National Baseball Hall of Fame holds its induction ceremonies Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y., both players on the platform -- Jim Rice and Rickey Henderson -- will be African Americans. To some, it is a troubling reminder that African American participation in baseball has plummeted by two-thirds since Rice and Henderson broke into the game. But it is a scene that would have delighted Satchel Paige, whose induction nearly 40 years ago was a memorial to the days when our national pastime was all-white and blacks were banished to a shadow world called the Negro Leagues.

It was Leroy "Satchel" Paige's moment of majesty as he stood on the dais that August morning in 1971, ready to be enshrined as a diamond demigod. The White House had telegraphed, offering President Nixon's congratulations and saying, "If you still persist in not looking back, your many friends and admirers are pleased to do it for you."

Seven Caucasian heroes were being honored too that year, but it was the dark-skinned flamethrower with the horn-rimmed glasses almost everyone had come to see.

When Satchel makes it, newspapers across America trumpeted, so do the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Birmingham Black Barons and a lineup of black baseball trailblazers from Moses Fleetwood Walker to Andrew "Rube" Foster.

Even as he relished the limelight, familiar voices dueled in Paige's head. Should he be grateful that the lords of hardball finally were acknowledging that "blackball" had brilliant players, or should he resent them -- and all of the United States -- for making him pitch his best ball in the shadows? Was what counted that he was the first vintage Negro Leaguer to be voted into this exclusive club and the only pitcher to make it with a losing record in the Major Leagues? Or was it that the Hall of Fame had tried to banish him to a separate and unequal wing?

Getting there had not been easy. Paige had pitched his heart out during 20 years in the Negro Leagues, then reminded the majors of all that he could do when the Cleveland Indians signed him at 42, an age when most players were watching from the bleachers.

Supporters helped force the doors open for him at Cooperstown. Former Indians owner Bill Veeck never stopped reminding baseball why its conscience should be guilty, while Bowie Kuhn, the new commissioner, worked from the inside to change people's minds. The staunchly Republican Red Sox slugger Ted Williams led the push, taking time out during his own 1966 induction to urge "that Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson somehow will be inducted here as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here."