Staff Picks (February) - Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow

You can't work at Diamond without being a baseball fan. It's not a rule, per se, but baseball artwork and memorabilia hangs throughout the office, and I even have some baseball artwork hanging in my own office of players and places of a century ago. What I would love more than pictures, though, would be a time machine so I could visit stadiums that no longer exist. Wouldn't it be amazing to see Babe Ruth at New York's Polo Grounds? Or Mordecai Brown at Chicago's West Side Park? Or Satchel Paige at Pittsburgh's Forbes Field?

Ah, Satchel Paige. One of the finest pitchers to ever play the game, one who had a twenty year professional career in the segregated Negro Leagues before he crossed baseball's "color line" in 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson became the first black major league baseball player since the late 19th-century. Paige was notorious for his showmanship on the pitcher's mound; famously, he would walk the bases full, and then strike out the next three batters on nine pitches. James Sturm and Rich Tommasco tell his remarkable story in Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, a powerful graphic novel biography about one of the best players to ever play the game and the segregated society in which he lived and played that will engage any reader interested in baseball history.

— Wink Shörtendorfer 

Publisher: Disney - Hyperion
Item Code: FEB191677
SRP: $12.99
In Comic Shops: 4/24/2019