Nine Thousand Matches

Two days earlier, 690 people had watched the A's play a baseball game.

That was the number Charlie Finley was looking at in September 1965. Last place, an empty ballpark, a season to get through somehow. So on September 10 he signed a 59-year-old man who had not thrown a major league pitch in twelve years, kept him on the active roster for two weeks, and announced he would start Kansas City's next-to-last home game.

It was a stunt and nobody pretended otherwise. Finley set him up in a rocking chair beside the A's underground bullpen with a nurse to rub liniment into his shoulder and a kid to bring him water. Paige, who understood the assignment better than anyone in the ballpark, said the underground bullpen suited him fine since at his age he was close enough to being below ground already.

Then he went out and pitched.

His catcher that month was Rene Lachemann, 20 years old, who had heard the stories about Paige's control and figured they were tall tales. So he laid a gum wrapper down on the ground and told him to prove it. Paige threw fastballs over the wrapper. Then Lachemann asked for a curve, and Paige threw that over it too.

When he walked off the mound that evening, a carpenter named Bill Yearout stood up in the upper deck and told his two grandsons to get on their feet and clap for the man. The older boy was nine. His name was Rick Sutcliffe, he won a Cy Young Award nineteen years later, and he still says that ovation was the first time in his life he got goosebumps.

Then the stadium lights went out. Nine thousand people struck matches in the dark and sang to him. Rockin' Chair. Darling I Am Growing Old. The Old Gray Mare.

He never pitched in the majors again. Sixty-one years later, he is still the oldest man who ever played.