Editor’s note: The following is a lightly edited email interview with my friend and fellow Negro Leagues researcher/writer John Graf about his groundbreaking new book with McFarland, “Simulating Satchel,” in which he posits baseball’s biggest “what if.” I’ll let him explain it from there …

Ryan Whirty: How would you describe this book? What was the goal when you set out to put it together?

John Graf: Simulating Satchel is a fictional account of what might have happened if Satchel Paige and nearly 100 of his Negro Leagues contemporaries had been admitted, as young players in their primes, for the 1934 season into what were the exclusionary major leagues.

The effect I was going for was that of a reader imagining a combined preseason annual, account of the simulated season, and commentary from both fictionalized real life and invented members of the sporting news media. What would it have been like to hold in your hands a 1934 version of a yearbook like the old Street and Smith’s, with rosters, previews and predictions only titled Sweet & Fleet’s. Or like a daily newspaper with both “in-brief” and feature-length coverage. Or a fictional magazine-like publication modeled after The Sporting News, titled The Blackball Watcher. And I included simulated radio interviews with the fictional and real-life sports journalists describing the action and related stories, their context and significance.

The goals were simple: Create a book both fun and thought-provoking that not only reported on the games themselves but also in real life in the present invites consideration of how the stories relate to the larger world of which baseball and its integration history are a part.

RW: Where did the inspiration for this book come from? How did you come up with the idea for it?

JG: The inspiration for the book goes way back to my childhood, when my parents knew early on I was a baseball nut and gave me the tools of my trade, brown paper bags and pencils to copy data from baseball cards and draw pictures of players. I turned to half-sheets of typing paper for my stationery and produced My Sports Page, 93 pages worth of a 6-year-old’s chicken scratch penmanship and the best I could do at that age of illustrating.

The idea in part originated, also in childhood, as I played a solitaire, cards and dice version, of Strat-O-Matic Baseball. I played the games and compiled the stats. Eventually, Strat came out with a computer game during my adult years, and had Negro Leagues players like Satchel Paige in it, I was drawn to creating an integrated and expanded season that included the banned Negro Leaguers as well as the white players in the exclusionary majors.

It started out as a simulated season “replay” for fun and when my buddies on the Strat Fan Forum liked the write-ups I was producing for their online discussions, I thought I’d “pitch” the idea to McFarland publishers. Bless their hearts, they made me a fiction guinea pig added to their own impressive catalog of sports history titles.

RW: How did you approach such a unique and innovative project? What did you do to undertake the project?

JG: Since I had a journalism background, it was natural for me to put the writing in a format that resembled newspaper and magazine coverage. Also, having watched and listened to my share of sports talk in broadcast media, I wanted to fictionalize a real-life broadcaster as well as the scribes who could provide the coverage. So Sherman “Jocko” Maxwell, the first Black sportscaster from the Newark and New York region, was my radio conduit.

To craft the project, I operated under the assumption that baseball could have re-integrated (remember Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother Weldy were major leaguers back in 1884 before so-called organized baseball shut the door on Black players) in a big way, rather than simply modify its exclusionary status by adding small numbers of African-American players like it did when Jackie Robinson and his successors were added in the late 1940s and 1950s, just a handful of players at a time.

Whether that was plausible in real life in 1934 is certainly open to question. That’s why I call the book a “utopian baseball fantasy.” And that’s what the “what if?” is all about.

RW: What was the biggest challenge you faced writing the book?

JG: I would have to say that getting the “voices” of the players something close to right was the biggest challenge. I wanted to be able to close my eyes and ask the question, “Can I authentically imagine Satchel Paige saying this?” Or Dizzy Dean. Or Babe Ruth. Or Charlie Root. Or Oscar Charleston. Or, notably, Norman “Turkey” Stearnes.

I got a lot of help and encouragement on this from Vanessa Ivy Rose, who was instrumental in helping with the written content of the book as well as laying the groundwork for promoting it. Of course, Vanessa is Stearnes’ granddaughter, and she helpfully told me when I would do well to check myself on some particular phrasing. Or she would say something on the order of, “I don’t think Grandpa Turkey would have said it that way. Here’s what would sound more like him.” Invaluable guidance from someone who has become a dear friend and colleague. I have seen attempts by white writers attempting to mimic the vocabulary and cadences of Black characters done badly. It’s not a pretty sight and I wanted to avoid that.

RW: Are you pleased with the book and how it turned out?

JG: Oh, my! Pleased beyond bounds. I’m grateful for the responses I’ve received so far, including the critique that I came up with a unique concept. And a hat tip goes to Gary Mitchem who headed up McFarland’s involvement and to Mark Durr on the cover design. The discussion of the significance of my portrayal of a fictional 1934 is just beginning and I look forward to the give and take from the critics as well as other readers.            

RW: Without giving away spoilers, what conclusions did you come to? What was the end result of the project? 

JG: Even more than conclusions I’ll point out an assumption I started with. That’s that the “Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues.” That’s been borne out in the work of an impressive number of historians and captured in Todd Peterson’s book by that name. In over 600 games of head-to-head competition between Black teams and the white “majors” between 1900 and 1950, Todd reports the league, pre-league and all-star teams populated by African Americans won 315 games, lost 282 and tied 20. That, among a number of other convincing factors, led me to believe that in the simulation I didn’t prove that the Negro Leaguers were every bit as good. I assumed it all along, with evidence.

The end result is both a completion and a beginning. An end result is that, if I’ve proven anything, it’s that a reader can imagine what it might have been like in an integrated and expanded 1934. And that a lot of fun can be had in examining that story, which occupied the lion’s share of the book.

In addition, though, the book succeeds if it points out an awareness that the way I’ve portrayed it ain’t how it happened in real life. And I’ve got an extensive “For Further Reading” section that lists sources that provide those stories. I’ll be happy if readers can begin to imagine, if they haven’t started already, how integration could have happened more equitably, with less damage to Black baseball, whose demise occurred when what came to be known as the Major League Baseball brand absorbed the best of the Black players and attention shifted away from the Negro Leagues and the communities that thrived in part from their presence.

Finally, I’ll have succeeded if I have managed to introduce connecting baseball’s history to the larger world. That’s such a big subject that all I’ll say here is that will be an emphasis of my future writing. The short version is that our world needs to come to grips with how competition can too easily escalate, thinking globally, to levels that threaten our very existence. Just think of how human failure to effectively share power and resources has made for the dangerously-weaponized, war-saturated world we live in at present. I think that baseball, and sport in general, has the potential to be a venue in which we can build on the fact that, on the playing field, we can look at a world of competition in which we can determine fairly who “wins” without killing each other and destroying the planet that gives us life. There is so much more to be explored. The stories behind the stats. The larger meanings. Stay tuned. Critical PENNANT Race Theory beckons.