Seventy-eight years ago, the sensational Leroy "Satchel" Paige first took the mound for the Pittsburgh Crawfords, helping transform the team into the best in Negro baseball and cementing Pittsburgh's standing as the epicenter of African-American sports.

Paige entered the game partway through the third clash between the region's two all-black baseball powerhouses, the Homestead Grays and the Crawfords, a rivalry that was taking on the ferocity of the Red Sox vs. the Yankees, with the added dimension that these teams were desperate not just to be first but to be the favorite in their shared hometown.

The Craws, like the Yankees, spared no expense to beef up their roster. Owner Gus Greenlee opened a wallet fattened by numbers-running and bootlegging to surround Paige with an all-star cast that included outfielder Jimmy Crutchfield, catcher Cy Perkins and spitballer Sam Streeter.

Grays owner Cumberland Posey was equally determined, bolstering his pitching staff with Willie Foster, who 65 years later would be voted into the Hall of Fame, and building a lineup around the mighty Josh Gibson, who could hit the ball farther than Babe Ruth. Posey would later say that this edition of the Grays was its best.

They looked that way as they slugged their way back that Saturday in August against the Craws, scoring five runs in the fourth inning to even the score at seven. That is when Satchel came in and the Grays' bats went quiet. The newly arrived slinger did just what Crawfords owner Greenlee paid him to do, striking out six and holding Posey's players scoreless while his teammates rallied.

The Pittsburgh Courier called him "masterful and sensational." The Rev. Harold "Hooks" Tinker, playing his last game for the Crawfords that day, would tell an author years later that "they hardly hit a foul ball off of Satchel ... He was mowing those guys down like mad. He was throwing nothing but aspirin tablets -- fastballs. He hadn't developed all that fancy stuff then."

When the game was over Paige and his teammates headed to Greenlee's Crawford Grill, a nightclub so popular with players and wannabes that they called it Third Base, as in the last stop before home.

"We celebrated like no one ever had," Satchel remembered in his memoir. "I couldn't get away from anybody there. They mobbed me like money'd rub off if they touched me. All Gus' waitresses pressed around me, smiling those smiles I'd gotten mighty used to."

This history is worth recalling partly because Satchel Paige was the most spectacular pitcher of any color ever to throw a baseball in Pittsburgh and probably on the planet. He threw so hard his catchers had to cushion their gloves with beefsteaks. So pinpoint was his control that obliging teammates let him knock lit cigarettes out of their mouth with a hardball. When he finally made the majors at age 42, he pitched well enough to garner a dozen votes as Rookie of the Year. His last game in the big leagues was in 1965 -- at age 59 -- a record for longevity that likely never will be broken.

But Paige's story also is worth remembering for what it meant to Pittsburgh. While no one would deny that African Americans here, as everywhere, are better off than they were in the Jim Crow era of segregation, it was sad to see during two trips to Pittsburgh this summer that the Hill District appears to be in worse shape. The Hill in Paige's day was a center of black baseball and black society.

No piece of real estate made that statement more clearly than Greenlee Field, the finest independent ballpark and preeminent black-owned sports complex in America. It took six months to construct, cost a whopping $75,000 and used 75 tons of steel along with 14 trains cars of cement. Even better to Crawfords fans who frequented the field was that those bricks were laid by African-American workers, and the park and team were owned by a self-reliant black man. No more indignities of renting a stadium where black players were banned from the locker room, not when they could come home to a ballpark that the Courier called the "mecca of the Hill district."

Today a public housing project stands at the corner of Bedford Avenue and Junilla Street, with the grand stadium that stood there not acknowledged until last month. That is when the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum, the Josh Gibson Foundation and the Society for American Baseball Research put up a historical marker recognizing Greenlee Field as the landmark it was.

The plaque should remind this city how, as it builds a new future for the Hill, it can draw inspiration from its past and from racial pioneers like Satchel Paige.