Good morning.

No, not another Hot Stove already. But I thought a “Hot Stove Short” was in order to deliver a special baseball message from the Vatican.

Thanks to a heads-up in a retweet from Kiona Sinks of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, I saw this tweet about today’s meeting between President Biden and Pope Francis…discussing Satchel Paige!

The video of the conversation is priceless (click here).

As recounted in a couple of prior Hot Stove posts, President Biden often tells the story of Satchel Paige’s advice on how to determine your age: How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?

Biden sometimes ends his story with an estimation of his “Paige age” and that of the person he is talking to. At the Vatican today, he said he was 60 (actually 78) and the Pope was 65 (actually 84).

This is no doubt why President Biden keeps a Satchel Paige baseball card in the Oval Office.

For the history of Paige’s use of the phrase and Biden’s retelling of the story, see Hot Stove #161 and Hot Stove #163.

And I’ll see you tonight (virtually) at Game 3 of the World Series.

Lonnie