Paul—or “Bladder” as his teammates sometimes called him—checked the runner on second. Campaneris was sneaking in behind him. In practice the day before, pitchers and shortstops had spent half an hour working on the “daylight” pickoff play. (Pitchers had also worked an hour on the covering-first-base drill for the sixth day in a row.)
Spotting daylight between Campy and the runner, Bladder whirled and fired to the bag.
“Out!” shouted the ump.
Lindblad turned and hustled to the dugout, his three-inning stint on the mound over—no runs, one hit, one walk, four strikeouts, and one incredible Campy to Hoss to first double play. At the top step, Sullivan greeted him with a pat on the back.
Lindblad knew that one sure way to make a good impression on any manager was to properly execute the fundamentals, such as the pickoff play they’d just practiced. He smiled, happy that his arm had felt great—not even a twinge of elbow pain. He wouldn’t have to pack up the wife and kids and go back to Kansas and that miserable job he’d had in the meatpacking plant last winter… at least not for the time being.
He took a seat on the bench, draping his windbreaker over his left arm. Prior to the inflammation in his elbow, he’d been sailing through the Class A Midwest League, winning ten and losing only two, with an eye-popping 1.58 ERA, giving up only sixty-nine hits and twenty-three walks in ninety-seven innings.
His excellent numbers had surprised the Kansas City brass. When he signed for a modest $2,000 bonus before the 1963 season, scouts had rated his control and breaking ball as above average, but weren’t dazzled by his velocity. The big bonuses—those over $10,000—went to pitchers who blew it by the hitters. But what Paul had shown in Burlington was that he “knew how to pitch.” He threw strikes, got ahead of the hitters, and worked the ball in and out, and up and down in the strike zone. He was a left-hander with control, a great combination for moving up in any organization. Plus, his fastball had movement. There’d also been some concern that he was “too nice a guy,” and would be afraid to come inside or knock down hitters. He’d dispelled that notion.
Lindblad had his heart set on going to Birmingham. That would not only be the next logical step in his career; it would give him a chance to earn the $1,000 “progressive bonus” if he stayed ninety days in Double A. And God knew he and Kathy needed the money. They’d had to take out a $500 loan from a bank in Chanute, as well as an additional loan from her mother, just to get through spring training. He was vaguely aware of the civil rights unrest in Birmingham, and he’d overheard black players in camp talk about not wanting to get assigned there, but for him, Birmingham simply meant progress in his career.
Gathering up his glove, he jogged out to the right-field foul pole. He hadn’t told anybody in the front office, but he’d worried all winter that his left elbow was messed up. Since leaving Mayo, there’d been no medication, no special therapy, no guarantee it would get better. He’d run wind sprints and done his calisthenics prior to heading to Florida, but not much else. Players who spent the off-season in the warmer climates like California often threw a lot before spring training, arriving in camp in better baseball condition. (Of the 640 players on Major League Baseball rosters in spring training in 1964, 92 were from California. Pennsylvania was second with 47; Cuba produced 22.) But in wintry Kansas, Paul had spent the winter months working in that meat processing plant for $1.55 an hour while Kathy, pregnant, stayed home and took care of their toddler.
Finishing their wind sprints across the outfield grass, the pitchers bent at the waist and gasped for air. Except for Paul. He kept going, foul pole to foul pole.
“Hey, Bladder, you can’t run the ball across the plate,” yelled Hoss.
Paul smiled, and then held up two fingers. “Just two more,” he promised.
He’d always had good stamina, whether it was baling hay during the summers in Kansas, boxing with his brothers, or running up and down the court in basketball. He wasn’t running extra wind sprints to wow Sullivan or to show up the others—he just liked to run. He felt especially pumped up because his three-inning stint had gone so well.
For many players, spring training was pure torture—too much running, too many calisthenics, too much sweating under the blistering Florida sun, too much being cooped up with too many guys.
For fans, however, the very notion of spring training summoned poetic reveries—the verdant outfield grass, the magical sound of balls and bats colliding, the untrammeled hope for a better season. Ignored were the sunburned necks, or the painful blisters from new spikes, or the tedium of the endless outfield relay drills that measured players’ days.
For the minor leaguers nervously waiting to see if they were about to get pink-slipped and sent home to start looking for a “real job,” spring training was often an unpoetic ending rather than a beginning. They’d leave Daytona Beach with a tattered suitcase filled with broken dreams and no money in their pocket.
Spring training meant living on a shoestring. Paul’s $2,000 bonus was long gone, a big chunk of it having been spent on a down payment for a ’63 Chevy Impala—the Red River Rock was no longer practical. He and Kathy had already talked about getting a station wagon, maybe even one with air-conditioning. To get to spring training, they’d crammed everything they owned into the Impala for the drive from Kansas to Daytona Beach, the car packed so tightly that Kathy had to ride with towels and pots and pans at her feet.
Unlike most players in camp, Paul at least got to go home at the end of each spring training day to his family and the luxury, such as it was, of their efficiency apartment. The other players slept in barracks, on bunks with mattresses as thin as second base, eating bland cafeteria food, and hanging out with the same sun-parched faces day after day. These players didn’t have enough money to go out bar-hopping and chasing girls every night, which limited their chance to be, as one sage put it, “boys in the thoughtless pursuit of being themselves.”
For minor-league players in the Kansas City organization in 1964, spring training in Daytona was a little cushier than the experience other organizations provided. The Diamond City Complex included multiple fields and a perfectly manicured main diamond with a covered grandstand. Other teams’ minor-league facilities looked as if they’d been dredged out of alligator swamps, their infields pocked with more craters than a country road. Still, Diamond City wasn’t exactly Club Med. Players were discouraged from having cars in camp, and a cab ride to the beach was too expensive for all but a few of the bonus babies. And sleeping in the barracks was like a Boy Scout campout, with water balloon fights, snoring, and general mayhem to disturb the nights.
At Finley’s urging, Kansas City’s management had selected Daytona Beach for the team’s minor-league spring training site in part because it believed black and Latino players would be treated better there. Even though white Florida participated in Dixie’s staunch resistance against integration, Daytona Beach was viewed as being slightly more progressive. It went back to Jackie Robinson and 1946, the year before he became the first black player in the major leagues (but eighteen years before Birmingham would field an integrated team). Robinson came to spring training in Florida with the Montreal Royals’ AAA team… and encountered hostility everywhere he went. An exhibition game scheduled between the Royals and the Dodgers in Jacksonville was canceled when city officials padlocked the stadium. The game was then offered to the city of Sanford, but it, too, declined, the chief of police proclaiming he would “arrest any Negro trying to enter the ballpark, including ballplayers.” Eventually, Daytona Beach stepped forward and hosted the game, which was played without incident. Slowly, the city’s Jim Crow laws began to at least show cracks, if not crumble. The next year, the city’s auditorium was desegregated, followed by its buses, parks, restaurants, and beaches. One East Coast reporter called the city “an island of enlightenment in a sea of bigotry.”
Paul waited in front of the ballpark for Kathy to pick him up, anxious to tell her how well he’d done and that his arm didn’t hurt. He paced. In Burlington his first season, she had come to most of the games, bringing the baby with her, but in Daytona, the games were in the day, right in the middle of the girls’ naptime.
Finally, she pulled up to the curb and slid over to the passenger side. “So?” she immediately asked. “How’d you do? How was your arm?”
“Couldn’t have gone better,” he said.
“Are you going to call your dad and tell him the good news?” she asked.
“No,” he replied, the smile disappearing from his face.