Barons’ first-year manager Haywood Sullivan picked up a thirty-five-inch Louisville Slugger and stepped into the batting cage. He signaled to pitcher Ken Sanders, a scrappy right-hander, that he wanted to take a few cuts. At thirty-three, Sullivan, who had a six-foot-four, 215-pound frame, was still in good shape.
Sullivan seemed like a questionable choice to be the manager of Birmingham’s first-ever integrated team, a baseball experiment that had already generated angry opposition from the city’s staunch segregationists, including the Ku Klux Klan. These hard-liners didn’t want blacks playing in their city, even if Babe Ruth managed them. The opposition to Sullivan as manager came mostly from Birmingham’s black community. They wondered if his Southern roots would cloud his judgment of black players.
Their anxiety was based on valid reasoning. After all, as a native of Alabama, Sullivan had grown up in Dothan in the full flower of Jim Crow. He attended an all-white high school and competed only against all-white teams. After high school, he attended the University of Florida, a school with no blacks, whose teams played in the SEC, a conference with no blacks. As a big leaguer, he’d played in Boston, a city with a long and troubled history of racism. During his first three years with the Red Sox, the last team in the major leagues to integrate, he had no black teammates. Tom Yawkey, the team’s owner, lived part of the year on an old plantation in South Carolina (“I have lots of Negro help”) and was regularly criticized about the absence of black players on the team. Sullivan’s manager with the Red Sox, Pinky Higgins, was an unrepentant racist. “As long as I’m the manager of this team,” he once said, “there’ll be no niggers.”
Sullivan’s credentials for running an integrated team were thus suspect. But as he dug in to the batter’s box for his first swings of the spring, the issue at hand was whether he could still swing the bat. Back injuries had constantly dogged him during his career.
Sanders fired the first pitch, a fastball that tailed in on Sullivan’s hands. The ex-catcher swung, and the ball jammed him, sending a million bees swarming through his hands. The ball dribbled back to Sanders.
“Hey, just groove it,” hollered Sullivan. “This isn’t the World Series.”
Sanders delivered his next pitch, this one a sinking fastball, low and away. Feebly, Sullivan swung and missed. Stepping out of the box, he glared at Sanders, not sure whether to cuss him out or compliment him on his good stuff.
“I repeat… just groove it,” he said, holding his hand out about pecker-high to show him where he wanted it.
He was, after all, the manager, just up there to take a few easy swings.
This time Sanders piped one down the middle, and Sullivan took a smooth cut, the ball rocketing off his bat, a line drive to left field.
Sanders offered up another cream puff, and again Sullivan drove it hard to left.
A handful of players still running sprints in the outfield noticed, and applauded.
Sullivan had been hired to manage the Barons, but in the back of his mind he hadn’t ruled out the possibility of playing, too. With a limit of only twenty-two players on a minor-league roster, he figured that, at the very least, he needed to be ready to step up in case of an injury. Despite his commitment and enthusiasm for his new career as a manager, part of him still believed he belonged in the big leagues.
“One more swing,” he said, digging in.
Sanders was being converted to relief after spending his first four years in pro ball as a starter, and the bulldog in him wanted to show his new skipper that he deserved consideration for the starting rotation. Instead, he served up a grapefruit down the middle. Sullivan unloaded, and all heads turned to watch the ball disappear over the left-field fence.
Leaving practice, Sullivan stopped at a pay phone and plugged in two quarters to call his wife, Pat, back at their home in Lake Worth, Florida, 150 miles to the south. She hadn’t joined him for spring training this year, deciding that it would be easier on her and their three young kids not to have to uproot and move again, especially with their older son now in school. They’d been college sweethearts, and Haywood and Pat had been married for eleven years, having wed in San Francisco when he played in the Pacific Coast League. By his calculations they had moved thirty-three times in those eleven years, putting on many miles with kids in diapers. During the off-season, he’d done PR for a Buick dealership. This would be the first spring training Pat hadn’t joined him.
Sullivan’s blast over the fence in batting practice was a far cry from how his playing days had ended the previous year, hitting .213 at Portland in AAA—an ignoble end to a career that had started with such clear promise back when he was a star athlete at Dothan High. Not only was he an outstanding baseball player, he’d also excelled in basketball and football, earning a total of nine varsity letters. In the summer prior to his senior year, 1949, he grew four inches, put on twenty pounds of lean muscle, and led his football team to an undefeated season, earning all-state honors. After a game in which he ran the opening kickoff back for a touchdown, the opposing coach called him “a man among boys.” Heavily recruited, he turned down offers from the football coaches at Alabama and Auburn, as well as Bear Bryant at Kentucky, and he chose the University of Florida.
While attending Florida on a football scholarship, he would hitchhike the two hundred miles between Dothan and Gainesville on holiday breaks. During his sophomore and junior seasons, he set twelve passing records (that stood until broken by Heisman winner Steve Spurrier in 1966) and was named to the all-SEC team twice. He also starred as the catcher on the Gator baseball team. In the spring of 1952, a steady stream of major-league scouts beat a path to his dorm room, dangling bonus money and trying to convince him to drop out of college and go pro. When the Red Sox offered him the princely sum of $45,000, he couldn’t pass it up, starting his climb to the big leagues in Albany, Georgia, the Red Sox team in the Class D Florida State League.
But as the Korean War crept on, a military draft had been instituted, requiring all men between eighteen and a half and thirty years of age to sign up. Sullivan enlisted in the army and was assigned to artillery, learning how to shoot bazookas, howitzers, and machine guns. But instead of seeing active duty as did his future teammate Ted Williams, he was assigned to play on the Fort Jackson (South Carolina) baseball team and to coach its football team, a talented squad of mostly ex–college players. This was his first taste of coaching, and his players loved him. Whenever the baseball team had a game, the whole football team showed up to cheer for him.
He resumed his baseball career in 1955, spending the next three years in AAA, including 1956 with the San Francisco Seals in the Pacific Coast League (where he hit .296 with eleven homers). Each of those three years, the Red Sox called him up for the last month of the season, although he mostly warmed up pitchers in the bullpen. He got to bat a total of only six times in those three years, failing to get a hit.
Just as military duty had slowed his progress, so did a serious back injury. Surgery forced him to miss the entire 1958 season. After another year in AAA, he finally got promoted to the Red Sox, spending the entire 1960 season in the big leagues, appearing in fifty-two games. He called the pitch when Mickey Mantle hit the longest home run of his career at Yankee Stadium. Sullivan hit a pitiful .162 for the season. He did, however, have his first black teammates, second baseman Pumpsie Green and pitcher Earl Wilson.
Despite the fact that Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey liked him personally, Sullivan was traded, ending up with the perennial doormat of the American League, the Kansas City A’s. With the A’s, he got to see much more playing time, appearing in 252 games over the next three years and hitting .239. But in 1963, he fell into a horrific slump, going 2 for 50 in the month of June, including 0 for 14 in what would be his last four games. But like Tom Yawkey, A’s owner Charlie Finley was drawn to Sullivan’s personal charisma and thought he had a future in the game as a manager.
Sullivan’s understanding of the game impressed Finley. As a catcher, Sullivan saw everything unfolding in front of him, and he’d studied how players in each position responded in different situations. Like a coach on the field, he positioned players and kept teammates alert. With pitchers, he had a reputation for his defensive skills—blocking balls in the dirt, throwing out base stealers—but he was even more highly regarded for calling a game. He had an innate sense of each pitcher’s strength, whether the guy could throw a breaking ball behind in the count or had the confidence to come inside with heat and knock a long-ball hitter back from the plate. He also instinctively knew how to keep his pitcher calm in tight situations, a leadership skill he attributed to his experience as a quarterback in football and a platoon leader in the army. He was well liked by all of his teammates… not an easy accomplishment in baseball. He just couldn’t hit.
In an era when the majority of ballplayers signed straight out of high school, his three years of college provided a scholarly tint to his image. In locker rooms, while teammates read the St. Louis Sporting News, he was reading newsmagazines and the front page. He also liked biographies of men of accomplishment, such as Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
There was a commanding presence about him. He carried himself tall and erect, and although in the homophobic world of professional sports his teammates would never tell him so, he eased along like Gary Cooper, movie-star handsome, with crystal blue eyes, chiseled jaw, perfect teeth, and tall, lean frame. Whether it was his time spent in New England or just something in his genetics, he had about him a sense of patrician dignity and strength, yet at the same time, he was approachable and friendly. His voice also added to his presence. With a Southern drawl, it was soothing yet deep and senatorial.
None of those qualities, however, qualified him to manage Alabama’s first-ever integrated team in any sport.
Barons pitcher Stanley Jones had just retired the side in order, and as he headed to the dugout Sullivan met him halfway. “You okay to go one more inning?” he asked.
Jones hesitated. This was his first outing of the spring, and in truth, after two innings of a scheduled three-inning stint, he felt tightness in his shoulder. But he was reluctant to confess it to Sullivan. He knew that the stereotype of black players was that they sometimes “jaked it,” the players’ term for either not hustling or taking yourself out of the lineup with nothing more than a hangnail.
More than any player in camp, Jones wanted to make the Barons. Birmingham was his hometown, and the chance to be one of the black players on its first integrated team was important to him. So far in spring training, he hadn’t been able to gauge Sullivan’s racial temperament.
Sullivan noticed the hesitation, and managers tend not to like hesitation in their pitchers. “Let’s let Sanders close the game,” he said. “Go get your running in.”
Trotting toward the outfield, Jones felt an odd ambivalence. On the one hand, he’d pitched two scoreless innings, striking out three. He felt good about that. But he’d also come out of the game after only two innings. Born and raised in Bessemer, ten miles west of Birmingham, he’d tasted the bitterness of Jim Crow his whole life—segregated schools, segregated neighborhoods, segregated lunch counters, segregated everything. Located in the midst of the iron ore, coal, and limestone district of Alabama, Bessemer was a major steel-manufacturing town. Stanley’s father worked in one of the city’s mills, earning half what his white co-workers made, always struggling to put food on the table for Stanley and his six brothers and sisters.
In some ways, Stanley’s career path in baseball had been as torturous as his dad’s struggles in the mill had been. Signed out of high school in 1958 by the Birmingham Black Barons in the dying gasp of the Negro League, he achieved local notoriety when he pitched a no-hitter against the barnstorming Kansas City Monarchs. Signed the next year for $1,000 by the Cincinnati Reds, he didn’t possess a blazing fastball, relying instead, much as Paul Lindblad did, on control, ball movement, and a good curve. At twenty-four, he was one of the oldest players in camp. A married father of three, he was starting his seventh year in pro ball, and like Hoss Bowlin he had never progressed above Class A. To some, it was a mystery why. Was it because of race? In his first year at Geneva in the New York/Penn League, he was 19–4 with a 2.55 ERA, the best record of any pitcher in the Cincinnati chain that year. Over the next four years, he never had a losing record. Yet even with a strikeout-to-walk ratio of four to one, he watched white teammates with inferior records advance ahead of him.
During the off-season, he’d been purchased by the A’s from the Reds organization. He hoped the change would give a rebirth to his stalled career. No player on the Barons’ roster better understood the importance of baseball’s return to Birmingham after a two-year absence—the two most violent years in the city’s history. He was home in Bessemer in September when the KKK blew up the 16th Street Baptist Church, where his mother had once worshipped. He remembered trying to tell his oldest daughter why those four little girls died, and then trying again to explain two months later why the president was shot in Dallas. He remembered going to Baron games at Rickwood Field when he was a boy, and being told he had to sit on the other side of a chicken-wire fence, apart from the white folks. Now he hoped to return to Rickwood and have his kinfolks come out and cheer for him and sit anywhere they wanted. He wasn’t interested in being a foot soldier in the war against bigotry… he just wanted Sullivan to give him a fair chance to make the team.
But he had to wonder. On the surface, Sullivan seemed nice enough, but Jones knew he was from Dothan, down in the southern part of the state, an area not known for racial tolerance. How could anybody who’d grown up in a town full of segregationists, as Sullivan had, not have at least some of it seep into his blood?
When Sullivan was ten years old, the big news in town was the lynching of Claude Neal, a black accused of killing a white girl in nearby Marianna, Florida. The Dothan Eagle urged citizens to attend the lynching, its headline proclaiming: NEGRO TO BE MUTILATED, SET AFIRE IN EXTRA LEGAL VENGEANCE FOR DEED. Never mind that there had been no trial. More than a thousand people, including women and children, turned out for the event. The following day, the Eagle reported it this way: “After slicing and shooting his body to mincemeat, citizens drug his naked body to the county courthouse where they strung him from a tree for all to see. Children stuck sharp sticks into him.” (Neal proclaimed his innocence all the way to the end, and years later evidence was uncovered to support his claim.)
Stanley Jones didn’t like his odds with Haywood Sullivan.