The Barons were holding a final tune-up at Rickwood Field on the eve of the season opener. Standing in front of the dugout, Finley, Belcher, and the Barons’ general manager, Glynn West, watched Haywood Sullivan step into the batter’s box.
“I got a feeling Sully’s gonna help this team with his bat before the season is over,” offered Finley.
On the second batting-practice pitch, Sullivan crushed it over the scoreboard, a towering drive that brought gasps from the crowd and a smile to Finley, Belcher, and West.
“Like I said…” added Finley.
It was more than just Sullivan’s tape-measure drive that had the three men in suits smiling. Over the past couple of days, everything was falling into place for the opener. Season ticket sales and fence advertising were up from 1961, and the advance sales for the opener had Belcher predicting a crowd in excess of five thousand. No game in ’61 had drawn that many. And on this night, an estimated twelve hundred fans had shown up just to watch the players take batting practice.
Birmingham fans had always been proud of Rickwood. Built in 1910, it was the oldest baseball park in America, older even than Boston’s Fenway Park or Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Over the years, it had hosted most of the great players, either in exhibition games, Southern Association games, or Negro League frays—Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle. It was a place where families walked through darkened tunnels into bright sunlight and a welcoming vista of perfectly mowed green grass, Georgia red clay, white chalk lines, and outfield fences brightened with billboards of the leading local merchants. It was where Charlie Finley worked as a batboy when he was twelve. It was impossible to think of baseball in Birmingham without thinking of Rickwood.
Over the past week, nobody had garnered more ink in the Birmingham papers than Charlie Finley. Before coming to Birmingham for the opener, he had defiantly vowed to move in the outfield fences at Municipal Stadium in Kansas City so that it had the same dimensions as Yankee Stadium, whose inviting measurements, Finley claimed, gave the Yankees an unfair advantage. He was calling his promised new right-field fence his “pennant porch.” The commissioner’s office had promised to stop him… which was just the publicity he was seeking. He had challenged Belcher to move in the fences at Rickwood, but so far Belcher had resisted.
“Charlie does things his way, I do things my way,” stated Belcher. “I’m not moving any fences until I see what kind of power hitters we have.”
As a concession to Finley, however, he agreed to paint a white line on Rickwood’s outfield fences and keep track of balls landing above the line (which would supposedly be homers if the fences were moved in).
In the days leading up to the opener, the Birmingham media had fallen all over themselves in praise of Finley. One column advocated ousting Ford Frick as commissioner of baseball and replacing him with Finley. Another labeled him “free-wheeling and free-thinking,” with “piercing blue eyes” and the “persuasiveness of a million-dollar salesman.” A speech to the Rotary Club was “marked with evangelistic fervor.” After the speech, he received a “rousing ovation.”
Seemingly, he was everywhere in Birmingham strumming up publicity for the season opener. A promotional visit to a minor-league town was unheard of in the world of big-league owners. But Birmingham was his hometown, and he’d personally set up this whirlwind tour. He talked to the media, Rotary clubs, even the student body of the high school in Ensley, the blue-collar community where he lived as a youngster. At every stop, he reminded listeners that he’d been a batboy for the Barons, and would be again at the opener. Whether it was a lunch in Hueytown or a meeting with downtown bankers, he wore a green, satiny A’s jacket and boasted how the Barons would be wearing the same colors adorning the splashy, sleeveless uniforms worn by his big-league players.
With impassioned fervor, he talked about the importance of the Barons and baseball to Birmingham, and how he hoped the team would provide a healthy diversion to help keep the lid on a potentially incendiary summer.
“Here’s my guarantee,” he said. “I will do everything in my power to give the Barons the best available talent it needs to be a winner. Birmingham deserves it.”
Finley came from a poor, working-class Southern Baptist family, his grandfather and father working backbreaking jobs in the steel mills of Birmingham. He mowed lawns and sold eggs to help pay family expenses. When he was thirteen, his dad lost his job in the Depression, and the family moved to Gary, Indiana, where his dad found work in a steel mill.
After graduating from high school in 1936, Finley went to work in the mill as well. He also worked in a butcher shop, took classes at a Gary junior college, got married, and indulged his passion for baseball by playing first base for mill teams. When World War II broke out, he tried to enlist in the marines but was rejected because of an ulcer. During the war he worked in an ordnance plant, but his new father-in-law encouraged him to moonlight selling life insurance.
Finley quickly discovered he was a natural salesman. In 1946, however, he contracted tuberculosis and had to spend a year in a sanatorium, struggling to breathe and needing assistance just to get out of bed. He lost a hundred pounds. But as fate would have it, while he was in the sanatorium he hatched an idea to sell disability insurance to doctors. Within two years of his release, he’d sold policies to 92 percent of the doctors in the Chicago area. He soon expanded nationally, and within a few years he was a multimillionaire, with a twenty-one-room farmhouse on 260 acres near La Porte, Indiana. Married with seven children, he was rarely home.
In the late 1950s, he became obsessed with buying a major-league team, making unsuccessful bids for the Philadelphia A’s, Detroit Tigers, Chicago White Sox, and the rights to a new team that would become the Los Angeles Angels. Finally, in 1960, he purchased the dreadfully inept Kansas City A’s for $1.975 million. Initially, he charmed the Kansas City media and fans with his folksy demeanor, guaranteeing to keep the team in Kansas City and promising to build a winner. He anointed himself the “savior of Kansas City baseball.” The honeymoon was short-lived, however, as he began threatening to move the team to Dallas. People began to doubt his word; he promised to end the A’s history of trading its top players to the Yankees, and then six days later he traded his best pitcher, Bud Daley… to the Yankees.
Finley developed a reputation as a maverick with offbeat promotions, such as using players to ride the mascot, Charlie O. He lobbied to use orange baseballs; he installed a pop-up mechanical rabbit behind home plate to deliver balls to the umpire; he personally interviewed the good-looking ball-girls. He also developed a reputation as hot-tempered, penurious, confrontational, overbearing, loud, and obnoxious… but charming when he needed to be. It didn’t take him long to alienate the other American League owners, as well as the commissioner’s office.
Many worried that his roots in Birmingham had made him a racist. But those who worked for him claimed otherwise. For the most part, his players liked him. “He’s equally rude to whites, blacks, Puerto Ricans, everybody,” said outfielder Jimmy Piersall.
Following the workout, the Baron players sat in front of their lockers, admiring the brand-new wedding-white uniforms hanging in front of them. “Pretty nice, huh?” extolled Finley, sitting in a corner next to Belcher.
Sullivan signaled for the players’ attention, and then after announcing the starting lineup reviewed the signals, all eyes on him. In the ranking of baseball no-nos, missing a signal was near the top, proof that a player’s head was in the clouds.
“Right hand to the face will be the indicator,” said Sullivan. “Everybody got that?”
Lindblad leaned close to Hoss. “Need me to show you which is the right hand?” he whispered.
After repeating the signals, Sullivan turned to Finley. “Gentlemen, Mr. Finley would like to talk to you for a moment,” he said.
Finley stepped into center stage, his piercing blue eyes scanning the players. They fell silent, realizing that an address from a major-league owner to a minor-league team wasn’t normal.
“I’ll keep this brief,” he started. “My goal is to turn the Kansas City Athletic organization into the best in baseball. I want us to be World Series winners. I want our players to be homegrown, raised in the Athletics way of playing ball. We’re going to do everything possible to make this team a pennant winner. In a couple of weeks, the big-league team will have to trim three players off its roster… and some of them might be coming here.
“This city has been through a lot in the last year and deserves a winner. Some of you may know that I grew up around here. Used to be the Barons’ batboy, as a matter of fact. So this team and this city mean a lot to me. I want you to go out there and play like hell… and it’s not impossible that I’ll see some of you in a big-league uniform before the season is over.”
As he spoke that last sentence, he looked straight at Campy, who smiled but had no clue what Finley had just said.
“Anything you want to add, Mr. Belcher?” he asked.
Belcher stood, remembering his promise of a free trip to Hawaii to Hank Peters. He looked directly at Finley. “I agree with you how important it is that this team wins,” he said, “so I’ve got a challenge for you. If the Barons win the Southern League championship, you and I will go together and treat all these guys and their wives to a week in Hawaii. Whattya say?”
The players all looked at each other, mouths open, shocked by the proposal. For most of them, scraping together enough money just to get home was a challenge, let alone accumulating the stash needed for a week in Hawaii.
Finley stared at Belcher, the challenge totally catching him by surprise. Prior to the start of the big-league season, he’d told his A’s that if they just finished in the first division, he’d give them $100,000 to divvy up among them, an offer that seemed super-safe considering that the moribund Washington Senators were the only team the A’s even remotely had a chance of finishing higher than.
“Come on, we can afford it,” added Belcher.
“Well, I’m pretty sure my wife would like to go to Hawaii… so I say, Damn right, let’s do it. But we better ask the players and make sure it’s all right with them.”
A roar as loud as Alabama thunder shook the clubhouse.
As the exuberant players started to retreat to their lockers, Finley called out the names of Stanley Jones, Bert Campaneris, Santiago Rosario, Luis Rodriguez, and Freddie Velázquez.
“I’d like a minute with you guys,” he said, leading them off to a corner.
Separated from their white teammates, the five drew around Finley, who nodded toward Rosario. “You can translate for Campy,” he said.
Speaking in a hushed tone, Finley’s face drew serious: “I don’t know what you guys have heard about the way they treat colored people around here,” he said. “But a lot of it’s true. You guys are going to hear a lot of shit this season. Lots of ugly names. I’m sure you’ve all heard them before. You might get thrown at. You might get spit on. But I want you to stay cool. I know it’ll be hard, but you can’t yell back at these people. Not in Birmingham, not on the road. Some of these people are nuts. And if you get in a situation where you feel threatened or in danger, you can’t fight. You need to walk away. The last thing we need is for there to be stories about you guys getting in fights. There’s a lot at stake. So it’s important that you behave in a good way.
“You need to be like Jackie Robinson. When he broke in, the abuse was horrible. But he handled it beautifully. He changed baseball. You can do the same here in Birmingham.”
He hesitated, eyeing each of the five men. “A lot of people will be watching,” he said. “I’m counting on you.”