Sullivan wasn’t going to waste his time and energy fretting over losing Grzenda to the big-league team. Yes, it bothered him, but he reminded himself that the primary purpose of a minor-league team was to prepare its players for the big leagues. He’d done his job. When he was a quarterback in the SEC, if the ref made a bad call against the Gators, or if he threw an interception, he had to block it out and move forward. He was good at it then, and he could call on that training.
As left-handed-hitting Bill Meyer, a twenty-one-year-old outfielder from Southern California, stepped into the batter’s box, Sullivan motioned for him to meet halfway between home and the third-base coach’s box.
“Be alive up there,” Sully warned.
In his previous at-bat, Meyer, nicknamed “the Snake,” hit a rocket that cleared the right-field fence by about eight furlongs. There was no love lost between the Barons and Lookouts, a Phillie farm team. In the first game of the series, the Barons roughed up the Lookouts’ star hurler, future Hall of Famer Fergie Jenkins, sending him to an early shampoo. The Lookouts didn’t appreciate the Barons’ raucous dugout celebration.
At six foot one and 160 pounds, Meyer didn’t look like a guy who could hit tape-measure homers. In fact, one News headline called him “Little Meyer.” But he had quick wrists and a sweet swing that generated tremendous bat speed. Balls jumped off his bat. In spring training, Sullivan had not been dazzled, but Meyer was starting to grow on him.
The first pitch from Lane Phillips sailed up and in, knocking Meyer back from the plate. He stumbled to regain his balance, then stared at Phillips. At six foot three and 168 pounds, Phillips wasn’t exactly Sunny Liston, either.
If this was about to turn into a donnybrook, the Barons took comfort in knowing that if they did charge the field, they had a secret weapon—Sullivan. He was the biggest man on the field, and if Hoss’s story was accurate, pity the Lookout who found himself in a headlock. Not only was Sullivan an ex–football player, he had played without a face mask. A column about him in the News declared: “Behind his easy demeanor, he is an imposing man.”
The Snake dropped his bat and slowly started walking. All eyes on the field and in the dugouts were on him. Same with the fans. And the umps. And the batboys. And the guys selling hot dogs. But instead of charging the mound, Meyer trotted to first, ignoring Phillips.
Sullivan applauded. He wasn’t a man to back down, but he believed payback didn’t need to be delivered with a hummer to the ribs or a wild boar charge at the mound. He flashed the steal sign. On the first pitch to Woody Huyke, Meyer got such a big jump that the catcher didn’t even bother to throw.
Rattled, Phillips walked Huyke on four pitches. That brought Rosario to bat. Sullivan met him near the plate. “Get a good pitch and make him pay,” he said.
Swinging at the first pitch, Rosario drilled a line-shot homer to right, the ball leaving the park faster than a guy could say “statehood for Puerto Rico.” As the three Barons circled the bases, Sullivan glared at Phillips. The message was clear: Don’t even think about throwing at our next hitter.
The next hitter was Wayne Norton. Phillip’s first pitch was a low and inside fastball. Phillips swung, golfing it deep and gone—a back-to-back job, on back-to-back pitches—and that, except for the shampoo, was the end of the evening for Phillips. The Barons won 7–2.
For the Barons, Sullivan was omnipotent. He not only had the power to tell them when to bunt or steal, but he also dictated what time they were supposed to go to bed, whom they hung out with, and what they wore in the hotel lobby. He was their teacher, the person responsible for working with them on improving their sliders or how to choke up and punch the ball to the opposite side. But most important, he filled out the player progress reports to send to the front office. These daily reports determined who had a chance to move up in the organization. He must’ve written something good about Grzenda.
Although he’d only been in the managing biz a short time, he had already established certain parameters. For one, he wouldn’t go out and pound down beers after games with the boys. He wouldn’t check curfew unless he suspected the players were taking advantage and staying out too late. (“If you can’t get laid by midnight, then give it up.”) He wouldn’t schedule workouts on days off, unless the team was making more mistakes than a juggler with blisters, and he definitely wouldn’t make them show up to the ballpark in the middle of a hot and humid day in July and August when players were starting to tire, and the weather was too hot to even sit on the veranda in the shade of a weeping willow and sip mint juleps.
Sullivan didn’t have a pitching coach, hitting instructor, fitness trainer, or masseuse to travel with the team. He didn’t drive the bus, but if it broke down, he damn well knew where to go to get it fixed.
As a player, he’d liked the camaraderie of the clubhouse, the feeling of being one of the guys. He missed being able to go have beers with his teammates after a game, but he knew he had to keep his distance. Sometimes that was hard, especially on the road, where he spent most of his time by himself. But he knew that getting too close with his players would land him in the baseball graveyard, already populated with former minor-league managers who had tried to be one of the guys and ended up getting trampled to death by players stampeding to oblivion.
He knew that young players—and even old ones—liked to hit the nightlife and chase girls. It was as much a part of the baseball culture as jock rash. Some players called it the “Neon League.” Others called it “the game within the game.” He knew it was inevitable. Running the team like a police state wasn’t his style. “But don’t let me catch you,” he warned.
In his original interview with Finley, he said he wanted the game to be fun, as it had been when he was growing up, an era when kids gathered in the street or at the park to play work-up or over-the-line until dark. There was no organized Little League, or coaches, or parents screaming from the bleachers… just kids making up their own rules. But he also made it clear to Finley that he knew baseball was a business, and people’s livelihoods were at stake, and the young men wearing the uniforms represented the cities where they played, whether that be Kansas City or Birmingham. There had to be rules, discipline, and a clear sense of order. The manager was the boss. Period.
When Finley was asked whether Sullivan’s Alabama roots would interfere with his ability to treat all his players equally, he defended his decision.
“The key to a good manager is his relationships with the players,” he said. “People who think Sully won’t be fair to colored players have never met him. He’s one of the most decent people I’ve ever met. If I thought for one second that he couldn’t be fair, I wouldn’t have hired him.”
With the Barons leading 6–0 in the seventh inning against the Charlotte Hornets at Rickwood, Paul Lindblad gave up a line-shot homer. In the dugout, Sully shook his head, puzzled, detecting something amiss with his starting pitcher. Hornet hitters were suddenly taking vicious cuts, digging in at the plate, like they knew what was coming.
Sully turned to the players on the bench. “I think Lindy’s tipping his pitches,” he said.
Ever since Ty Cobb was in diapers, hitters and coaches had been studying pitchers in an effort to figure out if they were telegraphing their pitches. A pitcher might grip the ball one way for a fastball, another for a curve; or he might position his feet on the mound one way for a slider, another way for a changeup. If opposing hitters know what’s coming, it’s like batting practice. Some hitters can pick up these clues by themselves at the plate; others want a signal relayed by the bench or a base coach—a whistle for a fastball or a finger to the bill of the cap for a changeup.
Some hitters want to know, but others don’t, afraid that if the alert for a curveball is false, they won’t be able to get out of the way if a fastball actually arrives. When he was with Boston, Sullivan played in a game against Jim Bunning, the ace of the Detroit staff, and Del Baker, a Red Sox coach, called every pitch Bunning threw… and Bunning still threw a one-hitter. The only Red Sox hit was by Ted Williams, who refused the information because he was legendary for his ability to make a pitcher throw his entire assortment of pitches his first time up, enabling him to pick the pitch he wanted in subsequent at-bats.
Sullivan nodded to Seitz and Tompkins on the bench. “I want you two guys to watch Lindy’s head and see if he’s tipping it that way.” Then he assigned two others players to watch his feet, and two more to watch his hands.
In the eighth inning after two straight line-shot base hits, Sullivan, Huyke, and Seitz simultaneously noticed the same thing: Lindblad was tilting his head to the left on breaking balls. Sullivan trotted to the mound and conveyed the discovery to Lindblad.
With some pitchers, it might take days or weeks to make an adjustment. Some might never make it. But Lindblad was a quick study. He nodded in agreement with Sullivan, and then he retired the last five hitters in a row, his head held steady. The Barons won 6–1, Lindblad striking out eight and improving his record to 4–0, keeping the team only a game out of first.