Belcher set down his copy of the Birmingham News and shook his head. He wouldn’t admit it, at least not publicly, but sometimes Charlie Finley got on his nerves. Today was such a time. He’d just read an article that practically anointed Finley as the James Dean of baseball, the rebel who had the lords of the baseball establishment shaking in their wingtips. Finley was still taking on the Yankees, claiming the other American League owners were its lapdogs. He hadn’t given up on the grievance he’d been harping on for weeks—the owners’ refusal to let him move in the right-field fence in Kansas City. Belcher had gotten a taste of Finley’s provocative style when he demanded that Belcher move in the fences at Rickwood. But Finley didn’t own Rickwood—Belcher did. He was glad he hadn’t knuckled under to Finley’s pressure, especially after he saw that the long ball wasn’t going to be the Barons’ limousine to the pennant. After the first month of the season, the Barons were seventh (out of eight) in Southern League homers.
Calling up Grzenda had also rubbed Belcher the wrong way. He loved Joe—who didn’t?—and he marveled at what a great comeback story it was. But the chances of Kansas City finishing anywhere but last place, with or without Joe, were lower than the Alabama congressional delegation voting for passage of the impending civil rights bill.
“That man sat in my office, right across the desk from me,” said Belcher, “and he looked me straight in the eyes and promised he’d do whatever it took to bring Birmingham a pennant. How long did it take him to break that promise? A month.”
It wasn’t so much that Belcher resented Finley sucking the ink out of the sports page—the man was good copy. But Belcher was a good old boy schooled in the Southern way of doing business: A man’s word was his bond. He’d shipped countless train cars filled with his lumber based on just a handshake; he’d ordered the paint for Rickwood on another handshake… and paid it off before the paint even dried.
When Belcher plunked down $150,000 to refurbish Rickwood, it was his own money. What the A’s had contributed to the Barons—salaries, equipment, travel—came out of the A’s treasury, not Finley’s personal pocket. Not that Belcher didn’t appreciate the fact that Finley had taken a risk to step up and be the Barons’ parent club. But he wondered if he’d done it because he loved his hometown and wanted to contribute something positive to the community—or as just a vainglorious grab at the Birmingham spotlight. Somebody brought up the idea that maybe Finley was looking to open an insurance office in town.
Yes, Finley had made a couple of trips to Birmingham prior to the opener to help promote the team. But instead of getting his picture on the front page for being the batboy, writing a check to help with the paint bill would have given harder evidence of his love of Birmingham. At least from Belcher’s perspective.
Belcher hoped that calling up the team’s best reliever would be an aberration, not a trend. Maybe Finley’s motives were pure. Belcher knew he’d find out quick enough. Finley had made another promise that he’d do everything he could to sign the best amateur talent, such as Blue Moon Odom, Catfish Hunter, Willie Crawford, and Rick Reichardt, and start them all with the Barons.
“Can you imagine all that talent in Birmingham?” said Finley.
Belcher had something else he was worried about—that Finley would fire the A’s manager, Eddie Lopat, and replace him with Sullivan. A blind man could see how much Finley admired Sullivan. If Belcher got upset about the A’s snatching Grzenda, he would go completely apoplectic if he lost Sullivan. Sullivan was the perfect manager for the return of baseball to Birmingham. Whatever doubt people had about Sullivan at the start of the season had vanished. Everybody loved him—the sportswriters, the fans, the business community, and, most of all, the players. When Sullivan hustled in and out of the dugout between innings, Belcher had watched women in the box seats ogling him as if he were Gregory Peck.
All Belcher could do was cross his fingers and hope Finley would leave his team and his manager alone. But as everyone in baseball knew, that wasn’t Finley’s customary way of doing business. Belcher just hoped Finley’s love of Birmingham would come back and win the day.
In May, the Barons were suddenly the hottest team in the league. Sullivan was especially pleased with a complete-game, eight-strikeout victory thrown by Paul Seitz, the Ohio native’s first win since coming off the disabled list after his opening night debacle. It was the Barons’ fourth straight win and lifted them into a first-place tie with Macon. The key blow was Bill “Snake” Meyer’s eighth homer, a drive that cleared the BELCHER LUMBER sign in right field, earning him an extra $50.
The victory moved them into first place. The next morning, in a show of journalistic cheerleading, the headline in the News read: OUR TEAM NO. 1.
Despite the hot streak, Belcher wasn’t happy when he counted the gate receipts. Attendance on this night was only 686. The night before it had been 709, and while the Barons were still 8,586 ahead of the 1961 attendance pace, Belcher was concerned. The team had won fifteen of its last twenty games and it had the hottest player in the league in Campy, who had scored thirty-three runs in thirty-three games and was now leading the league in stolen bases and triples, as well as anchoring the best double-play combo in the minors. Meyer was tied for the league lead in homers, and despite a recent mini slump, Rosario was second in the league in batting average. The pitching staff was as good as any in the league, with several potential big-league arms, and the addition of Reynolds had bestowed the team with one of the best hitting prospects in the league.
So why weren’t more fans turning out? Belcher had entered the season hoping for one hundred thousand in total attendance for the year, but at this rate wouldn’t make it.
Birmingham’s influential black newspaper, the World, which had been extremely critical of the city’s white power structure, was doing its best to encourage attendance. Sports editor Marcel Hopson wrote:
There is peace and tranquility at Rickwood Field. So, dear fans, let’s go out en masse to help set paid attendance records and show our favorite Birmingham Barons that the true sportsmen and lovers of topflight pro athletic entertainment are 100 percent behind them in an effort to make the 1964 season the best ever in this area.
Alf Van Hoose, who covered the Barons for the News, wondered if the lagging attendance had to do with race:
Is pro baseball not well in a town which once boasted of being the capital of the minor leagues? Is this town, as a whole, still in general shock from the various troubles of recent months? Has there been a silent boycott of the old ballyard because Albert Belcher had the courage to lead the future wave of ballplayers here?
In Birmingham, civil rights activists feared that the passage of a civil rights bill would stimulate a devastating white backlash, not just in Alabama and the South but all across America. George Wallace’s success in primaries in the Midwest did nothing to alleviate their fears. Belcher worried about the bill’s impact on the Barons and their fans. He did not support the civil rights bill, but he was also pragmatic and saw the inevitability of its passage and the end of Jim Crow’s reign of terror in the South.
In the months since Bull Connor had jailed Martin Luther King, the white citizens of Birmingham, including its media, had organized to repudiate the steady barrage of outside criticism leveled at their city. A community affairs subcommittee to “Sell Birmingham” had been formed to paint a “correct and good picture of our city in the minds of people of America.” Civic leaders continued to blame the city’s problems on outside agitators. They despised the New York Times for sending reporter Harrison Salisbury to Birmingham, and insisted that his portrait of a city where “fear stalked the streets” was slanderous, and skewed outsiders’ perceptions of their hometown. A lawsuit was filed against the Times.
The Birmingham press took special pleasure in returning the fire at New York. A front-page headline in the News declared: NEW YORKERS TERRORIZED BY YOUNG NEGROES. The following day, in a column titled “Et Tu, New York City?” Keith Walling wrote that there was enough crime going on in New York “to keep a whole staff of police reporters busy.” He wrote about a section of the Bronx being patrolled by “vigilante committees” to protect citizens from “hoodlums, muggers and rapists.” He maintained that the people of Birmingham would never stand by in passive silence as a young woman was stabbed repeatedly, as New Yorkers had when Kitty Genovese was murdered. He implied that these cowardly witnesses were the same people who had gotten so upset over events in Birmingham. His conclusion was that the problems occurring in New York needed to be corrected by New Yorkers, and that Birmingham—“which certainly has had more than its share of outside criticism and advice”—should enjoy the same opportunity to remedy its deficiencies.
Although the streets of Birmingham had been relatively quiet in recent months, a battle between police and demonstrators broke out in Tuscaloosa, eighty miles to the west. In an effort to quell the disturbance, Bobby Shelton, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, had formed a motor patrol of vigilantes to cruise the streets to keep “Negroes out of white neighborhoods.” Police used tear gas and fire hoses, and the mayor of Tuscaloosa proclaimed that further demonstrations would be met with additional force.
Some viewed this renewed tension by whites in Alabama as backlash over a unanimous Supreme Court decision overturning an Alabama court order barring the NAACP from operating in the state. The State of Alabama had ruled that the NAACP, among other things, had illegally “paid Negro students to attempt to integrate the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa,” although the Crimson Tide’s football team under coach Paul “Bear” Bryant remained all white.
Albert Belcher was worried: “I’ve lived around here too long to think there won’t be another explosion.”