June had been a good month for Sullivan and the Barons—they’d led the league every day, and still held a three-game lead on July 5, giving them the right to host the Southern League All-Star Game. Several players were playing at an All-Star clip: Campy was on pace to be the league’s MVP; Ken Sanders was 7–0 and almost automatic coming out of the bullpen; Hoss had turned into a clutch hitter, and no second baseman in the Southern League had better hands or could turn two quicker; Stan Jones was a surprise, now leading the team with eight wins as a long reliever; and at the plate, Reynolds, although he was still on the disabled list, was hitting over .300; with Rosario, Meyer, Norton, Stahl, and Huyke also providing, if not Murderers’ Row power, punch in the middle of the order.
Still, Sullivan had concerns—mainly his pitching. Lindblad had lost five in a row; Seitz was struggling to keep the ball in the county, let alone over the plate; Tompkins seemed to have lost something off the fastball that had struck out thirteen in a game in May; and Blue Moon was a mess. In his five starts in June, he’d averaged a walk per inning. The swagger he’d arrived with had been replaced by a droopy-shouldered shuffle. Sully worried that all the hype had put too much pressure on him. In a conference call with the A’s brass, the idea was floated that the best option would be to send him down to Lewiston.
“I think we should at least give him a couple more starts here in Birmingham before we do anything drastic,” said Sullivan.
It was decided that Bill Posedel, the A’s minor-league pitching instructor, would meet up with the team and see if he could figure out Blue Moon’s problem.
Nobody doubted his talent. But even the reporters covering the team were questioning whether he belonged in AA. Alf Van Hoose of the News wrote:
His performance has got to cast a distinctive shadow on his future career as a Baron. He has been too wild recently to be a winner. With nine other pitchers available, Manager Haywood Sullivan cannot afford to keep starting him if he can’t find the plate consistently.
Haywood Sullivan appreciated Charlie Finley for giving him a start to his managing career, and for generously assigning him to AA Birmingham, where he was the youngest manager in the Southern League by almost ten years. He also appreciated that Finley was serious about turning Kansas City into a winner—the signings of Blue Moon and Catfish Hunter were evidence of that. But Sullivan was an old-school kind of baseball man, and shook his head at some of Finley’s gimmicks—orange baseballs; Charlie O the mule; sleeveless uniforms; stints as a batboy.
Still, he could live with all that. What bothered him was the nagging suspicion that Finley was going to come swooping in again, just as he’d done with Grzenda, and take away the heart of his team, specifically Bert Campaneris and Ken Sanders. If he did, then it would speak volumes about whether Finley’s proclaimed intention of supplying Birmingham with a winning team was honest.
Logically, at least from Sullivan’s viewpoint, it wouldn’t make any sense to raid the Barons and put a dagger to their pennant hopes. If Finley needed players in Kansas City because of injuries, which was always a possibility, he had players available on the AAA team in Dallas. Already twenty-five games out of first, Dallas was in last place in the Pacific Coast League. If they lost a player or three, it would have no impact on a team going nowhere. And if Finley didn’t like what Dallas had to offer, he could dip down to any of the A’s four A-league teams. All of them were either in last place or next to last. Of all the teams in the A’s organization, from top to bottom, only the Barons were in a pennant race.
They were also the only team playing in a city as potentially explosive as Birmingham.
But maybe Sullivan was just being a little too paranoid. The A’s were also in last place, twenty-one games out of first and plunging deeper. Surely Finley wouldn’t jeopardize the Barons’ chances just to decorate the A’s coffin.
With the score tied 3–3 in the bottom of the ninth against Columbus, Ron Tompkins was due up with a runner on first, no outs. He glanced at Sullivan in the third-base coach’s box, expecting him to signal for a pinch hitter. In the bullpen, Sanders was warming up. Instead, Sullivan motioned for Tompkins to meet him halfway between third and home.
“How do you feel?” asked Sullivan, knowing that in the history of the game, no pitcher had ever admitted to the manager that he was exhausted and wanted out of the game.
“Still feel strong,” replied Tompkins, who’d struck out six and retired the last twelve hitters in a row, his best outing in a couple of weeks.
“Must be the beer,” said Sullivan.
Tompkins grinned. Earlier that day, on Sullivan’s advice, he’d drunk a couple of Budweisers at home with his lunch—not exactly standard training procedure. Over the last month, the heat and humidity had taken a toll on the string-bean Californian. He’d lost ten pounds, weight he didn’t have to lose. Sullivan thought that beer might help prevent the weight loss. (The era of team nutritionists and health trainers was still far in the future.)
“Okay, sacrifice him to second,” Sullivan whispered.
Returning to the plate, Tompkins felt good. Few things bolster a pitcher’s confidence as much as a manager’s faith.
Settling into the batter’s box, Tompkins tried to stay loose. He’d bunted thousands of times in practice; he knew the proper technique—get square to the pitcher, extend the bat, elevate the meat end slightly above the handle, grip it loosely, and then, on contact, give with the pitch. But in practice, the pitcher was usually throwing lollipops. In a game, with the ball blazing toward home, it wasn’t so easy.
On the first pitch, just as he’d done all those times in practice, Tompkins laid down a perfect sacrifice bunt, advancing the runner to second.
Two hitters later, Larry Stahl drilled a single to left, scoring the runner to win it for the Barons.
With the victory, Tompkins’s record now stood at 8–1… and 1–0 on Bud. He wondered if he could get Sullivan to recommend a Budweiser clause in his next contract. Probably not… he was only nineteen.
Sullivan’s report to the front office on his twenty-three-year-old center fielder, Bill Snake Meyer, was positive. Now in his fourth year of pro ball after signing out of high school in Hawthorne, California (an LA suburb), Meyer was a pleasant surprise for Sullivan. The previous year, when Sullivan had been a player-coach at Portland in AAA, Meyer had been a teammate. But he hit an anemic .191 with only two homers, and seemed overmatched. The high hopes the organization had held for him in 1962 when he hit .289 with eighteen home runs in only a hundred games at Lewiston had withered.
Going into spring training, Sullivan doubted if Meyer was even ready for AA. But then he hit shots all over the yard in Daytona and earned a spot with the Barons. Still, Sullivan didn’t insert him in the lineup on opening day. But now, with two months left in the season, Meyer led the team in homers with eleven. Two nights earlier, he had earned himself the $50 bonus from Mr. Belcher, the fourth time he’d hit a homer over the BELCHER LUMBER sign atop the right-field grandstands at Rickwood. With his wife expecting their second child, the money would come in handy.
Sullivan had worked with the slender-built Meyer on developing a short, compact swing. It helped that he had great coordination and strong wrists, and he attacked the ball.
“But we need to put about ten more pounds on him,” he said. “It’ll make him stronger and not as prone to injuries as he has been in the past.”
Sullivan wasn’t the only one impressed by Meyer’s power. In an article titled “The Thin Man Is a Slugger,” News sports editor Benny Marshall labeled his long blasts as “distinctive” and “rockets.” He predicted a bright future:
Meyer is tall and thin, a frail-looking sort of boy who seems to have no place at all in the homerun business. He ought to be beating out bunts, which he is swift enough to do. But he isn’t a bunter. He’s a boomer. Fans need to be advised to get out and see him soon. The Southern League can’t keep him.
Sullivan knew that Finley subscribed to the Birmingham papers. He just hoped that Finley didn’t take this column as his cue to call up Meyer.