With home games against Asheville and Lynchburg slated before for the All-Star Game, the Barons had a chance to pad their lead. They would start the home stand with a doubleheader against last-place Asheville, with Blue Moon scheduled to start the first game, Lindblad the nightcap. With only one win between them the whole month of June, Odom and Lindblad knew that their performances would be critical in determining their fates for the rest of the year, if not their careers. Pitching coach Bill Posedel was in town to watch.
In the first inning, Blue Moon walked the first two hitters. After a quick trip to the mound by Sullivan to settle him down, he served up a hanging curve to Asheville’s first baseman Dave Kwiatkowski, who bombed it deep over the left-field fence—and just like that the Barons trailed 3–0.
Blue Moon gave up another run in the third, and then was finally relieved in the fourth after issuing two more walks, giving him a total of six bases on balls in four innings. He also hit a batter and committed a balk.
Returning to the dugout, he took a seat at the end of the bench and stared off into space. Less than a month earlier, he was the talk of baseball, the poster boy for cockiness and a grand future. Every article written about him played up the fact he’d received the largest bonus ever given a black athlete, and in his first pro game, his hometown fans had gone totally nuts when he struck out the side in the first inning.
But his control had vanished like a morning mist. Whether it was because of the pressure, or flawed mechanics, or the fact that pro hitters wouldn’t swing at pitches that Georgia high school kids flailed at hopelessly, Blue Moon was on the cusp of an eclipse that might conclude with an embarrassing trip to Lewiston, Idaho.
Fortunately, for the fourth time in a row the Barons rallied after he was pulled from the game. Down to their last out, the Barons watched Rosario drill a two-run homer to lift them to a dramatic win.
The other good news was that Campy was back in the lineup, taking up right where he left off before the beaning, legging out a triple and turning two spectacular double plays.
In the second game of the doubleheader, Lindblad hurled a complete game four-hitter, his first win after five straight losses. His performance boosted the Barons’ lead to six games, the largest of the year.
In the victorious Baron clubhouse, Blue Moon sat in front of his locker, trying to put on a happy face. Sullivan sat down next to him.
“Keep your head up,” he said, and then informed him that Posedel would start working with him the next day.
Blue Moon nodded. Until a month ago, he had experienced nothing but success. Everything had come naturally. At Ballard-Hudson High, Coach Slocum had basically just turned him loose. Why tinker with success? But now he’d just been told he needed special instruction. He’d already lost three more games in a month than he had in his whole high school career. He missed home, his mother’s cooking, and the sweet kisses of his girlfriend, Perrie. Perhaps more than anything, he couldn’t stand the thought of letting down Mr. Finley, the man who’d shown all the faith in him and made him “a rich young man.”
Bill Posedel stood next to Blue Moon on the bullpen mound, providing a crash course on the pitching fundamentals normally taught during spring training. While his teammates had been endlessly drilling on the art of the follow-through and covering first base in Daytona, Blue Moon had been sitting in math class back in Macon, daydreaming about his pro career.
Posedel’s plan was not to make any major overhauls with Blue Moon’s mechanics. The young pitcher had the one attribute that not even a great pitching coach can teach—a cannon for an arm. Fundamentally, his motion, release, and follow-through were all fluid and sound. During the week he’d spent with the big-league team prior to joining the Barons—something no other player in the organization had gotten to do—the organization decided the best strategy was to basically leave him alone the first month, to let him sink or swim with the obvious talent he possessed.
But Posedel knew that lots of kids entering pro ball had great tools. The difference between those who made it and those who didn’t was often what was between the ears and inside the heart. Nobody doubted Blue Moon’s competitive fire. But some now questioned whether he could handle the mental strain.
Posedel and Sullivan agreed that at this early stage of his career, Blue Moon was a thrower and not yet a pitcher. In high school he didn’t have to worry about setting up a hitter—how to come inside and then go away, how to change speeds, how to attack a hitter’s weakness. All he had to do in high school was rock and fire.
Sullivan’s experience as a big-league catcher had exposed him to the craft of pitching, but he was under instructions from the front office not to tinker with Blue Moon’s delivery, and to let him do things naturally… at least to start with. The A’s also wanted a consistent voice in working with him… they didn’t want Sullivan telling him one thing and then Posedel something else. Breaking into the game was hard enough—being away from home for the first time, meeting new people, learning how not to overindulge, figuring out how to sleep on a bus. Loading down a nineteen-year-old with seventy-three techniques for holding a curveball, on top of everything else, could overload his circuits.
On this day, Posedel started with a few of the basics. The first drill required Blue Moon to go through his motion and then prepare to field his position.
In his first five games, he had failed to field several balls hit back toward him.
The next drill was designed to teach him how to hold a runner on first and to improve his pickoff move. Having pitched eight no-hitters in high school, Blue Moon had never had to worry too much about holding runners on. Now, in thirty-seven innings pitched in pro ball, he’d had forty runners reach first by hits or bases on balls. Out of those forty, eleven had tried to steal, and ten succeeded.
After watching Blue Moon work on the drills he’d shown him, Posedel shared his observations with Sullivan. “Geez, what an arm,” he said. “I’m not going to suggest anything that will take away any of the confidence he has throwing the ball. I might be able to help him a little on the finesse things, but considering his background and the limited competition he’s had, he surprised me with all the things he does so well already. He’s got that great competitive drive. I truly believe he’s going to be okay. No… better than okay.”
While Posedel was working with Blue Moon, Stanley Jones wandered across the outfield, shagging balls during batting practice. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Posedel finishing up with Blue Moon and signaling for Paul Seitz to join him in the bullpen. Jones couldn’t help but feel jealous. This was Posedel’s second visit with the team, and he still hadn’t said word one to Jones… and there was no indication he planned to work with him before leaving town. For minor-league pitchers in the A’s farm system, parsing comments from Posedel was a peek into what the future held.
Jones thought he deserved attention. He was tied for the most wins with Tompkins, while Blue Moon had only one win and had stunk up the joint in his last four starts. And in Seitz’s last appearance, he had given up four runs in only one inning. Between them, Blue Moon and Seitz had seventy-three walks in eighty-nine innings, throwing with all the finesse of a cement mixer. Jones had thirteen walks in seventy-eight innings.
Jones knew he didn’t have the overpowering fastball that Blue Moon and Seitz possessed. But he had control and a ball that moved. And from a marketing standpoint, his hometown connection brought cheers every time Sullivan summoned him from the bullpen.
But he felt underappreciated.
Red Davis, his manager the previous year at Rocky Mount in the Carolina League and now the manager at Macon, didn’t skimp on praise for Jones. “I wish I had him on our team,” he said. “If I did, we’d be in first place instead of Birmingham.”
No player on the Barons was more connected to Birmingham than Jones: His mother had worshipped at the 16th Street Baptist Church as a child; he’d sat on the other side of the chicken-wire fence watching the Barons as a boy. He wanted to be treated fairly. Why wasn’t he starting? Why hadn’t Posedel said jack to him?
Although Jones didn’t think of himself as a civil rights pioneer in the manner of Montgomery bus boycotters or Freedom Riders, he was aware of the importance of his role as a Baron in rolling back the tide of prejudice. When his family and friends came to watch him play, they didn’t have to sit behind the chicken wire. Although his people had never enjoyed the guarantees of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, at Rickwood they now glimpsed how the benefits of genuine citizenship could work.
He felt proud of his contribution. With the Barons in first place, boosted by the efforts of Campaneris, Reynolds, Rosario, Huyke, and himself, Birmingham’s black community, which for years had abandoned the team, felt a nudge back toward America’s national pastime. Unmistakably, baseball was the most visible of Birmingham’s attempts to free itself from its racist past.
But as Jones watched Posedel put his arm around Seitz, he wondered if the A’s considered him nothing more than a token offering to the black fans in Birmingham. He liked Blue Moon personally, and was happy he’d gotten all that money, but considering their contributions to the team it didn’t seem fair. Not even close.
Blue Moon’s opponent for his next start against Lynchburg would be Manly Johnston, who along with Campy was the leading candidate for MVP of the Southern League. He led the league in wins with ten, including two victories over the Barons. But it wasn’t just his pitching—he also had five homers. Nobody would’ve been surprised if he’d been discovered selling Cracker Jack between innings.
Blue Moon remained undaunted. “Nobody is going to harm my fastball,” he proclaimed, confident his extra work with Posedel had cured his control problems. “I’ll be buzzing ’em.”
If he needed added incentive, he got it in an article in the News headlined NEW BLUE MOON FACES JOHNSTON. It talked about his work with Posedel, but added that there’d been “cynical whispers that Charlie Finley paid $75,000 for a wild softballer.”
Every pitcher in the league knew about Blue Moon’s big money, and every pitcher in the league wanted to show him up. That was especially true for Manly Johnston, an Alabama native who’d already been named the starting pitcher for the Southern League All-Stars against the Barons in four days. Now in his seventh year of pro ball, he’d signed with the White Sox out of Auburn University, where he also played football. Initially signed as a hitter, he played his first three years as an outfielder before the White Sox decided to make him a pitcher. Now, at the age of twenty-five with a wife and kids, he was at a crossroads in his career. Seven years of riding crummy buses and scraping by on $5-a-day meal money had grown tiresome. In the off-seasons, he had continued his schooling at Auburn, and was now within a semester of a degree in business administration. With the year he was having, he figured that if he didn’t get called up, it would be time to hang ’em up. He hoped a victory over the highly touted Blue Moon would compel the White Sox to call him up. As far as the Barons were concerned, it would be good riddance. To a man, they thought Johnston was a big, obnoxious bully. In his previous start against them, he’d knocked down Tommie Reynolds every time he came to bat. Reynolds suspected it was racial. But he could not test Manly now because he was still on the disabled list.
Once again, Blue Moon walked the first hitter, who scored the first of two Lynchburg runs in the inning. Then it got worse. The Lynsox sent him to the showers after six innings—seven runs, eight hits, six walks, and only two strikeouts. Manly Johnston pitched a six-hit, complete-game victory, 7–2, moving Lynchburg back into second place and cutting the Barons’ lead to four and a half.
After the game, Sullivan and Posedel huddled, discussing Blue Moon’s immediate future. Once again, the idea to send him down to Lewiston was on the table. His record was now 1–3, and if the Barons hadn’t rallied in his other failed starts, it would have been 1–6. The bases on balls troubled Sullivan most.
“Let’s give him one more start,” he lobbied.
Posedel reluctantly agreed. “But this has to be his last chance,” he said.
The next night, Lynchburg swept a doubleheader, moving to within two and a half games of the Barons. In the first game, the winning run was driven in on a pinch-hit sacrifice fly by—who else?—Manly Johnston. In the second game, the Barons managed only two bloop singles, giving them a total of eleven hits in their three losses to Lynchburg. Tompkins, named to start the All-Star Game against Johnston, suffered his third loss in his last four decisions.
“I’ve been saying it for a couple months,” said Sullivan after the game. “I think Lynchburg is our toughest challenger. But we’re not pushing the panic button. It’ll help when we get Tommie Reynolds back tomorrow.”
Reynolds did come back for the series finale, and the Barons won 4–2 behind a complete game by Lindblad, his second victory in a row. Although Reynolds went 0 for 3 in his first game after an eighteen-day layoff, he hit the ball hard twice. He was also hit by a pitch. Campy continued to show he was fully recovered, too, lining two more hits and stealing a base.
But for Blue Moon, the world that had seemed so impossibly delicious a month ago was souring fast.