Advance tickets sales for the A’s exhibition had been brisk. Belcher and his general manager, Glynn West, were predicting a crowd of ten thousand. They’d taken orders from Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and South Carolina.
The A’s visit would be the first time ever that a major-league team would play a game in Birmingham during the regular season. Finley had chartered a plane for the trip. But three hours before the game, a violent thunderstorm hovered over the city, dumping buckets and causing Belcher to nervously pace and consider the unthinkable—canceling the game.
Also pacing was Ron Tompkins. Sullivan had given him the plum assignment as the starting pitcher and told him to go as many innings as he could, hoping for a complete game. This was Tompkins’s big chance to finally impress in front of all the Kansas City brass—Finley, Peters, McGaha, Lopat, and Friday. But for Tompkins, as for any other pitcher, waiting out a rain delay or a cancellation put a wrecking ball through his mental and physical preparation.
Not only would a rainout eliminate his big chance to impress the A’s honchos, it would drown Belcher’s hopes for a profitable evening.
To everyone’s relief, the storm passed. When the gates opened, the fans of all shades streamed into Rickwood, filling the box seats and grandstands, fanning themselves to stay cool in the muggy ninety-degree heat. As the bleachers filled, ushers escorted fans to roped-off areas in the outfield. Kids clambered over the railings, hollering for balls, autographs, attention.
Extra security patrolled the park, including a Kansas City cop whom Finley had brought in on the charter jet to make sure nobody tried anything funny with the A’s players, especially Campaneris.
“It’s just to make sure that there are no shenanigans and nobody tries to kidnap my boy,” Finley explained. “I’ll personally inspect the plane to make sure Campy’s on board before we leave.”
Belcher was surprised that he hadn’t received any pre-game threats. As the fans settled into their seats, they were mannerly and well behaved, blacks and whites sitting side by side, talking baseball. They stood patiently together in line to buy hot dogs and drinks. Nowhere in the South in 1964, or maybe all of America, was integration working better than at Rickwood Field on this night.
Standing in front of the A’s dugout, Finley, Belcher, and Sullivan smiled for the cameras.
By the time the game started, every seat at Rickwood was filled, with several thousand more fans packed ten-deep around the outfield. They went nuts when the A’s leadoff hitter was announced—Bert Campaneris.
As he stepped into the batter’s box, Campy smiled and tipped his cap as the long ovation continued. When he grounded out to short, the crowd wasn’t sure whether to cheer or hiss. In his three months with the Barons, he had become as popular as any player in the club’s history, black or white.
After Campy was retired, Tompkins ran into trouble, giving up two runs on an RBI single by Jim Gentile. Not the start he’d hoped for to impress the KC brass.
The Barons bounced back to score four runs to take the lead and send the crowd to bonkersville, the big blow a ground-rule double by Larry Stahl that bounded into the overflow crowd in left field. But in the fourth, Kansas City tied it, forcing Sullivan to pull a disheartened Tompkins. In four innings, he’d given up four runs, four hits, and a disastrous four walks.
In the middle of the fifth inning, the fans’ enthusiasm ratcheted up again, but this time it was for the grounds crew from Kansas City that Finley had brought along on the trip. Headed up by thirty-five-year-old George Toma, widely regarded as the best groundskeeper in the business, they took to the infield dressed in matching green-and-gold outfits with customized gold rakes. The crew, including five brothers of French descent, ages fifteen to twenty, moved with drill-like precision—no dawdling allowed. Accompanied by Chubby Checkers’s “The Twist” blaring over the PA system, they shimmied and shook and raked the infield to perfection in only forty-five seconds while the crowd whistled and twisted as Finley beamed.
At Finley’s urging, Sullivan brought in Blue Moon in relief of Tompkins, even though he had pitched four innings a day earlier against Knoxville. Nevertheless, in two innings of work against the A’s, Blue Moon gave up two harmless singles and no walks while striking out four. The last batter he faced was slugger Rocky Colavito, and with a full count Blue Moon snapped off a curve that Colavito swung at and missed by a foot. The crowd howled and Finley beamed once more.
“Nobody in the big leagues could’ve hit that curve,” observed Eddie Lopat.
In the bottom of the sixth, catcher John Stutz hit a home run to put the Barons up 5–4, and then they added two more in the eighth as Shaky Joe Grzenda, who had let it be known that he wanted to pitch in the game, shut out the A’s the rest of the way for a 7–4 victory.
The headline on the front page of the News the next day proclaimed: FARMHAND BARONS TAKE PARENT A’S TO THE WOODSHED.
The attendance of 16,912 was the third largest crowd in Rickwood’s sixty-year history and, according to Belcher, the loudest. Veteran concessionaire Bob Scranton said it was also the hungriest, setting new Rickwood records for eating and drinking: seven thousand hot dogs, twenty-five thousand soft drinks, four thousand bags of peanuts, and fifteen hundred boxes of popcorn. But in the negotiations over the exhibition, Finley had demanded a 60 percent share of the gate, as well as for all of Kansas City’s expenses to be covered, including the cost of the charter jet. Belcher had no choice but to agree. But he wasn’t happy. When it was suggested in an interview with Bob Phillips of the Post-Herald that the game’s success had been a joint project between him and Mr. Finley, he bristled:
“Mr. Finley, my eye,” he shouted. “What do you mean Mr. Finley? I’m the man who would’ve been stuck. I guaranteed the cost of the plane, and it would have all come out of my pocket [if it was rained out]. Kansas City took more money out of Birmingham than any big league club ever took.”
After hearing Belcher’s side of the story, Phillips changed his tune in print:
We had been led to believe that Finley was doing it all out of love for the fans of his old hometown. But Finley wasn’t in on the big gamble. If the game had been stormed out, Belcher would have had to cough up the $4,000 along with whatever he had spent in promoting the game.