In 1966, two years after this story takes place, I was a twenty-three-year-old pitcher for the Macon Peaches in the Southern League, a California boy experiencing the South for the first time. The idea of becoming a writer, let alone writing this book, never occurred to me then, not for a nanosecond. I was a ballplayer. That’s it. Baseball defined who I was.
I could easily decouple baseball from the civil rights movement. I was not in Macon to observe the onerous habits of Jim Crow; my job was to blow the ball by any sonuvabitch who carried a Louisville Slugger into the batter’s box. Like the players in this book, I was singular in purpose: have a good season and get to the major leagues.
I played against some of the players written about in this book, including Blue Moon. I am now almost forty years removed from the game, but instinctively and emotionally, once you’ve lived in the land of baseball, you’re a permanent resident.
As a player in the Southern League, I never took notes or recorded my thoughts into a tape recorder—I would’ve been laughed out of the locker room. But over the years, a few distinct memories have stuck stubbornly in my mind. Details of specific games are long gone. The memories I do carry, however, were the seeds from which this book would emerge four decades later. And each of those memories had to do with race.
The first seed was planted on our initial road trip of the season, a visit to Montgomery, Alabama, to play the Rebels, a Detroit farm team. After the series opener at Paterson Field, the twenty-two Macon players and our manager, Andy Seminick, climbed onto our bus—nicknamed the Coffin—for the ride back to the hotel. I was sharing a seat with Leroy “Cat” Reams, an outfielder from Oakland, California. Leroy and I had played together on a semi-pro team in the Bay Area prior to launching our pro careers in the Phillie organization. This was his second year in the Southern League, my first.
Several blocks from the team hotel, the bus pulled to the curb and Leroy and the two other black players on the team got up and started down the aisle toward the door. “Hey, Cat,” I said. “Wanna go grab a bite to eat?”
He whirled around and looked at me as if I’d lost my skull. “Not unless you have a death wish.” He turned and got off the bus and disappeared into the Alabama night.
Okay, I was in that Montgomery, the city where Rosa Parks had started the bus boycott a decade earlier and where George Wallace sat as governor. It didn’t matter that the Civil Rights Act had been passed two years earlier—most hotels and restaurants in Alabama still didn’t serve blacks, and hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan were as common as grits.
I played that whole season and never knew where Leroy and the others went after the games. I never asked. I saw them only on the bus and at the ballpark.
A second memory is of a team picnic, a chance for us to gather socially with our families on a rare day off and to share some brews and barbecued burgers. I brought my wife, Denise; she was eight months pregnant. She had been an art major at Berkeley, and had just finished a haunting charcoal portrait of the four young black girls who had been murdered in the bombing of the Birmingham church. It hung in the living room of our small Macon apartment right next to another one of her paintings—Mickey Mantle sliding into third. (In our divorce several years later, I got the Mantle painting.)
We arrived at the park at the same time as Cat and John Lucas, who was Hank Aaron’s cousin. Together, we headed into the park, searching for our teammates. As we walked deeper into a wooded area, the path led us toward an opening and a very large white tent. Suddenly, Cat and John spun around and started sprinting back toward the street, looking like they’d seen seven ghosts.
“What’s wrong?”
They pointed back toward the tent. Standing there were half a dozen hooded Ku Klux Klan members, squinting through the slits of their hoods.
It was one thing to have seen newsreel footage of KKK cross burnings, but an altogether different experience to peer into those hard, angry eyes. Our picnic was canceled.
Perhaps my most vivid memory of my season in the Southern League springs from a road trip to Mobile. Somewhere along US 31 between Montgomery and Mobile, the Coffin stopped for lunch at a small greasy spoon café nestled in a clump of pine trees. I took a seat at the counter. A heavyset waitress wearing a hairnet served me a glass of water in a plastic tumbler. Watching the rest of the team straggle in, she spotted Cat.
“Niggers have to eat out back,” she instructed.
Andy Seminick, an old-school, barrel-chested, tobacco-chewing native of West Virginia who once caught a World Series game with a broken wrist, and was the Phillie catcher the day Jackie Robinson broke into the major leagues, glared at her.
“Then you don’t serve none of us,” he said, signaling the team to head back to the bus.
His response surprised me. I’d never thought of him as a champion of civil rights, yet when I thought more about it, his stance was consistent with his constant preaching about the importance of being a team. “We’re in this together,” he repeatedly said. “We got to jump on ’em, both feet.”
Back on the bus, we all returned to our seats, nobody trying to analyze what had just happened. The card games, chewing, and spitting continued. We were a team of twenty-year-olds from all over the country, not Freedom Riders. Neither Cat nor the other black players said anything.
But Seminick’s declaration of the unifying principle of team above all else never left me. The four other books I’ve written have all had a common theme of team, seen not just as wins and losses, but as stories illuminating how people function and interact under pressure—whether it’s a championship NBA team; a college fraternity; a high school girls’ basketball team on an Indian reservation; or submariners facing the ultimate test in World War II. In dissecting each of those teams, I learned that the subjects’ relationships to time and place, as well as to each other, are what shape the narrative.
Four decades passed before the seeds that had been planted in memories of the Southern League’s red Georgia clay began to take root as a story. Long after I was out of baseball, I began to think of the sport in its broader context. I was no longer obsessed with my own trajectory in the game—that arc had led to a crash landing. Instead, I puzzled over baseball’s place in American culture—both the good and the bad—and its assigned role in our country’s evolution. Since its inception, baseball has been a way to connect us, to transcend the boundaries of time and place, to bind generations, and to offer us a unique sense of community, a dialogue among strangers. In Southern League, baseball brings blacks and whites together in a place where it had never happened before.
I am constantly reminded of how, to many, baseball is a religion. I played in only one big-league game in 1968, and yet I still get a steady stream of letters requesting an autograph on my Topps rookie baseball card. I have been a writer for over three decades, but it’s a rare day when I receive a copy of one of my books in the mail with a request to sign it.
It is this fascination with baseball’s place in the cosmos that ultimately drew me to the 1964 Birmingham Barons, a story that somehow seemed to fit the notion that baseball is a perfect companion to our history, and even at times an augur of politics, as in the marvelous chronicle of Jackie Robinson. This seemed like just such a story.
More than the home runs and suicides squeezes, what drew me in were the backstories of the players—twenty-two young men as diverse as America—and the way they intertwined (or didn’t) with the turmoil that was Birmingham, the epicenter of the civil rights movement in 1964. I was looking for glimpses into the nobility of the sport and its recurrent sagas of success and failure… and, occasionally, perhaps, redemption.
To tell this narrative, I chose to focus on four players—two black, John Odom and Tommie Reynolds; and two white, Hoss Bowlin and Paul Lindblad—along with their manager, Haywood Sullivan, a man whose roots in the South were as deep as those of the trees used for lynchings in the town square where he was raised.
Along the way, I talked to the players, their wives (or ex-wives), and, in one case, a player’s widow. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, but I was hoping it would be a story where baseball and the real world collided… and baseball won.