Southern League

In 1966, two years after this story takes place, I was a 23-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.

But the South had a way of asserting itself. A road trip to Montgomery; a picnic where the KKK turned up to remind us that some things were not changing fast enough; a roadside café where our manager Andy Seminick refused to let the team eat a bite without our black teammates beside us. These moments stuck.

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. Baseball is 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 between strangers. In Southern League, baseball brings blacks and whites together in a place where it had never happened before.