Bill Veeck
Authors: Paul Dickson
Baseball's Greatest Maverick
PAUL DICKSON
To Nancy: always and forever
.
With an additional dedicatory nod to Dave Kelly for decades of
help as the “go-to” sports expert at the Library of Congress
.
Bill Veeck ⦠my choice for the most colorful baseball guy of all time.
It's more than that. Give me a last supper with half a dozen people
of my choosing, living or dead, and Veeck is at the table.
âDOUG MOE,
CAPITAL TIMES
AND
WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL
,
OCTOBER 20, 2005
Chapter 5. The Philadelphia Story
Chapter 6. Pvt. Veeck Goes to War
Chapter 8. Lawrence Doby and the Integration of the American League
Chapter 12. Striking Out with the St. Louis Browns
Chapter 15. Bells and Whistles
Chapter 16. Peachblossom Creek
Following the Family and Close Friends
Appendix: Did Bill Veeck Lie About His Plan to Purchase the '43 Phillies?
The tendency today is to remember Bill Veeck as the guy who would do anything for a laugh or publicityâan irascible showman. Many think of him simply as the eccentric baseball owner who sent a midget, a man named Eddie Gaedel, to the plate for the St. Louis Browns in a 1951 game against the Detroit Tigers, or as the man responsible for one of baseball's most ill-advised promotions, the infamous 1979 Disco Demolition Night, when a stoned mob wrought havoc on Comiskey Park. Former
Chicago Tribune
columnist David Israel called it “Veeckstock”; others called it a disgrace.
But Bill Veeck was much, much more. As a four-time major-league team owner, he was a transformational figure in the history of baseball. Nonconformist, visionary, and showman extraordinaire, he spent a lifetime challenging baseball's staid establishment, cultivating powerful enemies the way others cultivate powerful friends. Today, the game reflects much of what he fought for, and his influence is still much in evidence. “Bill Veeck delighted in being everyman's owner,” remembered Andy MacPhail, president of the Baltimore Orioles, in a 2009 interview. “His influence is everywhereâall those activities going on at the modern ballpark outside the white lines can in some way be traced back to Veeck.”
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Physically, Bill Veeck was a larger-than-life figureâa tall, chain-smoking, charismatic, photogenic redhead with a big open face and a voice so deep and compelling that writer Dave Kindred said it “came as a train in the night.” He drank prodigious amounts of beer and was known to consume the reddest of red meat. “A group of us went out with him after a World Series game in New York in the early 1960s,” Cliff Kachline, then with
The Sporting News
, recalled, “and Veeck orders a steak extra rare. What we found out was that he really meant to bring it from the kitchen meat locker absolutely raw.”
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If there were excesses, there were also strict limits. Veeck never, ever swore,
nor would he let anyone else do his dirty work for him if he could help it. Decades later, those who played for him recall his simple courtesies, which then were rare and today are nonexistent. Virgil Trucks, who started the 1953 season with the St. Louis Browns, was summoned by Veeck one day in 1953 and informed that he had been traded to the Chicago White Sox. “He was the only man to call me into his office to tell me I was traded, and I was traded five times. All the other times I heard it on radio or TV, or read it in the newspapers. So that speaks for what kind of man Bill Veeck was.”
3
Veeck had great relations with the press, yet refused to share confidential information, a fact attested to by Ray Grebey, chief negotiator for the twenty-six owners in baseball's labor wars leading up to the 1981 baseball strike and a friend of Veeck's for more than forty years: “Bill was incapable of leaking anything given to him in confidence.”
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By nature, he was quick-witted, uninhibited, irreverent, quick to anger, stubborn, and prone to hyperbole. He was also funny and able to coax laughter out of the darkest situations. “Bill Veeck is obviously a dangerous manâhe knows how to laugh and how to think,” sportswriter Dick Schaap once wrote on a jacket blurb for one of Veeck's three memoirs.
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During World War II, he chose not to accept a deferment from military service and instead enlisted in the Marine Corps. He then demanded to be sent to a war zone, where he suffered an injury that would lead to a series of amputations and create unfathomable pain. This would, as his friend Bert Randolph Sugar, the boxing writer, expressed it, “put him on the edge of the volcano between good health and bad health for the rest of his life.”
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“I saw him with welts and sores that would have brought a mere mortal down. I can tell you that except for a wince or trouble getting up and down our stairs in Maryland, he never complained,” said his son Mike Veeck, adding that he behaved the same way around his family as he did in the outside world.
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“Suffering is overratedâit doesn't teach you anything” was Veeck's mantra, and he turned his missing leg into a sight gag. He took great glee in lighting a cigarette, pulling up his pant leg, and using the ashtray he had carved into the wood. When he took a bad fall at the Baltimore airport, an attendant asked, “Can I call you a doctor?” “No,” he shot back, “it's the wooden legâget me a carpenter.”
Bill Veeck brought change to both the business and conscience of baseball. He was a prime mover in the racial integration of the game, both on the field and in the front office. He was the first to integrate the American League when he signed Larry Doby eleven weeks after Jackie Robinson debuted in
the National League. In his drive to win the 1948 pennant, he signed the legendary Satchel Paige despite knowing he would be criticized for doing so. By the beginning of the 1949 season, he had fourteen black players under contract, including future stars Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso and Luke Easter. He brought in the second black manager, again Larry Doby. He also brought the African American John H. Johnson, the founder of
Ebony
magazine, into an ownership position as part of a syndicate that bought the Chicago White Sox in 1975.
Veeck loved the game of baseball, both on the field and outside the lines. He would do anything to accomplish what he believed would make it better, no matter how outrageous. Increasing the fans' happiness and having fun were his sacraments.
Alternately playing the role of innovator, catalyst, and gadfly, Veeck pushed for many of the major changes in the game that took place during the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, and he pioneered new ways to treat baseball as a successful business. His wildly innovative marketing techniques drew in so many new fans that he set records for ballpark attendance.
Elements of the game we take for granted todayâthe designated hitter, interleague play, the playoff system, free agency, an expanded leagueâwere all things that Veeck advocated many years before they went into effect. In 1986, the great slugger Hank Greenberg, his close friend and sometime business partner, told the
New York Times
: “Bill brought baseball into the 20th century. Before Bill, baseball was just winning or losing. But he made it fun to be at the ballpark.” Veeck's combination of financial creativity and marketing genius was unlike anything else in the history of sports. Today he is seen as a man decades ahead of his time. In 2004,
Business Week
picked him as one of the great business innovators of the previous seventy-five years. He accomplished this as the last owner to purchase a Major League Baseball franchise without his own personal fortune.
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Veeck successively owned three major-league teamsâthe Cleveland Indians (1946â49), the St. Louis Browns (1951â53), and the Chicago White Sox (twice: 1959â61 and 1975â81). The highlight of his baseball career came in 1948, when his Indians won both the American League pennant and the World Series. It was one of the most excitingâif not
the
most excitingâsingle season of the postwar golden age of baseball. His revival of the Go-Go White Sox in 1959, and then again in 1977 with his South Side Hit Men, are two of the great comeback stories in baseball history.
Veeck had a long-running feud with the New York Yankees, whose
stodginess and refusal to integrate he hated as much as they hated his flamboyance. He relished the irony that his player Satchel Paige gave the Yankees an attendance boost whenever he pitched in Yankee Stadium. “Hating the Yankees isn't part of my act,” Veeck said. “It is one of those exquisite times when life and art are in perfect conjunction.” He played David to the Yankees Goliath and did everything he could to get under their skin. He also had an uncanny ability to beat them at their own game. From 1947 to 1964, the Yankees were denied the American League pennant only three timesâtwice by a Veeck-owned team and once by a team that he had built more or less from scratch and that was deeply dependent on men of color.
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His life entwined with those of many well-known figures of the twentieth century, both inside and outside of baseball: Hank Greenberg, Satchel Paige, Larry Doby, Lou Boudreau, Casey Stengel, Studs Terkel, Jimmy Breslin, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, George Steinbrenner, John F. Kennedy, Connie Mack, Paul Newman, Minnie Miñoso, Abe Saperstein, Thurgood Marshall, Gene Autry, Al Capone, Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra, Ty Cobb, Jesse Jackson, Elston Howard, Ray Kroc, Salvador DalÃ, and Jack Ruby, to name a few. They too are part of this story, even if they played only cameo roles.
Although he probably did as much or more than any other individual to change the game in the decades following World War II, Veeck did it as a self-anointed outcast. He baited and berated those in power, including umpires. Most owners despised him in return and at critical junctures tried and sometimes succeeded in keeping him out of the game, but he kept coming back.
Ed Linn, who co-wrote three books with Veeck, asked rhetorically in an article in
Sport
magazine why the other owners disliked Veeck. “Apparently they hate Veeck because he has always looked upon baseball as a form of entertainment rather than a religious experience,” Linn answered himself, adding that Veeck would do anything to get fans to the ballpark and keep them coming back. William Barry Furlong, a writer who had a special affinity for Veeck, wrote that the real reason for his alienation from the other owners was that Veeck was a person of “greater dimensions and grander vision than his contemporaries.” He added: “All this would be tolerable if Veeck fitted the baseball men's image of such an individualâi.e., a failure. But his success offers a suggestion of their own inadequacy and threatens some of the longtime institutions of baseball, such as the domination of the American League by the Yankees.”
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