Bill Veeck (23 page)

On New Year's Eve—with his future in baseball in doubt—Doby signed a contract with the Paterson, New Jersey, Crescents of the previously all-white American Basketball League, which allowed the team owner to boast that Doby had integrated two professional sports leagues in the course of six months.
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Signing Doby was Veeck's first defining moment as a major-league owner. It gave him a voice as a progressive and social critic. He could now portray
the sainted Branch Rickey as a cheapskate and castigate the Yankees and the Red Sox for being lily-white and unprepared for an integrated America. The executives in New York and Boston played right into Veeck's hands. Earlier in the year Tom Yawkey, the owner of the Red Sox, had said, “Anyone who says I won't hire blacks is a liar. I have about 100 working on my farm down south.”
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The acquisition of Doby also put Veeck front and center in the emerging civil rights movement. At the same time Veeck was determined not to be taken too seriously, especially by his friends. Bob August of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
remembered a story told to him by Spud Goldstein, traveling secretary for the club. Goldstein's family made movies, but Goldstein was so fascinated by Veeck that he gave up Hollywood to go work for him. “On one of the many nights whose adventures sometimes stretched on to dawn, Spud and Bill and companions spent hours arguing whether Bill was a phony. After a lively debate, an agreement finally was reached that he was, but he was a ‘sincere phony.' How many high-powered executives would ever have entered such a debate and agreeably accepted such a verdict?”
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Veeck's active nightlife had a side effect that was, in all probability, unknown to him for the rest of his life: it served to open up a file under his name at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On April 10, 1947, a memo was sent to Alex Rosen, a top aide to J. Edgar Hoover, by the head of the Cleveland bureau reporting that Veeck was “constantly associating with known racketeers” at sporting events as well as spending considerable amounts of time at the Theatrical Grill, “a known hangout for Cleveland hoodlums.” Memos in the FBI file express concern that Veeck's association with racketeers could make him susceptible to extortion. Nothing more appears to have come of it, but if Veeck had known of the FBI's interest in him, he probably would have bragged about it.
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For his part, Veeck was as strongly opposed to gambling at the ballpark as his father had been. During the 1946 season he had had his ushers try to stop the practice, but that had not been effective. In early 1947 he had asked the city to stop gambling at the two ballparks and to make the failure to report a bribe offer a felony. Veeck had told Mayor Thomas Burke, “The gambling element has been disturbing the players.” Within a matter of hours the mayor promised to bar gambling and bribery in sporting events in the city.
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On November 24, 1947, Veeck and Lou Boudreau sat down to negotiate a new contract. They met behind closed doors for six and a half hours and came to terms on two contracts: one for two years as a player and one for two years as manager. The player contract was standard, but the manager pact allowed Veeck to fire Boudreau on short notice.

As part of this negotiation Veeck retained the right to hire new coaches. He kept Bill McKechnie, with twenty-five years of National League managerial experience behind him, including four pennants; he hired Muddy Ruel, fresh from a year as the Browns manager; and he converted Mel Harder, the team's ace pitcher for much of the thirties, into a pitching coach at the same salary he had received as a pitcher. He also hired Cleveland immortal Tris Speaker—manager and star of the city's only pennant winner, the 1920 World Champions—as a part-time coach. Veeck had a special role for Speaker that would begin in spring training: to help make Larry Doby a major-league ballplayer.

Veeck even tried to hire Casey Stengel away from the Oakland Oaks. “I wanted Casey because he knows baseball players,” he told Ed McAuley of the
Cleveland News
. “He can tell you quickly whether you're wasting your time and money on a rookie.” Stengel declined the offer, but not before determining that had he accepted, he would have been made a vice president of the team.
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Veeck's first public statement in 1948 came on January 4, after a meeting of his five-man “brain trust,” a group that included himself, Boudreau, and three graybeards (Grabiner, Ruel, and McKechnie). After the meeting,
Veeck said that the Indians were ready to trade anybody at any time if it could help the ballclub. He was interested primarily in another starting pitcher and would take any outfield help he could get. A few days later Veeck said that, thanks to “trade engineering and a few other acquisitions,” the 1948 team was going to be so tough that “they will surprise even its best friends.”
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Before the month was out Shirley Povich of the
Washington Post
took a look at Veeck's additions, namely, Wally Judnich from the Browns and Allie Clark from the Yankees, and felt that he could safely declare the Indians to be the “dark horse” of the American League—with a fair share of breaks and one more solid player, they were poised to take it all. “While the Indians don't have much cash to work with compared to the rich clubs, in Veeck they have a smart operator.”
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Veeck's pitching staff looked solid, though nobody could have predicted the success it would achieve. On January 21 Veeck signed Feller to a new contract, retaining the team's anchor on the mound. Based on his performance in 1947, Bob Lemon appeared ready to join Feller at the top of the Indians' rotation. Lemon had made the switch from infielder to pitcher in 1946 and was nearly claimed by the Senators for his waiver price, but he was reclaimed at the last minute by a petulant Veeck because the news of the trade leaked to the press before he was ready to announce it. Lemon's bags had already been packed when Veeck called off the deal. Lemon then sparkled on the mound, winning eleven games in 1947, his first full year as a pitcher.
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In 1947, Gene Bearden had worked only a third of an inning for the Indians, inauspiciously allowing three earned runs. He was to be sent down to the Indians farm team in Baltimore, but instead demanded that he return to the Oakland Oaks and his mentor, Casey Stengel. There he had put together a solid 16–7 season, mastering the knuckleball under Stengel's tutelege. He spent the winter of 1947–48 in the Mexican League and earned a spot in the Indians 1948 rotation in spring training.

Among his hitters, Veeck faced a dilemma on the first day of spring training: Larry Doby did not look ready either on the field or at bat. He knew that if Doby did not make the cut, he could not send him down to either of his top two farm teams in Baltimore or Oklahoma City, and to send him lower in the Indians system would be tantamount to giving up on him. Tentative plans were thus made for him to be sent to a team in the Pacific Coast League if he didn't make the Indians. Doby's lackluster 1947 performance had led to
speculation that Veeck had put him on the team merely for public relations purposes—that it was just another stunt.
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Eight outfielders reported to Tucson on March 1, and Doby was assigned to the B squad. Tris Speaker made Doby his special project and worked with him over several weeks. Speaker, who was one of the greatest defensive center fielders in the game's history, helped to convert Doby from a subpar infielder to a superlative center fielder. Speaker had admitted to being a member of the Ku Klux Klan as a young man in Hubbard, a town in central Texas where Jim Crow ruled and where, according to Speaker's biographer Tim Gay, “the Klan operated at a fever pitch. Local KKK leaders were heroes. Lynching was not uncommon.” However, Speaker appeared to have overcome his past as he got older.
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A significant event occurred during an exhibition game against the St. Louis Browns in Los Angeles in late March. In the fourth inning Doby hurtled into second base, colliding with shortstop Sam Dente. Doby got up safe, but Dente's leg spurted blood. One of the arguments against allowing Negroes into the game had been the fear that if a black man spiked a white player, a riot would break out. As Chris Parry noted in the
Philadelphia Tribune
, a Negro paper, “It was a sort of accident which any two players might have been involved, and to their everlasting credit, that's how everyone in the park regarded it.”
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With Speaker's and McKechnie's coaching, Doby came out of Arizona batting .354 and playing strong defense. An article in
The Sporting News
claimed that “the No. 1 story” of the spring was the emergence of Larry Doby as a starting outfielder. Boudreau had not yet decided whether he would play the young fielder in center or right, but he was convinced that Doby was the fastest man in the American League.
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“All through the training season I said that we had eight outfielders fighting for three starting jobs. I wasn't kidding. Doby not only proved himself one of the three best. He was the very best. It would be wrong to keep him out of the starting lineup in view of his great performance.”
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The team then barnstormed its way back to Cleveland, playing a series of
games with the New York Giants in various cities, including three stops in Texas. The trip was especially harsh on Doby. Since arriving in Tucson he had spent every night away from his white team members because the team hotel barred blacks. The hotels on the road were no better, and Doby was forced to board with local black families and find his own way to the ballpark

At Lubbock, Texas, he was not allowed into the park by gate attendants until a team official vouched for him. In Texarkana, two taxicabs claimed to be busy and he had to walk several miles to the park in uniform, only to be denied entrance by a new set of gatekeepers. A barrage of bottles and other objects greeted him in center field, and he was taken out of the game for his own protection, to the gratification of those who had attacked him. In Houston, he was greeted with a hostility that was “frightening in its intensity.” He was booed until he hit a ball some 500 feet, beyond the center-field fence, after which grudging applause was heard. Doby was not mollified. As he told his biographer Joseph Thomas Moore, “In fact, I resented the cheers.”
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He also told Moore that this was the loneliest time of his life.

Veeck was sensitive to Doby's plight. Claire Smith, the ESPN news executive who traveled and worked with Doby at the end of his life, recalled Doby's observation that from his early days with the Indians Veeck had the ability to determine when things were getting him down and then “swoop in and grab him and tell him they were going out to a jazz club. Bill was a great jazz fan and he would take Larry to see the great ones—Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie and all the others. Bill sensed when he needed him and then showed up.”
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Monte Irvin underscored their special relationship. “Larry and Bill became really good friends. They would go to nightclubs together.
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Later when Bill would come to New York he would call Larry and me on the phone and say that we were going out.”
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At the end of March, Veeck's friend Hank Greenberg, then thirty-eight years old, joined the club as an executive, following his retirement the previous year from the Pittsburgh Pirates. He became a vice president along with Harry Grabiner, thus giving Veeck one of the most powerful and visible front offices in baseball. He and Veeck had met at the 1947 World Series and dined into the wee hours at Toots Shor's. “When I first met him he was talking to me about the Indians,” Greenberg remembered. “I thought he was
talking about the ball club, but no, he was talking about the American Indians who were treated so badly by the U.S. government. He was very concerned about them and what a shabby deal they had gotten. He loved them.”
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The two spent further time together at the 1947 Winter Meetings and discussed the possibility of Greenberg buying 10 percent of the team, though Greenberg was never offered the chance to buy the stock.
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Nonetheless, Veeck and Greenberg became fast friends, and for the team and its fans, the former Detroit Tigers star became an immediate talisman and a good omen. Greenberg, a Jew, could easily identify with what Doby was enduring, having experienced prejudice during his career.

If bringing Greenberg into the management mix would prove to be inspired, so would Veeck's gamble on Russ Christopher, a tall right-handed pitcher with a submarine delivery and a bad heart. A good strikeout pitcher and reliable starter during the war, he had become a fine reliever in 1947 for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, going 10–7 with 12 saves and a 2.90 ERA. But his health had deteriorated over the winter, and a few weeks before Opening Day he was bedridden with pneumonia, the result of a congenital heart defect that made him vulnerable to respiratory problems. Veeck knew that this would be Christopher's last year in baseball, but when they met in Orlando, Florida, Christopher told Veeck that he understood the severity of his situation and would rather die on the mound than in bed.

Ever willing to take chances on players with physical or emotional flaws, Veeck bought Christopher from Connie Mack for $25,000 on April 3, acquiring him for two reasons. On a personal level, Christopher had two young children at home, and one more year would make him eligible for a higher pension allowance and better death benefits. More important, Veeck foresaw the need for a spot reliever who could pitch a crucial inning here or there. The Christopher deal became the perfect Veeckian bargain: helping another human being while helping himself.