Bill Veeck (34 page)

Bill Purdy, a high school student and avid Browns fan, won a contest to become the batboy for the 1952 season and, later in the season, batting practice catcher. Purdy recalled Hornsby as a “a very difficult person” whom he quickly learned to stay clear of: “I was scared to death of him.”
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If the future of the Browns seemed unsettled, so, suddenly, did that of the Cardinals. In April 1952, as Hornsby was imposing his will on the
Browns, Cardinals owner Fred Saigh was indicted on federal charges of evading $49,260 in income taxes between 1946 and 1949.

Veeck soon attracted attention of his own with a move that seemed to have no greater purpose than to create headlines and perhaps to assert himself over Hornsby in racial matters. With the help of Browns stockholder Abe Saperstein, Veeck signed two farm team players from the Negro American League—third baseman John Britton and pitcher James Newberry—and then loaned them to Japanese teams. Less than two weeks earlier the United States had signed its final peace treaty with Japan, giving the Japanese back their independence and formally ending the war in the Pacific. Veeck proclaimed that the move was his way of celebrating Japan's new status.
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Hornsby's drive paid off at the start, as the Browns won seven of their first nine games and led the American League for a few days. But by the end of May they were in seventh place and the team was angry and demoralized under Hornsby's tough hand. Veeck had never seen a team “so tense, so ready to explode,” and realized he had to make a change. As the team prepared for a road trip to Washington, New York, and Boston, he alerted Marty Marion to be ready to take over the team on short notice and tipped off several writers as to what was about to happen.
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The matter came to a head in Washington on June 3, when second baseman Bobby Young asked permission to visit his wife, who was having a very difficult pregnancy in nearby Baltimore and had been confined to bed for several months. Hornsby denied him. Young was so mad that he positioned himself outside the clubhouse with a bat waiting for Hornsby to emerge. Fortunately, Bill Durney spotted Young and got the bat away from him with the promise that he would be able to go to Baltimore.

When Veeck confronted Hornsby, the manager insisted, “All players are alike to me. I can't have two sets of rules.”

“That's just ridiculous,” Veeck retorted. “If everybody lived in Baltimore and had a wife who was pregnant and in ill health, and you let some of them go and didn't let others go, then you'd have two sets of rules. You have only one player in that situation, so you let him go and you'll only have one set of rules.”

“I don't see it that way,” Hornsby said.

“All right, then, I'm informing you, as president of this club, that I am going to call Bill Durney as soon as I hang up and tell him to give Young permission to go home now and for the rest of the series. I'm not going to
argue about it with you, I'm just telling you so you won't be able to say I did anything behind your back.”

Veeck observed in his memoir, “If Rog had only been the independent character his press agents say he is, he would have quit on the spot and I would have been out of a difficult situation about as cleanly as possible.” But Hornsby did not quit, and Veeck let the matter ride for several days. On June 8, however, during the first game of a doubleheader against the Yankees, Browns pitcher Tommy Byrne hit a foul ball near the third-base box seats. A fan interfered with the ball, and the umpire ruled that Byrne was out because infielder Gil McDougald was unable to make the catch. Hornsby complained, but Ned Garver, who was to pitch the second game, disputed the call from the bench and was ejected.

Veeck was listening to the game on the radio in St. Louis and heard the call along with a description of the play, which made it sound as if McDougald had not been close enough to make the catch. Veeck called Hornsby and told him to lodge an official protest. Hornsby claimed it was too late—which it probably was—but Veeck persisted, later lodging his own protest (which was disallowed).

The Browns traveled next to Boston. Veeck met the team there, called Hornsby to his room at the Kenmore Hotel, and fired him without haggling about payment for the remaining years on Hornsby's contract. Hornsby later observed that the $100,000 he netted from his Browns contract was enough to keep him comfortable for the rest of his life.

One of the first calls Veeck received after the firing was from his mother, who reminded him that he should not have thought himself smarter than his father, who had fired Hornsby twenty years earlier in a hotel a quarter of mile from the Kenmore. The Cubs had gone on to win the pennant in 1932 under Charlie Grimm, who was now in Boston managing the Braves.
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Veeck then met with reporters. “I blew one by hiring him in the first place. I have known him since I was a child, but I thought he had mellowed. He hasn't. He's grown worse in recent years,” Veeck said, maintaining that “he didn't give a damn about his players.”
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As he left for the airport, Hornsby offered a one-line parting shot at Veeck: “When you work for a screwball, you've got to expect screwball tactics.”
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Veeck replaced Hornsby with Marty Marion, who had been fired by the Cardinals because he did not have enough “drive.” The contrast between the two managers, opined Arthur Daley of the
Times
, “borders on the violent.”

Back in St. Louis, upon hearing reports that players were happy about his
firing, Hornsby insisted that Browns officials “must have put the words in their mouths, I didn't have any trouble with the players.” The players disagreed. Earl Rapp, who had been traded to the Senators that week, said, “If Hornsby had stayed, some of the players would have tangled with him. They were getting ready to fight.” Shortstop Joe DeMaestri later recalled: “Some guys were ready to strike, just refuse to play for him. But it became a whole team mutiny.”
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Ned Garver, coming off a 20-win season the previous year, complained that under Hornsby he pitched infrequently and irregularly: “I never knew where I was. I never agitated against him but I didn't like it. We had to stay on the bench when the others were taking batting practice. We had to be on the bench during the first game of a doubleheader even if we pitched the second.”
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Garver also recalled the dangers involved in playing for Hornsby. “When you pitched batting practice, he wouldn't let you put screens up. Every team when they went to take batting practice and infield practice, the pitcher had a net in front of him, the first baseman had a net in front of him. But he wouldn't let us have that. I don't know why. He just didn't want it…. Hank Arft, our first baseman, got hit in the head with a line drive off the bat while he hit ground balls and the infielders were throwing to first. Hank went to catch a ball and about that time a batter hit a line drive. Another time in New York, Gordon Goldsberry got hit with a line drive right in the back. He started limping toward right field, and Hornsby hollered out to him, ‘If you're scared, go take your uniform off.'”

Garver was bothered by Hornsby's policy of demanding that his pitchers adhere to his orders. “We'd be on the road, and Hornsby had us go out to the ballpark before the other team did. We'd be sitting on the bench, and we were supposed to watch those guys take batting practice and then decide how to pitch them! Lord have mercy! So we'd be out there sitting while the other pitchers were taking batting practice, and then he'd come up with something like, ‘Mickey Vernon is a better high-ball hitter, so you have to pitch him low.' Well, Mickey Vernon was a better low-ball hitter. We'd played in the league for years. He never asked anybody.” As if this were not enough, Garver said that for some inexplicable reason Hornsby would not allow his catcher to move his target for his pitchers. “Just put it in the middle of the plate” was his instruction.
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Perhaps pointing to a significant reason for Hornsby's firing, Harold Woods in the
St. Louis Argus
, an African American weekly, said that one of
the reasons for the dismissal was Hornsby's “sharp resentment against” Satchel Paige. Woods reported that Hornsby had made derogatory remarks about Paige in the presence of other players, and this eventually leaked back to the front office.
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“Rogers really hated Satchel,” recalled Joe DeMaestri, “and one day tried to set him down for a game and Paige said he wasn't going to do it because all he had to do was to pick up the phone and call Bill Veeck.”
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Veeck called a team meeting at which he apologized for his mistake and the eight weeks the players had endured. In return, the players presented Veeck with a loving cup inscribed: TO BILL VEECK FOR THE GREATEST PLAY SINCE THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, JUNE 10, 1952. FROM THE PLAYERS OF THE ST. LOUIS BROWNS.

Even this became a matter for instant controversy. Red Smith termed the players' act a “sorry exhibition of niggling spite, degrading all who participated. The whole affair is redolent of the bush, and Veeck did himself a disfavor by throwing in with the bushers.” Smith's disdain for the players was evident in every sentence of his column. As he described the players complaining to Veeck: “They must've come with quivering lips and streaky faces to weep in Bill Veeck's lap. Else how could he know how their little hearts were aching? So Bill dried their eyes and, in effect, told them: There, there the nassy man is gone. Let's see a great big smile, if anybody else pesters you about winning I will take care of him too.” Smith's column hit a nerve, and Veeck and his players were assailed for insulting the greatest right-handed hitter the game had ever known.

Although Satchel Paige had made no public comment on Hornsby, he seemed to flourish after Hornsby's departure. Beginning with a relief appearance the night of the firing that saved a game for Garver, Paige pitched ten brilliant innings in relief a few days later in an eighteen-inning win against the Senators, and came back two days later to set down the same club, allowing one hit in two and a third innings. Veeck was so impressed with his work against the Senators that he installed a plush reclining chair with a canopy top in the bullpen for him. Then Casey Stengel picked him for the AL squad for the All-Star Game—the only Browns player to be chosen.

Despite Paige's 12 wins and sparkling 3.07 earned run average, the Browns won just 64 games in 1952, though that was a dozen more than the year before, moving them out of the cellar and into seventh place. Attendance rose by 300,000 during the 1952 season to 518,796 total, second only in team history to the 1944 American League championship season.

By the end of the 1952 season, Veeck had established himself as one of the most player-friendly owners in baseball history. “I thank God for the time with Bill though it be little more than a year,” recalled Ned Garver. “He loved baseball and its fans and was always trying to improve his product. You knew he might trade you at any time, but he made you feel ten feet tall when you were with him. He helped me be the best pitcher I could be. Nobody likes a phony, and there was nothing phony about Bill Veeck.”

Pitcher Duane Pillette decades later called Veeck “the nicest man I ever met. No matter how badly you did he would come over and try to make you feel good about yourself.” Pillette had an extra reason to be thankful. “One evening during the '52 season Bill had us all out for a barbecue and suddenly I looked over and he took off his shoe, dove into the swimming pool and pulled out my son who was unconscious.” The boy, eight, was a good swimmer but apparently had hit his head on the side of the narrow pool; Veeck had seen him go in but not come up. A shaken Pillette asked Veeck how he had been the only one to notice, and he answered, “Simple. I like kids.”
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An even more touching story involved the young outfielder J W Porter. In late July, Veeck made a deal for Porter, who was on the road in Lincoln, Nebraska. At the time, Porter lived in Colorado Springs, and his eighteen-year-old wife did not drive, so Veeck arranged to have her driven to St. Louis by her father, whom he flew in from Oakland, California.

Father and daughter were tragically killed en route in a head-on collision. The job of telling the nineteen-year old Porter fell to Veeck, who told a reporter some years later that it was the hardest thing he had ever had to do in his life. When Porter returned to the team after the funeral, a message was waiting for him at his hotel, inviting him to move in with Bill, Mary Frances, and their young son in their ballpark apartment. Veeck became a father figure to Porter, consoling him and keeping him busy. Porter availed himself of Veeck's gargantuan record collection and the jukebox that allowed him to play Frank Sinatra with the touch of a button. The two men played on the field when the ballpark was empty. “We run with each other and pitch to each other. He'd pitch 20 minutes of batting practice with that artificial leg of his and he'd start to bleed. Then he'd shrug it off,” Porter recalled.
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Twice while Porter was living at the stadium, Veeck brought in a big band and a name singer—first Eddie Fisher and then Vic Damone—who entertained between innings. At the end of the game a portable dance floor was put down and dancing commenced until the early hours of the morning. Veeck told Damone what had happened to Porter, and after the festivities were over at the ballpark, Damone took him out for some early morning entertainment. Damone and the young ballplayer became friends and would still see each other occasionally more than fifty years later.
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