Bill Veeck (36 page)

On April 10, the Busch brewery bought Sportsman's Park from Veeck for $800,000 plus an additional $300,000 in moving expenses.
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The place was renamed Budweiser Stadium and the renovations began immediately.
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Bill, Mary Frances, and Mike went apartment hunting, as they knew they had to move out of the ballpark. The sale was a lifesaver for Veeck, as fans were staying away in droves. After the first twenty-three home games in 1953, the Browns had only drawn some 125,000, barely two-thirds of the previous year's pace, and attendance seemed to be getting worse. (Herb Heft, a reporter for the
Washington Post
, would sit with Veeck one night in June and watch as he counted the crowd from his perch in the press box. “It's a good thing I brought my car along,” Veeck would quip. “I can drive all these folks home after the game.”)
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Kansas City, Montreal, Los Angeles, and San Francisco joined in the bidding for the beleaguered team through the summer, and Yankees executive Del Webb, a wealthy builder from Arizona, unexpectedly threw his support behind Los Angeles as the new home for the Browns, observing, “There is too much baseball concentrated in the East.”

Underscoring the animosity between Veeck and the Yankees, games between the front-running New Yorkers and the bottom-dwelling Browns took on aspects of warfare. Bespectacled St. Louis catcher Clint Courtney, known for his pugnacity, had declared a personal vendetta against the Yankees ever since they traded him to St. Louis after the 1951 season. Courtney had participated in earlier altercations with the Yankees, including a historic fistfight with Billy Martin in Yankee Stadium in 1952 after the Yankee second baseman had applied a hard tag to Courtney's head as he slid into second base. But this paled beside the mayhem that erupted in St. Louis on April 28 following Courtney's high slide and spiking of Phil Rizzuto. Both benches emptied. Courtney was attacked by three Yankee players, and umpire John Stevens suffered a shoulder dislocation while trying to break up the brawl. The fines imposed were spread over the largest group of players in the history of the league. “I am amazed by the reasoning,” Veeck commented after Courtney received the highest fine.

Three days later Veeck was sitting in the press box in St. Louis and, as the night game against the Washington Senators ended with a Browns player striking out with the tying run on third, he stood and kicked a steel chair in anger with his good left foot, breaking a bone. Nothing could stop the slide and the reality that the Browns were on their way out of town.

However, on the cold and drizzly night of May 6, the most unlikely of pitchers provided a brief uplift. In the fourth inning of a game against the Philadelphia Athletics, a feeling of compassion came over Veeck and he announced to the sparse crowd that the game would be on the house—that the fans' rain checks would be good for any later date. To their amazement,
the 2,473 in attendance saw one of the most unusual pitching feats in baseball history, as rookie pitcher Alva “Bobo” Holloman pitched a no-hitter in his first start as a major leaguer.
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Holloman yielded line drive after line drive, but in every case a Browns player was in the right place to turn them into outs.
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Of the eighteen games played following the no-hitter, the team won only three, and after its losing streak reached seven after a May 24 defeat in Cleveland, Veeck decided to throw a party to loosen the team up. The event was held in the Aviation Room at the Carter Hotel, an elegant space decorated with airplane memorabilia from the Cleveland Air Races. The room was dominated by glass-framed picture of World War I ace Eddie Ricken-backer. Veeck insisted the whole ball club be there; he hired a piano player and laid out an enormous spread of food and drink.

“It was a great time; we were singing songs and laughing and telling stories. You'd have thought we had just won the World Series instead of riding [a] … losing streak,” pitcher Max Lanier recalled, having joined the Browns early in the season, the last of his fourteen-year career. “Around one o'clock in the morning a few of us started getting ready to leave. But Veeck got by the door and said, ‘Nobody can leave until I say they can leave.' Then he started opening champagne and squirting it at everybody. Vic Wertz and myself, we caught him and poured a bottle of it right down his back. He was laughing so hard we could hardly hold him. Then there was one bottle of scotch left and Veeck grabbed it and threw it at Eddie Rickenbacker's picture and smashed the glass frame into a thousand pieces…. It was a great party. Cost him $1,850.” The team went out the next day nice and loose and lost its eighth game in succession, and the day after that the ninth before halting the steak, only to start another.
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The Browns limped into Yankee Stadium on June 16 to face a New York team that had won eighteen in a row. Sportswriter Milt Richman found manager Marty Marion in the visitors' clubhouse staring glumly at a blank lineup card. Marion handed the card to Richman.

“Here,” he said. “You make it out.”

Richman protested, but Marion was insistent.

“Pick out any nine you like,” he said.

Richman did, and the Browns won 3–1. They then lost the next six games.
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The nadir of the season came on July 7, when the Browns lost to the Indians 6–3, setting an unenviable major-league record of twenty losses in a row in their home park, breaking the mark of the 1906 Boston Red Sox.
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In August Veeck again began actively looking for other cities in which to place the Browns, starting with Los Angeles and San Francisco but including Kansas City, Minneapolis, Toronto, and, of course, Baltimore. In September Veeck met with officials of the Brooklyn Dodgers to inquire about the cost of acquiring the Dodgers' Montreal farm site, the most valuable minor-league property available. Soon the list of cities being considered had grown to eight with the addition of Houston, although Veeck's preference remained Baltimore.
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On the eve of the season-ending American League meeting in New York, at which the future of the Browns would be voted on, the issue of race suddenly entered the picture as the
New York Times
published a telegram to Will Harridge from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) urging the American League not to approve the transfer of the Browns to Baltimore because the city excluded Negroes from hotels and restaurants. The “racist spirit” of the city was most recently exemplified by the refusal of the Lyric Theatre to book the celebrated African American contralto Marian Anderson.
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Baltimore-style Jim Crow “wasn't blatant, just thorough”; in the early days of the new Memorial Stadium “black fans testified that anyone buying a seat at the ticket window would then in the stands find himself or herself surrounded by other blacks.”
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Satchel Paige was already on record as not wanting to go to Baltimore unless it was under Veeck's wing. Earlier in the year he had confided to teammate Gene Bearden: “I never got treated too good in that town, you know I played a couple of exhibitions there. But of course if it's Mr. Bill that goes there, I'll go right along with him. I play anywhere for him—even in Afghanistan.”
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The effect of the NAACP protest on the voting was probably negligible, but it added an unexpected last-minute complication. On Sunday, September 27, Veeck received bad news: he had again lost, this time by a 4–4 vote. “Bill put a lot of work into this and was really hurt by it, and you can understand why,” recalled Charles Comiskey. The vote was secret, but one owner
told the Associated Press that the opposition had been organized by Webb, a point later confirmed by Detroit Tigers owner Spike Briggs, who sided with Veeck for a number of reasons.
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While this vote was being taken in New York, the Browns were in St. Louis before a sparse crowd of 3,174 playing what would be their last game. Fittingly, the Browns lost a twelve-inning struggle with the Chicago White Sox 2–1, suffering their 100th loss of the season. The game ended on a sad and symbolic note. In extra innings, plate umpire Art Passarella called for a fresh supply of baseballs, but was advised there were no more. Rather than call the game on account of lack of baseballs, he went to a box of scuffed balls and pulled out the least damaged. After the game the players changed into street clothes and gave their uniforms to kids who hung around after the game hoping to grab a souvenir.
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The Browns had drawn 311,000 that season—down some 208,000 from the previous season—while the Milwaukee Braves were ending their inaugural season with a record National League attendance mark of 1,826,397.
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Baltimore mayor Tom D'Alesandro was furious, complaining to baseball commissioner Ford Frick that Webb was manipulating the owners meetings. D'Alesandro barged into their second session the next day. “He told them he was friendly with presidents and congressmen,” D'Alesandro's son recalled, “and vowed he would go to work on baseball's antitrust exemption if they didn't move the Browns to Baltimore. Basically, he threatened the hell out of them. He thought [his chance] was slipping away.”
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This was no idle threat. Emanuel Celler, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who was spearheading an investigation of baseball's antitrust exemption, had termed the denial “a damned outrage” and suggested that Congress might want to step into the matter.
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At this point in the meeting, Briggs and Comiskey walked out, fearing another negative vote even with the threat. Without them there was no longer a quorum, and the meeting was adjourned. Briggs worked to persuade Webb, who began to relent when the notion of forcing Veeck out of the deal was raised. D'Alesandro and Miles understood quickly that what Webb and his followers really wanted was for Veeck to be pushed out of baseball. The Baltimore group was given forty-eight hours to put together a consortium
that would buy the team from Veeck. At the same time, Webb remained intrigued by the prospect of a team in Los Angeles and had convinced the Senators' Clark Griffith of this. Griffith, nearing eighty-four, remarked prophetically: “I can't see how we can possibly keep the Browns in St. Louis now. Heck, who is going to come out and see them play? I wouldn't be surprised if we move them to Los Angeles this year and follow-up by moving another club to San Francisco in 1955.”
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Miles worked the phones, asking Baltimore investors to raise their stake. They came through, and their pledges, including one from Jerold C. Hoffberger, owner of the National Brewing Company, more than doubled the original offer. With a few hours to spare, Miles arranged to pay $2,475,000 for the 79 percent of the stock still owned by the Chicago holding company controlled by Veeck. There was only one bright spot in the situation: Veeck and his backers had bought the Browns stock at $7 a share and were in a position to sell it two and a half years later for $12, so even after significant operating losses, the transaction netted Veeck and his backers a 38 percent profit.
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When the owners met on September 29 for their final session, D'Alesandro and Miles had negotiated a key yes vote from Clark Griffith, who previously had been reluctant to see a team move so close to his Senators but was mollified by Hoffberger's offer that his brewery sponsor the Senators' telecasts, a deal worth a reported $250,000. Meanwhile, the money behind Webb's Los Angeles bid had failed to materialize.
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After D'Alesandro and Miles presented their offer, the owners deliberated behind closed doors before calling D'Alesandro back into the room. American League secretary Earl Hilligan addressed reporters in the corridor, and a roar went up when the members of the mayor's contingent heard Hilligan say the word “approved.” D'Alesandro then emerged with a huge smile. Baltimore was back in the major leagues. The Browns would become the Baltimore Orioles for the 1954 season and move into Baltimore's rebuilt, 51,000-seat Municipal Stadium, the fourth-biggest ballpark in the majors.
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The vote was 8–0, and even the reluctant Webb had voted for Baltimore, receiving in return a concession from his fellow owners to expand to California “if it should become desirable.”
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Conventional wisdom has it that Veeck was expelled for a long list of issues ranging from the perceived indignity he had caused the game in the Gaedel incident to his verbal baiting of his fellow owners. Mary Frances, among others, has always believed that the owners' dislike of him stemmed from his demands for pooled television and radio income. However, unstated by mainstream media at the time but articulated by Fay Young of the
Chicago Defender
was another viewpoint: that a primary source of the hatred of Veeck by some of the American League owners was his signing of numerous African American players, beginning with Larry Doby in 1947. At the time of the first 6–2 vote in March, five of the teams against him—the Athletics, Senators, Tigers, Red Sox, and Yankees—were still without an African American player.
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Veeck himself saw it in intensely personal terms. “I knew they had no regard for me. With all that, it had been a shock to me that Sunday evening to learn that they were out to break me, not just to teach me a lesson. I hadn't thought they hated me that much.”
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And yet some of the owners still sympathized with him. “Personally I hope Baltimore takes him back,” the Tigers' Spike Briggs remarked when he was in Baltimore for an October football game between the Detroit Lions, which he also owned, and the Baltimore Colts. “Veeck's good for baseball. The people who were trying to keep Baltimore out of the American League are not.”
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