Bill Veeck (37 page)

“I didn't leave baseball gracefully. I was evicted,” Veeck declared. The American League had given him the boot and, as his friend the
Cleveland Press
columnist Whitey Lewis put it, “broke his back and his heart.” Out of baseball, he vowed to be like the bad penny, fated to turn up again.
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Less than two weeks later, he was back in circulation as a $l,000-a-month special assistant to Phil Wrigley, assigned to develop ways of spearheading baseball's move to the West Coast. Veeck was to work closely with Don Stewart of Wrigley's minor-league Los Angeles Angels. Wrigley aimed to put the National League ahead of its rival in moving to the fertile West Coast market. In making the announcement, Wrigley said, “Bill's duties will be to organize the effort so that the great Southern California region may have major league baseball in an orderly and sensible way as soon as possible.”
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The stakes for Western expansion were huge. Any move would require a joint deal for Los Angeles and San Francisco because, as Arthur Daley explained in the
New York Times
, “each trip to California would cost $10,000 per team and it would be financial suicide for Frisco to be in one league and L.A. in the other.”
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Veeck was immediately back in the news. “Wait a minute. Give me a chance to catch my breath,” he told James Enright of the
Chicago American
, who asked him how long it would take him to accomplish his new task. “I just got the job, and they have been talking about moving teams to the West Coast for years.” Apropos of what had happened to him already during the year, he observed: “Don't forget, I'm the only man who ever had a hand in
transplanting two major-league teams between March and September of the same year, and then failed to end up with either one of them.”
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Before the year was over, Veeck had not only proposed a major upgrade of Los Angeles' Wrigley Field to major-league standards but also met with California governor Goodwin Knight to explore the public financing of ballparks in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Veeck told the governor that the publicly owned park in Cleveland was a great success and that California might consider revenue bonds that would be retired from rent paid by teams. Veeck moved his young family to Los Angeles and immediately became the face and voice of western expansion.

If Veeck had an immediate reincarnation, Satchel Paige did not. Although he had led the Browns in saves with eleven in 1953, he still had been 3–9 and was not re-signed by the Orioles, who quietly released him at the end of January, citing his advanced age and high salary as the deciding factors. Veeck had paid Paige $25,000, which meant that under the rules of the time, the Orioles could cut his salary by only 25 percent. He had, in the words of an Associated Press reporter, become more of a character than a pitcher, and had spent many of his final days at ease in the contour chair Veeck had installed for him. “The new bosses told me they were starting a youth movement and they didn't have room for an old man like me” was Paige's interpretation. He was offered up on waivers for $10,000, but nobody wanted him.
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Based in Los Angeles, Veeck attempted deals of all sorts, often for or with friends. One involved the eccentric and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, who owned a brewery in Texas that Jerold Hoffberger wanted to buy. Hoffberger asked Veeck to make the approach. As Veeck recalled twenty years later: “With cloak and dagger maneuvering, I got to the Hughes people, and they promised to relay the message to the chief.”

A year of silence followed, but then one night at eleven o'clock, the telephone rang and it was Hughes, who instructed Veeck to meet him three hours later at a hamburger joint on one of the main streets of Los Angeles. Veeck kept the appointment, and except for the counterman, Hughes and he were the only people in the place. After asking Veeck if he wanted coffee, Hughes grunted, “I don't want to sell the brewery.”

To which Veeck replied, “My friend doesn't want your brewery. He bought one in Detroit eight months ago. Good night!”

“Good night.”
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In the fall of 1954, Veeck updated an earlier report and sent carefully numbered copies to National League owners. His proprietary study presented the inevitability of expansion, reporting that the demand for baseball was great in both Los Angeles and San Francisco. Voters in San Francisco had already approved a bond issue to build a big-league stadium. Los Angeles was prepared to finance one as well. Veeck concluded that with two National League teams in the West, transportation costs and scheduling for visiting clubs would be reasonable. The game needed to be truly national to retain its financial power and popularity. Adding these two cities would increase baseball's market by 25 percent.

Veeck's report amounted to a business plan for anyone who might want to put a major-league club in either city. It covered political issues, the cost of compensating local minor-league teams, scheduling, transportation logistics, and even summer rainfall figures—essentially zero in Los Angeles and 0.15–0.29 inch per month in San Francisco.

Furthermore, he reported that the American League was secretly planning its own invasion of California. Veeck urged the National League to move quickly: “The plain fact is that the league that gets to the Pacific Coast first will obviously maintain the edge of having a coast-to-coast set up for a long time to come.” Veeck had given the National League a road map leading to Los Angeles and San Francisco.
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In February 1955, Veeck officially ended his fourteen-month stay in Los Angeles and resigned his post with Wrigley with the understanding that his job was done and the groundwork for moving the National League to California was established. At the final press conference, with Phil Wrigley at his side, he displayed an artist's drawing of how Wrigley Field in Los Angeles could be expanded to seat 50,000 by cutting the grandstand in half and moving it to the outfield.

Veeck also used the press conference to announce that he had bought the 47,000-acre Deep Creek Ranch in New Mexico, fifteen miles north of Glenwood, which now became home for his family. The ranch, he explained, would keep him busy until his return to Los Angeles or San Francisco with a “major role” with a big-league club. Pressed as to which city he would prefer, he said Los Angeles. Years later Mary Frances would recall: “That
was a fantastic period in our lives. It was two years of investigating all the possibilities.”
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Veeck was soon planting and puttering and maintaining a real distance from baseball. So remote was the ranch that he relied on a telephone attached to a weather-scarred utility pole five miles from his house. Twice a day Veeck drove to the pole and called the operator in Glenwood to gather his messages and return his calls. If people really needed to get in touch with Veeck immediately, they would order a messenger sent from Glenwood for a fee.
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But Veeck needed some link back to baseball. In March 1955 he signed on as an in-season western scout for the Cleveland Indians. “He belongs in baseball and we don't want him to lose contact with the game to which he has contributed so much,” said Hank Greenberg, the Indians general manager, who made occasional trips with Veeck looking at talent west of the Mississippi.
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Veeck's remoteness in Glenwood had its dangers. On June 11, 1955, Veeck was painting a shed using a spray gun. “He was supposed to use a quart of paint with the sprayer, but that was too slow for Veeck,” recalled Beth Smith, who had moved to Deep Creek Ranch with the Veecks. “So he hooked the sprayer up to a one-gallon jar. The pressure gauge exploded, severing an artery.”

Smith somehow got Veeck into a car and rushed him to the hospital. “He was bleeding badly and told me he didn't think he was going to make it. Every time he was nodding off, I'd take another curve at 90 mph that should have been taken at 20.” They made it to the hospital in the nick of time, and the bleeding was stopped. He later told her that he willed himself to survive the injury and the wild ride because “I wanted to see how this came out.”
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Six months later, in December 1955, Veeck reprised his minor-league Milwaukee experience. He and two of his St. Louis friends, former Browns vice president and insurance executive Sidney Salomon Jr. and banker Elliott Stein, bought the Class AAA International League Syracuse ballclub for $100,000 and moved the Philadelphia Phillies farm team to Miami, where it was renamed the Miami Marlins. The group bought the team on the premise that that they could make a lot more money in this new market, but their ultimate goal was to get Miami into the major leagues, a goal Salomon said might materialize in four to five years. They persuaded Veeck to come east and help upgrade Miami to major-league status, giving him the title of vice president.
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Veeck's first task was to gain a lease on Miami Stadium. When the hard bargaining stalled, Veeck rolled up his pants leg and began to remove his artificial leg. “Here,” said the mock-beleaguered Veeck, “you might as well have this, too.” With that one gesture he got the laugh that broke the impasse, secured the lease, and earned his first dose of publicity. His second task was to sign Satchel Paige. He announced his intention at a Kiwanis luncheon in late January and predicted that Paige would do “some pitching” during the season.
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Veeck presented his plan to sign Paige for $10,000 to manager Don Osborn, who knew that Paige would have extraordinary privileges and freedoms. He asked his pitchers to vote on the matter, reminding them: “Satch isn't going to do any running to keep his legs in shape. He may not show up till the games are half over—or maybe not at all on some days. But there's not a better relief man in the business, and he'll save a lot of victories for you boys. It's up to you.” The staff that season included such future major leaguers as Turk Farrell, Seth Morehead, Don Cardwell, and Jim Owens. There was some reluctance, but they finally voted to take him. But the signing was kept secret even from the local reporters.
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On opening night, Veeck arranged for a bubble-top helicopter to deliver Paige to the mound before the game started, but the pilot missed his signal and the landing did not take place until well into the second inning, the helicopter kicking up a miniature storm that blew infield dirt into the stands.

“Welcome to our newest Marlin, Satchel Paige,” came the announcement as the lanky pitcher stepped out of the helicopter. The crowd roared.

Outwardly unimpressed, Jimmy Burns of the
Miami Herald
turned to Veeck and said: “You just made your first mistake. People didn't come here to get covered with dirt. They'll never come back.” Veeck shook his head and laughed. “In your column tomorrow, tell them to send their dry cleaning bills to me and I'll reimburse them. They'll remember this the rest of their lives.” For his part, Paige told reporters, “Veeck better think up something new,” and he vowed never again to ride in a helicopter.
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Osborn was amused by the stunt but told Veeck that he did not want Paige as a regular pitcher and that he would mostly use him in exhibition games. The next day, Veeck took Osborn to lunch and, insisting Paige had not been hired as a gag, made a deal with the manager. Osborn would line up his nine best hitters, and Veeck agreed to pay $10 to any of them who got a clean hit off Paige. Paige retired all nine, and Osborn agreed to make him a roster player.

In Paige's first game as a Marlins starter, he pitched a complete-game, four-hit shutout. Osborn, a former minor-league pitcher, watched with awe as Paige performed beyond all expectations. In mid-August, with a 10–2 record and a 1.50 ERA under his belt, Paige celebrated his forty-ninth birthday and suggested that he might pitch until he was seventy. He was 11–4 for the season.
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While on the sidelines as a minor-league executive commuting between Miami and the ranch, Veeck became increasingly alert to possibilities in the majors. Amounts now being paid for ball clubs were on the rise. In February 1955 the Indians team that Veeck had bought for $1.4 million and sold for $2.2 million was sold again, this time for $3.9 million to a syndicate led by Cleveland industrialist William R. Daley. A share of stock worth $100 when Veeck sold the club was now worth $1,000. One of the owners was Indians general manager Hank Greenberg, delighted to have finally become a major stockholder. Their positions were now reversed—Greenberg an owner and Veeck, when time and inclination permitted, a scout.
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But it was an open secret that Veeck was angling to come back to ownership.
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One of the first rumors was a report in early 1956 that the “former Mr. Big of baseball was assembling Chicago money to buy the Tigers.” Veeck knew that Spike Briggs, the heavy-drinking son of the late Walter O. Briggs, who had died in early 1952, was being forced to sell the team by his three sisters, who owned equal shares in the team with Spike. In addition, the bank with the trust for the Briggs grandchildren had gotten a court order demanding the sale.
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In early June, Veeck was the front man for one of the eight groups making a bid for the team. The Tigers were regarded as one of baseball's best franchises, and Briggs Stadium was a beautifully appointed venue, seating nearly 53,000 fans, located an easy five-minute walk from the heart of downtown Detroit.
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But the team's chemistry had recently been upset when, just before the sale was announced, Spike Briggs proclaimed he was “fed up” with those running the team, especially manager Bucky Harris and general manager and former Veeck colleague Muddy Ruel—both venerable baseball men.
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Players Harvey Kuenn and Steve Gromek felt it necessary to demand radio time to defend their manager.
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