Bill Veeck (47 page)

Veeck, however, was no absolutist, arguing that the reserve clause should be modified rather than repealed: the immediate and total elimination of
the reserve clause would be detrimental to the game, but the clause needed a major overhaul. Veeck then outlined three possible solutions to the problem: (1) a contract like that used in the motion picture industry, in which a player would be held for a specified time, with the contract calling for scheduled raises during the contract period; (2) a variation on the pro football option clause, in which a player could become a free agent by playing out the option year of a contract; or (3) a combination contract under which a team could control a player for a specified length of time in the minors and a separate and specified period in the majors. This would prevent a team from stockpiling players in the minors.
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The cross-examination was lackluster and petty, attempting at one point to uncover contradictory opinions on free agency in Veeck's two books,
Veeck—as in Wreck
and
The Hustler's Handbook
. Pressed again and again on statements he had made in the books, Veeck candidly admitted that he was entirely capable of contradictory statements and shrugged off the charge with a smile.

“One of the best witnesses imaginable. Absolutely,” said Marvin Miller years later of Veeck's testimony. But if it pleased Flood's team, it made Veeck even more of a pariah with owners, who thought he was trying to destroy the game by freeing players to negotiate with other teams each time their contract ended. Flood, Veeck, and others had gone out on an unpopular limb. Very few active players supported the case; Frank Howard and Harmon Killebrew were among those who expressed public disapproval in the lawsuit. Many in the media feared that Flood and allies such as Veeck would spell doomsday for baseball. A back-page headline in the New York
Daily News
warned, “Curt Win Kills Baseball.”
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The court found against Flood and in favor of Kuhn and organized baseball, a decision that was upheld by the Court of Appeals. Flood's lawyers petitioned to have the case heard by the Supreme Court.

At Suffolk downs in the spring of 1970, Veeck unleashed a psychedelic tote board that exploded in phantasmagorical colors when a payoff of $100 or more was made. It was coordinated with a 100-foot fountain and was featured in a piece in
Look
magazine, with the accompanying headline “He Convinces the Bettor He's Having a Fine Time Blowing the Rent.”
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Late in 1970s first race meeting, Veeck bought chariots from the MGM movie
Ben Hur
to stage a chariot race that he dubbed the Ben Hur Handicap. The vehicles were piloted by local disc jockeys aided by professional
drivers. Veeck had also turned the track into a venue for all sorts of outside activities, which improved cash flow considerably. “We had one advantage,” he logically observed, “and that is that the track represented the largest display area in New England. We scheduled folk music shows, and automobile shows. We scheduled the New England Industrial Show and the Flower Show. We had a great many things that we used the rest of our stadium for…. We did have some concerts and we had anticipated some more. My tenure unfortunately was briefer than I had planned on.”
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By late 1970, Suffolk's parent company, Realty Equity Corp., was in deep financial trouble and was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, so Veeck's job ended officially in January 1971 with a loss of his 15 percent ownership option in the operation. For all of its success at the gate and the fact that it had returned a record $8.5 million to the state for the year just ended, the track itself was $14.5 million in debt. The parent company had created the debt by siphoning off capital from the track, a move that was devastating to the future of Suffolk Downs. As Veeck put it, “A voracious conglomerate gobbled up the track's operating money,” thereby forcing him out of the business and back to the Eastern Shore, where by year's end he was at work on his third collaboration with Ed Linn. It would be called
Thirty Tons a Day
, a memoir of his days at Suffolk Downs. The title alluded to the amount of horse manure produced daily at the track by the 1,600 horses on hand on peak racing days.
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Veeck had genuinely enjoyed Boston and had become an adored public speaker, as likely to show up at a luncheon for the mothers of twins as at the Saugus Lions Club. The sportswriters loved him, an affair whose passion deepened when he worked to save the Patriots. Veeck conquered Boston for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that he was genuinely at home in a place whose residents thought of their city as the hub of the universe—a conceit worthy of Veeck himself. “Boston is one of my favorite towns, and the people are wonderful,” he would write in
Thirty Tons
. “I don't understand how they keep electing such creepy politicians. They were just dull and greedy. But, except for them, I had a wonderful time.”

Back in Maryland, Veeck reiterated his interest in acquiring the Washington Senators, “a franchise that has never reached its potential.” Veeck loved the team with its “personalities”—Denny McLain and now Curt
Flood, who had sat out the 1970 season but signed with the Senators in 1971 for $110,000 as he awaited a hearing of his case in the Supreme Court.
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Veeck suggested the Senators add pitcher Jim Bouton, the recently retired author of the highly candid memoir
Ball Four.
“They would have an author in residence and Bowie Kuhn would have all his problems in one place,” he cheekily observed, including himself in the count.
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That said, he added, “the Senators are worth maybe $6–7 million. Anything higher than that and I'm not interested.”
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A small item in
The Sporting News
in June quoted Veeck as stating he had four offers pending to get back into baseball, but the writer noted that he had been reading that same story for ten years and it was time for Veeck to make his move. Veeck was indeed prepared to move on the Senators, but not at the asking price of $12 million.
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In early September 1970, Senators owner Bob Short announced that the team had to be sold and that he was entertaining offers from various parties who would either keep it in Washington or move it to the Dallas–Fort Worth area. On September 15, Veeck and Hank Greenberg met with Short and on behalf of their proposed group offered him $7.5 million, then met again the following day to up the offering price to an undisclosed amount. A meeting was scheduled for September 21 in Boston to which Veeck and Greenberg were not invited, but which included Joseph Danzansky, president of the Giant Food supermarket chain in the Washington area.

The night before the Boston meeting, Short called Veeck and told him that if he did not get permission to move the Senators to Texas, he would get back to Veeck and his ownership group, as they had made the highest bid among those who would keep the team in Washington.
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What happened at the meeting remained a mystery for some time, but based on later recollections, Danzansky appears to have made a higher offer of $8.5 million. Danzansky's offer was seen as “soft” in that he claimed two other men were in his group and that they would put up $2.4 million in cash and arrange a loan of $7 million. From the loan they would pay the balance of the purchase price, meet obligations, and have cash for operating expenses. But as Kansas City owner Ewing Kauffman told
Sports Illustrated
, “Danzansky did not have a commitment for a loan. He wanted the league to guarantee the loan first, and then he proposed to go out and negotiate it. In effect, the other teams in the league would be underwriting Danzansky's investment, and few were in a financial position to do so. So they turned Danzansky down.”
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Veeck, it seems, had been rejected by Short, who never brought Veeck's offer to the table and really preferred to move his team. He was looking at a sweetheart deal in Texas, which ensured him an advance of $7.5 million against television rights. The move was approved and Short retained his ownership until 1974, when he finally sold the team to a group headed by Brad Corbett for $9 million.

Veeck was both “shocked and saddened” by the move to Dallas and wondered aloud why the government could bail out a big corporation such as Lockheed but stand idly by when a little federal aid could have kept a team in Washington. He was alluding to the congressional loan guarantee of $250 million to the nation's largest defense contractor. Veeck said that he understood the team might not compare to an institution such as the Kennedy Center: “Don't get me wrong, I think there is room for Bernstein's ‘Mass' and baseball. But no one [in Congress] thinks this [baseball] is a kind of culture too. It's sad.”
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Veeck also predicted that the transfer of the Senators would tip the balance in the legal challenge by Curt Flood to baseball's reserve clause. His lawyers, he said, would ask the Supreme Court what chances one small individual player has against an industry that “has illustrated its complete lack of candor and interest in the millions of people who surround Washington.”
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“Ten days after the execution was ordered and carried out in Boston, the body of the Washington Senators was finally laid to rest last night at RFK Stadium.” That was how Morris Siegel opened his column on October 1, 1971, the day after the Senators lost to the Yankees in their final game of the season. Out in deep right field in section 110, row 10, seat 9, sat Bill Veeck, who had driven from Easton to pay $5 to attend the burial. Siegel noted: “Had Veeck been sitting in the box of the owner, which he tried to occupy twice, there never would have been the tragedy of last night.”

Veeck was still infatuated with the notion of a team in Washington, which would now have to be an expansion club. In mid-December 1971, Congress opened hearings on getting baseball back to D.C. to fill the stadium taxpayers had bought to house the Senators and the Washington Redskins. One faction felt that the proper lure for a new team would be the installation of artificial turf. With great anticipation, Veeck was invited to address the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia on December 15, 1971. “We should learn something about promotions from Veeck,” said Senator Thomas Eagleton on the eve of the hearings.
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Veeck gave a full account of his knowledge of stadium operations for all sports, sharing details on ideas that had and had not worked over the years. These included, he admitted, a failed plan in his early days with the Cubs to introduce winter sports to Wrigley Field, which would have featured a ski jump affixed to the main scoreboard. Commenting on his desire to bring baseball back to Washington, Veeck wryly observed, “I think I have one rather dubious claim to fame—I have made more unsuccessful offers for the Washington Senators than anyone in history. I live just across the creek, and I think of it as our stadium rather than Baltimore, strange enough.”
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The spring of 1972 brought a baseball strike and a chance for Veeck to lash out at the power struggle that caused the “crime of the century”—the theft of spring. “You see,” he opined in a bylined piece in the
Baltimore Sun
, “Marvin Miller and his 600 hearties, aided and abetted by Bowie Kuhn and his two dozen stalwarts, have peddled spring down the river for a few lousy bucks. It doesn't matter who's right (no one) nor who's wrong (everyone). It's the fans, the guys who pay the freight, that got the shaft.”
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Despite his vituperations in print, Veeck remained close to Miller. Later in 1972, Miller's son Peter, whose lower leg had been severely damaged in an accident, was about to go in for a second round of surgery. Just before the second operation Miller ran into Veeck in Washington. “He had read about Peter's accident in the paper,” Miller recalled. “When I mentioned the second surgery, his face turned solemn. Veeck had injured his leg in the Marine Corps, and despite all medical advice refused for more than two years to have it amputated. In the interim, he endured a dozen operations. He said, ‘I'm not a doctor, and it's none of my business, but if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't go through the poisonous process of one surgery after the other. I would have had an amputation. I wouldn't say this if the amputation had to be above the knee, but below the knee there's almost nothing you can't do with an artificial leg.” Miller admitted, “I was struck by the sincerity and power of his speech. And in all the years that I knew Veeck, it was the first and only time he ever mentioned his leg. I never told Peter this because it wasn't necessary. He made a remarkable recovery.”
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Veeck channeled some of his rants into syndicated op-ed pieces. In one, he listed all of baseball's catastrophes—the strike, the Senators' move, the failure of an expansion team in Seattle, the Braves' move from Milwaukee to Atlanta, the move of the A's from Kansas City to Oakland—and blamed it all on the Yankees, specifically Weiss, Webb, and Topping. His logic may
have been faulty, but his anger was real. In his mind, Yankee success had caused others to fail and the American League to be weak.
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Among his other reasons to be angry was the delay he had encountered with the publication of his new book,
Thirty Tons a Day
, which had been held up for seven months to give his publisher's lawyers a chance to vet the manuscript, which contained accounts of numerous lawsuits, including eight Veeck had lodged against the attorney general of Massachusetts. Veeck complained that said lawyers had identified 138 to 140 potentially libelous items that he was refusing to change.
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