Bill Veeck (50 page)

Because no basic agreement had been signed between the players and the owners, the latter imposed a unilateral lockout during spring training. Veeck threatened to go to court to find a legal way to open the White Sox camp, characterizing the owners as unfair and unreasonable. Morris Siegel of the
Washington Evening Star
wrote that if the other owners had an opportunity to vote again on admitting him to the league, the vote to bar him would be unanimous. Speaking of the owners, Siegel wrote, “In the eyes of the establishment, which has always taken a dim view of Veeck's baseball lifestyle, this was a flagrant case of strike-breaking against their
union.” Veeck, he said, was against his peers on almost everything they did except inhaling.
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The White Sox, Veeck stubbornly insisted, would report to Sarasota on March 1, regardless of what the rest of the league did. But on February 26, Veeck finally backed off because of what he described as intimidation and threats from the league that included “a lot of very unpleasant things, from fines, suspensions and even lifting the franchise.” Calvin Griffith proposed a $500,000 fine if Veeck disobeyed. At a hastily called press conference in Chicago, Veeck admitted, “The gun is loaded and pointed at my head. There is actually nothing else we could do—they could have taken away the franchise and kept us in bankruptcy the rest of our lives.” He told
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist Tom Fitzpatrick, “Frankly, I quit like a dog.”
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“I was afraid this kind of thing was going to happen,” California Angels owner Gene Autry observed about the affair. “That's why I definitely voted against Veeck when he was about to buy the White Sox.”
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Veeck now felt free to express mock pity for Autry. He told
People
magazine: “I'm sorry for girls in homes for wayward women and for Gene Autry. I say nasty things sometimes, don't I? I mean them.”
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Veeck decided to open spring training with non-roster players—fifteen minor leaguers and ten former major leaguers hoping to stage a comeback, including former New York Mets star Cleon Jones and the well-traveled Bob Oliver. Lee MacPhail was quick to point out that this was not a violation of anything, and that there was nothing wrong with his bringing players not on his forty-man roster. “Of course I did it to attract attention,” Veeck admitted. “Not to us, but to baseball and the fact that it's a game played on the field with a bat and a ball, not in court with writs and pleas. I think it's about time somebody called attention to this.” Nonetheless, Veeck predicted the other owners would be furious. As if on cue, Calvin Griffith called Veeck's actions “stupid … very narrow-minded … self-serving … if we thought this was the act of the rational man, we'd worry about it.”
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As the lockout continued, public interest in the upcoming season seemed to be ebbing. Part of Veeck's plan was to engage the fans in the changes he was making, and on Saturday, March 6, he invited people to come to the ballpark to remove 18,000 square feet of artificial turf that he felt was the blight of the Allyn years. “When you go to the ballpark, you are entitled to the smell of grass freshly cut,” he observed. He also knew the players hated artificial turf because it became unbearably hot in the summer and caused injuries. At a time when other owners were crowing about the advantages
of artificial turf—even, as in the case of the Cincinnati Reds, building an offense around it—some 1,000 potential White Sox ticket buyers showed up to de-install the carpet, hauling off pieces ranging from ones the size of ceiling tiles to room-sized remnants.

On the heels of the rug removal, Veeck staged a fashion show. He had been talking about putting the White Sox in short pants since February, when he first mentioned it at a press conference, noting that Bucky Dent and Goose Gossage were among those who were keen on the idea, which had sprung from Veeck's what-if imagination. In early March, he announced three possible designs—Hollywood Shorts, Clamdiggers, and Knickerbockers—which he said would be modeled on March 9 in the elegant drawing room of Chicago's Tremont Hotel.

As models, he brought in five large, well-known, knobby-kneed former major leaguers to stage the show in front of about 100 sportswriters and several television crews gathered for the event. Moose Skowron, Moe Drabowsky, Dave Nicholson, and Dan Osinski were the first to come down the runway, and all received polite applause and much laughter as they modeled home and away versions of the two Bermuda-length designs. Then came the Hollywood design, approximating the short, tight “hot pants” of the era. It was modeled by “Jungle Jim” Rivera, who had earned his nickname from a highly aggressive playing style. Rivera sucked in his cheeks, placed his arms akimbo, and did a perfect parody of a twirling, swishing model taking command of a runway. It brought down the house. A small group of women, including Mary Frances and White Sox organist Nancy Faust, were invited to comment while Veeck, who claimed to have designed the three uniforms from scratch, narrated the show: “They're not garish. Like my wife, Mary Frances, said, they have an understated elegance.” Dave Condon called it “the most revolutionary fashion event since Adam and Eve introduced the fig leaf.”
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On March 17, as Commissioner Kuhn was still debating whether or not to open spring training camps, he took a call from Veeck.

“Do you remember the television special about
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
?”

“Sure, but what's that got to do with the reserve clause or major league baseball?” Kuhn responded.

“Well, unless we open training camps pretty soon, we're going to be remembered as the ogres who stole spring. You know, to some people, spring is represented by robins and crocuses. But to a lot of people, spring means baseball, and if we steal it, we're going to get into big trouble.”

Kuhn laughed and replied, “I don't want to be a Grinch.” Within a few hours, he issued the order to take the padlocks off the doors, and the seventeen-day lockout was over.
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Veeck was eager to meet his new players as they reported to spring training in Sarasota. Veteran first baseman Jim Spencer recalled how Veeck greeted him. “I had just come over to the Sox in a trade from the Angels for Bill Melton, and he said to me, ‘Spence, welcome to the club; you are my first baseman. I want you to go out and play hard, have fun, and always remember, I only fear one thing—
termites
.”
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Now that the season was ensured, speculation resumed as to how Veeck would launch the home opener on April 9 against the Kansas City Royals. Someone predicted that he would stage a volcano or an earthquake. Replied Veeck, “The earthquake's been done before—in San Francisco—but I will offer something that will astound you.”
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Dave Condon had been in on the plan since Veeck hatched it late one night: “I'll play the fife, Rudie Schaffer will have the drum, and Paul [Richards] will carry the flag. We'll all wear Revolutionary War garb.” The nation was celebrating its bicentennial in 1976, and Veeck latched onto this as his theme, focusing on the famous painting by Archibald MacNeal Willard of three battered Continental Army veterans marching with flag, fife, and drum. The painting, known as
The Spirit of '76
, had a hundred years earlier been the hit of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

“Would you buy it?” Veeck asked Condon.

A
Chicago Tribune
article described what happened next: “The hour was late—the inevitable hour when … all ideas sound like world-beaters. Veeck was assured he'd come up with the greatest idea since stretch pants.”

Prior to the first pitch on Opening Day, the three men appeared suddenly and unannounced in white powdered wigs. “When they came out of the dugout, people were spellbound at first. They found it hilarious, and touching,” Roland Hemond remembered. “It was quite an interesting moment in the return of Bill Veeck.”

The three men stood there with Veeck's wooden leg fully exposed and dour Richards playing his part to the hilt. “It was only Opening Day, with
162 games yet to play,” Rick Talley wrote in the
Tribune
the next day, “and there was the distinguished, 67-year-old manager of the Sox wearing a white wig. Actually, he looked pretty good. He did an excellent job, too, in reciting his favorite stanza of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' and he carried the American flag at just the right height.” Veeck explained that his favorite stanza was the fourth: “I've tried with every club to get them to sing the 4th verse instead of that first one.”
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“It combined all the things of great gags,” Mike Veeck recalled years later. “It was wonderfully subtle in a lot of ways. It had textures. And it was appropriate. But the fact that it just appeared made it seem magical. It was universally loved. A lot of times, gags were half-and-half. But it was a very literate promotion. Here was a guy who had lost his leg in the war. And here were survivors who represented a couple hundred years in baseball. It had this wonderful delicacy. Fans are very smart and they looked out and they got it…. I thought it was wonderful to be raised by a guy who was like Geppetto.”
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As Veeck stumped triumphantly across the new natural turf, he saw 40,318 fans, double the Opening Day attendance in 1975. With the help of such innovations as toll-free telephone lines, season ticket sales were up some 40 percent. More than 500,000 tickets had been sold before the first ball was pitched, to see a team that had drawn only 750,802 fans at home for all of 1975.

This showing was all the more remarkable because the pre-Opening-Day take on the team was not good. “We'll bunt a lot, steal a lot, and pray a lot,” said manager Richards on the eve of the new season. At least two writers used the line “The Sox are a Wreck—as in Veeck,” and from the start the team had the unenviable nickname of “Veeck's Wrecks.” Although the White Sox won their home opener 4–0, Sox victories were few and far between during the 1976 season, and in June they endured a skid of ten consecutive losses.

Meanwhile, after the school year was over the family moved back to Chicago and into adjoining apartments in the Hyde Park section. Mary Frances said the timing had been perfect. “Our kids are at an age where they can appreciate the city,” she said, adding that she loved the house in Easton but was happy to now be “the retired champion of everything that has to do with keeping house.”
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As always, Veeck listened to the fans. After he had moved the organ played by Nancy Faust from behind home plate for Opening Day to free up
space for a dozen box seats, the people who had sat around the organ circulated a petition to have it restored. As Faust recalled, “He did have high regard for the fans' comments, so the second or third series, he moved the organ back down.”
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He was also listening to fans on Opening Day when he noticed that those who clustered around the broadcast booth were singing along as Harry Caray sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” during the seventh-inning stretch, which was his custom. A few days later, unbeknownst to Caray, Veeck snuck a microphone into the broadcast booth attached to the stadium's public address system. When Caray began to sing, his voice carried through the whole stadium, and the fans joined in with discernible gusto. After the game, Caray confronted Veeck in the Bards Room, and Veeck explained, “Harry, I've been looking for a guy to do that for 30 years, but I never could find the right guy before. Well, you're the right guy. Do you know why you're the right guy?”

Then Veeck explained that Caray was perfect because everybody knew that he or she could sing as well or better than him. “Hell, if you had a good singing voice you'd intimidate them and nobody would join in.”
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Before the end of the 1976 season, the Veecks staged a Harry Caray Appreciation Night, with each fan's complimentary gift bag containing a recording of Harry and organist Nancy Faust performing four variations of the song.
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Veeck held promotion on top of promotion. In addition to the usual giveaways, there was a Salute to Mexico Day, complete with caballeros, a parade, and a bullfight in which the bull was spared. There was also a rain-dampened Greek Night with scantily clad belly dancers shimmering in unison. These antics did not sit well with his fellow owners, who criticized his carnival approach as outmoded. Brewers president Bud Selig, a long-standing Veeck admirer, now told a writer for
People
magazine: “What went on in the '40s and '50s is no more germane to baseball today than last winter's snow is to our conversation. Nobody ever paid to see an owner yet, and nobody ever will.”
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To be sure, people wouldn't pay to see Veeck, but they would go to see what rabbit he would next pull out of his hat. In early August, that proved to be an outdoor shower with an enormous head that Veeck installed in the center-field bleachers, intended to keep the bleacherites cool on hot days and perhaps help them forget that the team was hovering some twenty games out of first place.

“The worst thing we've done is sell the idea that you have to have a winning team. That dooms 20 of our 24 clubs to failure before the season even starts. What we have to create is an atmosphere of enjoyment. Take an example—I put a shower in the bleachers. It had a utilitarian function—it gets hot out there and people like to cool off. But it also attracts a certain number of young girls in bathing suits, and a certain number of young men who like to look at young girls in bathing suits. People in the suburbs aren't going to say, ‘Let's go to the game today because there's a shower in the bleachers,' but we create the impression that we are going to have some fun.”
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