Bill Veeck (52 page)

The White Sox ended up finishing third in their division, winning 90 games (including twenty-two in an amazing July), a twenty-six-game improvement over the previous year. Coming out of the All-Star break, both the Sox and the Cubs led their divisions, giving a whiff of hope for the first all-Chicago World Series since 1906. The Sox were in and out of first place in the American League East for most of the summer and in first place as late as the end of August. Filling the park was a raucous working-class crew that seldom seemed to sit. “I've never seen anything like it,” said Mary Frances. “They cheer for anything from a home run to a routine play. It's wonderful.”
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The 1977 White Sox were a big draw, bringing a record 1,657,135 fans to Comiskey Park. Veeck, who had had Sox World Series tickets printed up in advance with permission of the league, chose to send them out to season ticket holders as keepsakes of the season. Many of the tickets went out with his autograph under the word “Thanks.”
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United Press International named Lemon manager of the year and honored Veeck as the baseball executive of the year. Veeck won in a landslide, with sixteen of the twenty-four participating writers voting for him. Veeck claimed that he didn't deserve the honor but that his business manager, Rudie Schaffer, did: “He does the work and I take the bows.”
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But his assessment after the 1977 season reflected his sense of achievement: “There was such excitement in this ballpark, it's hard to tell whether the fans affected the players or the players affected the fans. But it was the most remarkable year I have ever seen or had in baseball.”
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As Veeck knew was likely to happen, the demise of the South Side Hit Men began a few days after the executive-of-the-year honor was bestowed. In early November, Veeck lost the services of Richie Zisk to the Texas Rangers, who signed him to a ten-year, $2.5 million deal.

Then Oscar Gamble was signed by a fellow Chicagoan. In the late 1930s when Veeck ran the concession stands at Wrigley Field, the local salesman of paper cups was Ray Kroc. Now, some forty years later, Kroc owned the McDonald's restaurant chain and had recently purchased the San Diego Padres. Gamble was signed as a free agent by the Padres three weeks after Zisk left. “Gamble went in there with a figure in mind,” Veeck related. “Before he could say anything, Kroc offered him twice what he had intended to
ask for and said, ‘Take it or leave it.' Did you ever go to an auction? You see how people get when the bidding is on. They don't even care what's up for sale. All they want to do is win the bidding. That's what has happened in baseball.”
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Anticipating that his “rented” players would leave at the end of the 1977 season, Veeck began exploring other possibilities during the season. In late May, he ventured to Cuba to see if he could line up a few players for the White Sox. He was accompanied by Frank Mankiewicz, formerly president of National Public Radio and press secretary to the late senator Robert Kennedy. The two men had come together through mutual friends, and Mankiewicz was there to help Veeck but also to gather information for a
Washington Post
column. Veeck had come armed with scouting reports on a group of top prospects, including Bárbaro Garbey, who in 1984 became the first Cuban refugee to make the majors.

Veeck's plan was simple and explained to every Cuban official the two men met, including onetime major-league hopeful Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl. Veeck envisioned a new international alignment of teams in Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Japan, and Cuba. He wanted to be allowed to sign Cuban players for the White Sox under contracts that would allow them to return to Cuba to play for any valid Cuban team in the majors or the minors once U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations were restored. He also suggested that the other owners would raise no objections.

Knowing that the Yankees also were making overtures to the island nation, he told the Cubans that the Yankees were “Batistas”—an allusion to the regime the Castros had overthrown—and “capitalistas.” He declared, “I am a poor man, a fighter, so you know what side I am on.” The Cubans, according to Mankiewicz, would hear none of it, mostly because they did not trust Veeck. “They just couldn't believe that a major capitalist entrepreneur
had anyone's welfare at heart but his own and that of his class.” Veeck also hurt his own case, according to Mankiewicz, by interrupting his pitch to the Cuban commissioner of baseball with a garbled and erroneous tutorial on the balk rule. “He lost the Commissioner and probably the chance for a major foreign policy breakthrough,” Mankiewicz recalled later. “Veeck was always more fan than diplomat.”
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The trip was a bust, and on his return Veeck stated, “The Cubans aren't interested in exporting the human animal even if would help the economy.”
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During the winter of 1977–78, Veeck signed Ron Blomberg and Bobby Bonds to plug the gap left by the loss of his heavy hitters. As a Yankee, Blomberg had never lived up to expectations, in large part because he was prone to injuries: he had had only 106 at-bats in 1975, 2 in 1976, and none in 1977.
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Despite this, Veeck signed him to a four-year guaranteed deal amounting to $125,000 per year with an $80,000 signing bonus. Gabe Paul, general manager of the New York Mets, who had made a modest offer for Blomberg, could not believe Veeck's: “I don't know if Bill has lost his mind or not.”

Veeck told Dick Young of the New York
Daily News
that he hired Blomberg because he liked to hire the handicapped. Wrote Young, “I laughed over the phone when he said it, but then I quickly realized that this is one of the few times in his life Bill Veeck, the carney man, wasn't kidding.”

“I'm a believer in guys that want to play ball, and in rehabilitation,” Veeck said.

Young and others also believed that Veeck was consumed with the idea of beating the Yankees with one of their own retreads.
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Also, the fact that Blomberg was Jewish appealed to Veeck, who told him that there were other Jews on the team, including Steve Stone and Ross Baumgarten. “With your personality,” Veeck told him, “and all the Jewish people in Chicago, you are going to be a perfect fit.”
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The slugging Bonds came to the White Sox in a six-player deal from the California Angels, which also involved sending Brian Downing to California. Having played most of his career with the San Francisco Giants, he had been traded to the Yankees in late 1974, then traded by them after the 1975 season to the Angels, for whom he had had a big year in 1977. Soon after the season began, however, Veeck traded Bonds to Texas for Rusty
Torres and Claudell Washington, who took five days to report to the team, explaining, “I overslept.”
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With all the changes, the Sox got off to a terrible start in 1978, and as late as May 27 they were at the bottom of the American League West, twelve and a half games out of first place. Then, suddenly, they won fifteen out of seventeen and were only three and a half games off the pace.

But Veeck was not happy. He had become increasingly frustrated by what he perceived to be a lack of coverage from the
Chicago Tribune
, which had supported him for so long. On June 13 Veeck noted that the story about the Sox beating the Cleveland Indians was on page three, while the Cubs, who also won, got front-page treatment. “I've had it up to here,” said Veeck, pointing to his neck. “It just isn't fair.” He claimed that the Cubs were getting a two-to-one edge in
Tribune
coverage and that he could prove his charge by counting linear inches. Then he dropped a bombshell: “I'm tired of scuffling around. I'd take the franchise out of here if the chance came along.” He told Jerome Holtzman of the
Sun-Times
, “The
Tribune
is trying to bury us.”
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The story was splashed across the top of the sports section in the
Tribune
and was picked up by other reporters in hot pursuit, along with radio and television. “For the first time all season, the smell of TV sports-caster's hair spray wafted through the park,” wrote John Schulian of the
Sun-Times
.
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Veeck's face and voice were everywhere. In a live television interview Veeck explained at great length that the Cubs had received preferred media treatment, even though the Sox had won fifteen of their last seventeen games. Nodding in agreement as he signed off, the interviewer said, “Yes, it's remarkable the way the Cubs have come back in the last 17 games.”
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But Veeck had picked a fight he could not win. Soon thereafter
Tribune
sports editor George Langford responded in print under the headline “We Like Your Style, Bill, but These Are the Facts.”
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“For those interested,” he wrote, “these are the figures: since March 1, when spring-training opened, the
Tribune
sports sections tabulated, there was a total of 1,803 column inches of story type on the White Sox and 1,427 column inches on the Cubs. That figure does not include pictures and outlines during that time. 70
White Sox stories appeared on page 1 of sports, compared to 68 Cubs stories on page 1.”
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Confronted with this by the
Sun-Times
's Schulian, Veeck replied: “That's odd.”

Then Schulian observed: “A sly smile flickered across the face that looks like it belongs on a woodcarver's doll.”
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Once again, as he had in St. Louis with the Browns, Veeck had become a lot more interesting than the team he put on the field.

On June 30, with the team at 34–40, Veeck removed Bob Lemon and made Larry Doby the second black to manage a big-league club. Once again Veeck had made Doby the second to break the color barrier, and both times it was behind a man named Robinson—this time Frank Robinson, who had been made player-manager of the Cleveland Indians in 1975. When he left, Lemon commented that, absent the offense, this was a team dependent on its pitching, which wasn't very good: “A year ago, we just overpowered people and I was a very smart manager. I guess I wasn't too smart this year.” The night after he was fired, Veeck invited him home for drinks and Lemon accepted.
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At the same time that Doby was made manager, Veeck replaced Minnie Miñoso as first-base coach with the young manager of the Sox' Knoxville farm club, Tony La Russa. Miñoso was moved into a public relations role in what Veeck termed “a lateral promotion.”

When the team began to skid seriously in mid-July with nine straight losses, Veeck made a rare clubhouse appearance to announce that he wanted the players to forget about their mistakes and that, as he had in Cleveland in 1949, he was declaring a new start to the season on July 28. It would be staged with bands and player introductions, just like Opening Day. The Sox lost in the July 28 game, though, and Bobby Bonds, who had been traded to Texas early in the season, was the margin of victory for the Rangers, with a pair of two-run homers, a single, and a stolen base.

As the slide continued, out-of-town writers began calling the team names such as the “Chicago Blight Sox.” At one point in August Veeck asked his shortstop, Don Kessinger, to consider taking over for Doby, but Kessinger
deferred out of fairness to Doby; nor did he want to take over a team he had not led through spring training.
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In Cleveland for a late-August series, a local reporter referred to the Sox as “a gimmick that has not gimmicked.” He pointed out that Doby, whose dream had turned into a nightmare, was not even calling for the team to take batting or infield practice. After the Sox dropped a 10–1 game to the Indians, Doby admitted, “I have no promises, no contract for next year.”
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After a September 26 loss to Oakland in the home finale, Veeck advised: “Save the program from tonight's game, because they'll soon be a collector's item. A museum piece. It contains lots of names that never again will appear in a White Sox program. Some probably won't appear in any major-league program again.”
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Doby's club was 37–50, and the White Sox finished in fifth place in their seven-team division with a 71–90 record. If there was any happy ending for anyone close to Veeck, it was for Bob Lemon, who was made manager of the New York Yankees shortly after being fired by Veeck, after Billy Martin fell out yet again with George Steinbrenner. Lemon went on to win the 1978 pennant after Bucky Dent's famous home run won a one-game playoff with the Boston Red Sox, and then the Yankees took the World Series from the Dodgers.

In October, Veeck named Don Kessinger as his new player-manager to replace Doby, who again became hitting coach. Veeck said, “I took a man away from doing what he does best: instructing hitters. I asked him to manage. It didn't work out.” Frank Robinson was not alone in saying that Doby had not been given a decent chance to run the team and was being replaced by a man with no managerial experience.

Doby also felt he had not been given a proper chance. Though he hoped he would get the same kind of redemptive opportunity that had been given to Bob Lemon, he feared it would never happen. “Bill said to me, before he owned the White Sox, when I was with Montreal, that he wanted me to manage some day,” Doby recalled years later. “But he said, ‘I want to get you a good ball club first.' Yet he gave me an opportunity with a bad ball club. But I just realized now that he knew he was going out of business when he made me manager. And once he goes out of business, there's no chance for me to manage. He wanted to wait, but I think he just ran out of time, because he was running out of money.”
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