Bill Veeck (55 page)

“It was nasty—as nasty as it gets,” said Ray Grebey, who at the time headed the Player Relations Committee representing ownership in its dealings with the union. Years after working for Bowie Kuhn, he acknowledged that Kuhn had opposed DeBartolo absolutely and made negative comments about Italians to support that opposition.
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Perhaps to take the pressure off Kuhn and get in a shot at Veeck, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner said that the real reason the sale had fallen through was Bill Veeck himself—that the owners were trying to get back at him. Whether this was true or not, the owners now had Veeck in a tough spot. He could not afford to stay in, but he could not get out either. A few days after the meeting Veeck told a columnist that his life had become a little like a soap opera as he tried to get another offer and approval for a sale.
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Amidst this turmoil of the sale, White Sox chairman Bill DeWitt gave a series of interviews during which the subject of Bill Veeck came up. “I tell you, Veeck has more things wrong with him than anybody you can think of,” he said, ticking them off: quite apart from his leg woes, he was deaf in one ear, his eyes had gone bad, and the many years he had been forced to use crutches had damaged his upper body so that both shoulders, a wrist, and his spine had required operations. “That man has gone through things that normal people would be screaming about all over the world. Never complained, never says a word. And he's one of the most thoughtful persons that you'll ever run into. I can't agree with his philosophy on a lot of things. And I can't agree on his judgment on a lot of things, but he is the most thoughtful person.”
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Veeck held on to the White Sox through the end of the year. Finally, on January 8, 1981, a $20 million offer to buy the team was made by a local group headed by Jerry Reinsdorf, a real estate investor, and Eddie Einhorn, a television executive. It was essentially the same offer as had been made by DeBartolo, allowing Veeck and his partners to depart with a profit. Three weeks later, the American League owners voted unanimously to allow the sale of the team, and Veeck handed the keys to Comiskey Park to Reinsdorf in a signing ceremony at Sears Tower.

“It was the bitter end, but 66-year-old Bill Veeck was laughing,” observed John Schulian, the reporter who had most ably captured Veeck's last White Sox years. “Looking back on the career of baseball's reigning Barnum, with his pinch-hitting midgets and exploding scoreboards, there's really no other way he could leave.

“Sadness was for another time, another place.”
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On February 2, 1981, Bill Veeck received a lifetime achievement award from
Baseball Magazine
at Gallagher's Steak House in Manhattan. The two other awardees—pitcher Steve Carlton and third baseman George Brett—could not attend, so the show was Veeck's.
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Veeck took time to reminisce, complain about the corporate types who had taken over the game, and talk about his retirement. He told the assembled reporters that he thought his departure from baseball was a good thing. His health was failing, and the game had chased away all but one of its dinosaur owners—the sole exception being Calvin Griffith, of the Minnesota Twins. Veeck loved his image as the penultimate example of his species; as newsman John Schulian put it, he “saw himself as a dinosaur nibbling on the last leaves of a dying tree.”
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Veeck spelled out his latest set of imperatives for improving the game. He thought one set of rules should govern all teams: the designated hitter should exist in both leagues or in neither; one set of umpires should officiate for both leagues, not two sets with different codes; all parks should have either artificial turf or natural grass. On this last point, his opinion had always been clear, he said. “I feel firmly a baseball park should smell like grass, not an extension of the city streets and cigarette smoke and other odors.” He thought the leagues should be realigned, with three divisions and a wild card (as in pro football). The emphasis should be on natural rivalries, such as Cubs–White Sox, Yankees-Mets, and Dodgers-Angels. And teams should play more in the same time zone, to save fuel and reduce costs, which
in turn would help keep ticket prices low so that family groups wouldn't be priced right out of the park.
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Hank Greenberg made a plea for Veeck's election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, to which Veeck responded: “I would have to refuse it. If there is no room there for Luis Aparacio, Pee Wee Reese, or Phil Rizzuto, then there is surely no room for a scuffler who couldn't hit .001.”
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But perhaps the most memorable story came from Roland Hemond. “I'm sad Bill's leaving,” he said. “Let me tell you what kind of a man he is. Last September [1980], he planned a picnic on the playing field at Comiskey Park to thank all of his employees. But a few days before, he was rushed to the hospital and placed in intensive care. The day of the party, we're all concerned about him, and all of a sudden, he shows up. He talked a doctor into letting him out for the party. He stayed for a while, hopped into a cab, and asked the driver to speed up so he could roll down the window and stick his head out for air so that he could breathe. That says what kind of a man he is. He's a genius with compassion.”
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After a talk with his publisher about a possible new book—an indictment of modern baseball leadership—Bill Veeck headed home to Mary Frances in Chicago and their Hyde Park apartment, writing an occasional column and taking writing assignments during the postseason. He still made the newspapers with his comments on the business of baseball and self-deprecating quotes about life. He was, however, as
Chicago Tribune
columnist Bob Verdi put it, “living on broken parts and borrowed time.”

His phone number was still listed, however, and he would get occasional crazy calls, as he recounted to a reporter: “Yes … about three in the morning, from some fellows at a bar who are bombed and having an argument. One fellow will ask me if Earl Torgeson played for the Sox in '59. I'll answer, yes, he did. Then the caller will say, will you tell this to the guy I've got a bet with? The second guy will ask: Did Earl Torgeson really play for the Sox in '59? I'll say, no, he came three years later. It's my only defense … my only way of getting even. I go back to bed with a mental picture of a fight in the bar.”
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Veeck did put in an appearance at the White Sox spring training facility, where he ran into Marvin Miller. Said Miller, “I was shocked at the change in his appearance. He had been hospitalized with a collapsed lung. He was legally blind; he was deaf in one ear and had a hearing aid in the other. ‘The good news is,' Veeck said of the aid, which tended to squeal, ‘that with a little deft finger work on the adjustment, I can play a fair approximation of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.' The bad news is that I can no longer creep up on mine enemies unawares.' That was Bill Veeck, filled with hope and humor.”
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As the 1981 baseball season got under way, Veeck started to frequent the bleachers at Wrigley Field. The new owners of the White Sox had vowed to create a first-class operation, and Veeck had chosen to react to the perceived insult by embracing the Cubs. “I couldn't be at home in such a class operation as they're operating there,” he archly observed about Einhorn and Reinsdorf's White Sox. “The new owner, Fast Eddie—that is his name, isn't it?—is such a professional he doesn't want me and my kind of people spilling beer on the furniture.” Veeck was bothered by the fact that the new owners had paid exactly what DeBartolo had offered; he believed that DeBartolo should have been the new owner and that “the wrong people got the team.”
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Sitting in the Wrigley Field bleachers he had helped construct, below the scoreboard that had undergone only a few simple changes since he had overseen its installation in 1937, Veeck was in a familiar place. The flag signaling system he had installed in 1938 was still in operation, as was the light system that informed elevated train riders of a Cubs win or loss. “I didn't build everything,” he told John Schulian of the
Sun-Times
, “but I built enough of it, thank you.”

Veeck would help strangers in the bleachers with their crossword puzzles, buy beer for visiting TV anchors, and cut up with erstwhile minor leaguers and football executives alike.
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When the temperature permitted, he posed shirtless and wearing shapeless Bermuda shorts, bleaching his wooden leg in the afternoon sun. “Dad would sit out there without a shirt with his breasts hanging out. It was his way of saying, ‘This is what sixty-eight years looks like,'” his son Greg recalled, adding that an average of a hundred people would come up to him to talk during a game.
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He also had clearly lost none of his impishness, as Ray Grebey remembered. “One time I was sitting in the Wrigley Field bleachers with Bill and Dave Condon and an announcement was made over the PA system that Bill Veeck was at the game sitting with Condon and Ray Grebey, who was identified as the man who caused the '81 strike. The booing was intense.”
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Away from the game, Veeck became increasingly demonstrative in his antiwar pro-gun-control positions. “No Chicago peace march was official if Veeck was not in it. No handgun-control petition was complete if his name was not on it.”
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Not only did he speak out on guns, but on Halloween in 1981 he limped his way through a ten-kilometer walk against handgun violence. He gave speeches, staged press conferences, and lent support to anti-handgun legislation. For the first time, he publicly alluded to the gun death of Maurice, the older brother he had never known.
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Drawn by the arrival of spring, the season of hope in baseball, in 1982 Veeck showed up in Phoenix for spring training, catching as many Cubs games as he could muster the energy to attend. He obliged the writers with quotes about how baseball had changed and how it was now all about “agents, the counting house and the lawyers.” He also inspired literary allusions. “It was the fourth inning, I guess, before the man of the lined face walked in the ballpark carrying a canvas overnight bag,” wrote Tom Fitzgerald in the
Arizona Republic
. “He had a peg leg that he made no effort to camouflage. It was the same type of peg leg that you see Capt. Ahab wearing in the Heritage Illustrated classic version of Melville's great sea story…. Bill Veeck, now sixty-eight, but far from bowed, limped through the crowd, looking as proud as a man who could be the sole survivor of the last voyage of the
Pequod
. He might have been the one man who smelled Moby Dick's breath and lived to tell about it.”
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But later that spring, Veeck, baseball, and America suffered a great loss: on June 8, 1982, Satchel Paige died of a heart attack in Kansas City. Veeck told the
Baltimore Afro-American
that Paige's death was “a tragedy for all of society,” and he added, “We need more heroes like him.” In the days that followed, Veeck became a willing interpreter of Paige's career for the many reporters who called. He characterized his longtime friend and cohort as “the best pitcher I've ever seen … as close to unique as anyone I've ever seen. He had the best fastball and the greatest control, and had he been given the chance, would have compiled the best record of any pitcher ever.” Veeck admitted that Paige missed a few airplane flights in his time with the Browns, but that he was always there when they really needed him.
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Paige's death ended one of baseball's strongest friendships. “Veeck really loved Satch—they would talk on the phone for hours,” recalled Monte Irvin, who knew both men well.
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As the 1982 postseason approached, Veeck received an assignment he couldn't resist. Reporter Hal Bodley recalled one of Veeck's last jobs. “When we started
USA Today
in 1982,” Bodley remembered, “and were preparing for our first World Series, as baseball editor, I suggested we hire Bill Veeck to be a guest columnist. I couldn't think of anyone better suited to help get our fledging publication off the ground. After all, who was better at promoting baseball than Bill? And believe me, we needed all the help we could get in the fall of 1982.”

Bodley called Veeck, who accepted before Bodley could get all the words
out of his mouth. “We worked out the financial arrangements, and our first celebrity columnist was in the fold.” Then a few days after that—about a week before the St. Louis–Milwaukee World Series started—Bill called. “You know, for me to write a column I have to have my ghostwriter, Ed Linn, with me. I'll dictate my thoughts to him, he'll write them and give the column to you,” Veeck told Bodley.

“My wheels were turning,” Bodley remembered. “How could we make deadlines of 11:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. with this arrangement? Well, it was difficult, but we made it work. Neither man understood deadline pressure. They both agonized over each column. But spending nearly two weeks with Bill and Ed was an experience I'll never forget. First, even though I knew Bill fairly well, I had no idea of his popularity in the baseball world. People wanted to interview him and, frankly, got in our way when we wanted him to interview people for the column. And then there were the postgame conversations that lasted until the wee hours. 'Did I tell you about the time … ?” he'd start, and the yarn would last an hour.”
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