‘MLB owner Bill Veeck was unequaled in showmanship’
Veeck – As in Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck By Bill Veeck with Ed Linn University of Chicago Press 400 pp; $23.50
We’re heading into the All-Star Break and baseball’s summer doldrums, so what better time to reminisce alongside one of baseball’s greatest impresarios? Major League Baseball owner, promoter and innovator, Bill Veeck was unequaled in showmanship and gamesmanship. He was also ahead of the game in many respects such as integration, but often denied the opportunity to capitalize due to his maverick reputation. At least that’s how he tells it in his 1962 memoir. Here’s what we learned:
1 Lineage.
Veeck was from a baseball family. He grew up with the Chicago Cubs organization, where his father, William Veeck Sr., became president in 1917. Veeck Sr. allegedly got the job after suggesting he could do a better job running the Cubs in the Chicago American (a Hearst newspaper that also employed his friend Ring Lardner). Good hire, I say – after all, the Cubs hadn’t won a World Series in almost a decade. Veeck Jr. later worked for the Cubs in the 1930s, trying unsuccessfully to persuade owner William Wrigley to install lights (which didn’t happen until 1988), but he did convince him to plant ivy in the outfield, which Veeck had admired at minor-league Perry Stadium in Indianapolis. Ever the innovators, Veeck Sr. proposed a round of mid-season interleague play in 1922, a proposal Veeck Jr. echoed in 1949. This year, of course, is the 20th anniversary of interleague play, which began in 1997.
2 Showmanship.
Veeck is best-known for a stunt that’s not so charming today: sending the 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel to the plate for the St. Louis Browns in the second game of a doubleheader in 1951 (the Browns lost both games). Gaedel was a performer, and his amateur free agent contract was voided two days after it was signed. Veeck showed better form in an earlier doubleheader that season, when he had over 13,000 bottles of beer and soda passed out to everyone in the St. Louis crowd for a toast to his new team. And while running the Chicago White Sox the following decade, he flipped the stunt – instead of giving everyone in the crowd a beer, Veeck gave 1000 beers to one fan. It wasn’t all gags, though: Veeck did win a championship in Cleveland, his White Sox won their first pennant since the Black Sox scandal, and his Browns might well have been the toast of St. Louis if the crosstown Cardinals weren’t purchased by deeppocketed Anheuser-Busch. The Browns relocated to Baltimore, but at least their fans had the experience of voting on the starting lineup for a game, with voters in a special section to participate in managerial decisions. The result: the Browns beat the visiting Philadelphia Athletics to end a four-game losing streak.
3 Gamesmanship.
Not only would he do anything to sell a ticket, Veeck would also do anything he could to gain an edge on the competition – literally. He claims that while running the minor league Milwaukee Brewers in the early 1940s, they would move the outfield fences in and out to benefit the home team (though baseball history nerds contest this for lack of evidence). Veeck’s gamesmanship in Cleveland is a little more believable, perhaps because he gave credit to someone else: groundskeeper Emil Bossard. “Though Bossard sculpted and shaped the mound to increase advantage, his real wizardry was in managing the infield.” Apparently the grass was kept long for a shortstop with bad ankles, short for a fleet-footed second baseman, and damp for a third baseman with bad knees. Veeck also paid attention to the gambling odds, and if they differed too much from his own handicapping late in the day, he’d make a pitching change to stymie potential fixers. But Veeck also used the nationwide gambling syndicate to get the lowdown on players. “If these people have better information than the scouting force, I’m not proud,” he said. “I’ll use them.”
4 People pleaser.
Once Veeck went into the press box during a game and saw that the Yankees organization hadn’t put out any refreshments for the journalists covering it. So he rounded up all the vendors he could and brought them back up to feed and lubricate the writers – compliments of Veeck himself. Yankees GM George Weiss was furious for being shown up, but Veeck couldn’t understand why anyone would criticize him for such a “humanitarian” gesture. Maybe it was just more showmanship on Veeck’s part, but sometimes being kind simply paid off. Veeck signed Ken Keltner when the third baseman (the one with bad knees) was coming off his career-worst 1946 season, and promised Keltner a bonus if he got back to a certain level at the plate. Keltner missed the target in 1947 despite making good contact, and Veeck gave him the bonus anyway. In 1948, Cleveland’s World Series year, Keltner hit a career-best 31 homers – 20 more than the year prior – with the last scoring the go-ahead runs in a one-game playoff for the American League pennant.
5 Love of the game.
“Baseball doesn’t belong to the old guys spinning their tales or to the newspapermen or to the operators,” Veeck said. “Baseball is where you find it on the field. You’re never any closer to the game than you are to the players.” Veeck certainly ruffled the establishment, and Jack Kent Cooke – who owned the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team, Washington’s NFL team and both the Los Angeles Lakers and Kings – once lost a bid to buy the Detroit Tigers because he was called “the Bill Veeck of Canada.” After his first stint with the White Sox, Veeck became a scout for the Cleveland Indians, which surprised friends who wondered how he could stomach working for a team he had once owned. From the man himself: “It was easy. I like to watch baseball games. I like to find players. By becoming a scout, I was only doing officially what I would have been doing unofficially anyway. Nothing annoys me more than to be told I am not supposed to be doing something I enjoy because it is lacking in dignity. That has nothing to do with dignity. That is insecurity masking itself as dignity.” Maybe Veeck meant every word. Maybe, knowing him, it was bluster. But it sure sounds good.