Bill Veeck (11 page)

Closer to home, Jim Gallagher had finally persuaded Phil Wrigley to add lights to Wrigley Field for the 1942 season. The Cubs had had a disastrous 70–84 1941 season, with a precipitous drop in attendance to half the 1920 level. Gallagher had long met with the same objections Veeck had earlier, but financial necessity opened the door.
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Wrigley, who trusted his old treasurer in such matters, had asked Veeck the previous summer to investigate a Milwaukee company that offered a new lighting technique—a hydraulic system where the lights could appear and disappear in a
“telescopic fashion,” thereby preserving the daytime look of the stadium. The cost of the equipment was far more than what Wrigley had intended to pay, but he nonetheless purchased the lights for $185,000, storing them beneath the grandstand at the end of the devastating 1941 season. Construction was scheduled to begin the week of December 8, but Wrigley changed his mind after Pearl Harbor and ultimately turned over 165 tons of steel and 35,000 feet of copper wire to the government without taking a nickel in return. He figured it could be better used to build lighting for an airfield or munitions depot, and his lights ended up at the Great Lakes Naval Air Station. Like many others in baseball, Wrigley thought that the games might be cancelled or curtailed for the rest of the war, as had happened during World War I.
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When the American and National Leagues held their annual meetings in Chicago on December 9, discussion centered on the war and its impact on the game. Much was made of the fact that baseball was also Japan's national pastime. Indeed, right after Pearl Harbor the
Hollywood Reporter
had related that on the day of the attack “the first American victory over the Japanese was won by the Paramount baseball team when it defeated the LA Nippons, all-Jap team, 6-to-3. No one was aware of the war until the third inning…. F.B.I, men allowed the game to finish … then rounded up the Jap contingent.”
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For a minor-league owner such as Bill Veeck, the threat of cancellation or curtailment was a real fear. Relief came from two unlikely figures. Although a friend of baseball, Franklin D. Roosevelt bore no goodwill toward baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a severe conservative who openly loathed Roosevelt's liberal politics. Nonetheless, the president and commissioner exchanged letters in January 1942, Landis asking about baseball's role in wartime and Roosevelt replying with his famous “Green Light Letter,” which argued that the nation needed more baseball, not less. “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before. Baseball provides a recreation which does not last over two hours or two hours and a half, and which can be got for very little cost.”
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Baseball responded gleefully. “If the shot that was fired at Lexington in 1775 was ‘heard around the world,' it is equally true that the ‘Play Ball' of President Roosevelt in his letter to Commissioner Landis recently was heard and applauded around the baseball universe,” said
Baseball
magazine. In a
note to the president, the sports editor of the
Chicago Sun
called it “the most notable contribution to baseball in our time,” and
The Sporting News
deemed him to be “Player of the Year.”

Roosevelt also lobbied for night games to be extended “because it gives an opportunity to the day shift to see a game occasionally.” Each team had been limited to seven home night games per year, and Landis, among others, disapproved of night baseball. But night games improved attendance, and teams in smaller markets wanted more of them. This included Veeck, who immediately began scheduling night contests for the upcoming 1942 season. Phil Wrigley, having given away his lights, now talked about playing at night in Comiskey Park.

Veeck, who had entertained thoughts of building a new park, used the Green Light Letter to help him get zoning approvals to move light stanchions that were blocking spectator views, add restrooms, and strengthen his sagging bleachers, which were unsafe and a potential liability. Veeck had a plan to fill them with kids and others for an admission fee of 44 cents. Veeck also understood that the war would keep Milwaukee factories working at full tilt for the duration, and he was prepared to offer entertainment for war workers after the factory whistle blew.

Unlike most owners, who had adopted austerity measures, Veeck invested in the 1942 baseball season, betting that the war would not hurt his attendance. “We don't believe that this is a time to retrench,” he said as he announced that the Brewers had spent $80,000 to $90,000 for new players, including three purchases from the Texas League, and $10,000 sprucing up Borchert Field.
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Veeck also adopted a combative stance in his dealings with the other owners in 1942. It was unlike anything that the American Association had ever experienced and perhaps unlike anything organized baseball had ever witnessed at any level. Veeck started riling up his rivals when he complained that Milwaukee was not awarded the Opening-Day attendance trophy. His stadium was overloaded with 15,599 paying customers, but the trophy was awarded to Indianapolis, which had drawn only 11,546. The league, it seemed, gauged the attendance winner on a ratio of fans to their city's total population.

Veeck was steaming mad and struck back at the next home game with a four-foot-tall trophy of his own design, which he presented to himself in a ceremony at home plate, proclaiming the Brewers as winner of the opening
day award. Delivered in an armored car complete with a pair of armed guards the trophy was engraved:

PRESENTED TO MILWAUKEE BY THE MILWAUKEE BASEBALL CLUB
BECAUSE OF A TECHNICAL ERROR ON THE PART OF THE LEAGUE
MANAGEMENT

Veeck had laid out $300 for the trophy, an extraordinary sum in 1942. “When you buy something for yourself, you're certainly going to buy the best, aren't you?” he explained.
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The trophy became a dominant feature in Veeck's Milwaukee office, appearing in a
Look
magazine photograph of the young owner with his feet on the desk and a portrait of Judge Landis on his wall along with a caption that read in part: “Cost of the cup: $300. Value of the publicity: $3,000.”
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Continuing his performance on that night, Bill sarcastically presented George Trautman, president of the Columbus Blue Birds as well as president of the American Association, which had denied Veeck the attendance trophy, a striped cane and “seeing-eye dog,” in reality Veeck's own English bulldog. He topped off the show by giving bouquets of vegetables to the umpires while the loudspeakers blared “Three Blind Mice.”
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Instantly Veeck had established his two primary adversaries, publicly challenging the authority of his league and its owners and firing an opening salvo in what would become a lingering and genuine distrust and disrespect of umpires. He had begun complaining about the quality of the umpiring in the association shortly after he arrived in Milwaukee, and the easygoing Grimm was quickly convinced that Veeck looked upon umpires as “mortal enemies”—he barked at them from the stands and chewed them out after the game.
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Veeck took on the quality of ballpark lighting across the association, which he insisted was inadequate, especially as the Brewers took batting practice. The first place he targeted was Trautman's Columbus stadium. To illuminate his point, Bill and Schaffer arrived early and took seats down front. When the lights came on, Veeck and Schaffer jumped up waving lanterns, solemnly peering out toward the diamond like two shipwrecked sailors.

Veeck seemed to take special pleasure in ribbing Donie Bush, the well-liked president-manager of the Indianapolis Indians. Then in his fifties, Bush had played sixteen years in the majors as one of the leading shortstops
in the so-called dead ball era. The star of the World Series in 1909, he went on to manage the Senators, Pirates, White Sox, and Reds before returning to Indianapolis to lead the Indians. The Veeck-Schaffer lantern act was restaged for Bush, who ordered his groundskeeper to confiscate the lanterns and actually chased Veeck and Schaffer on foot. Bush swore that Veeck would have to pay to get into his park after that.
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“I wonder,” Bush asked Sam Levy of the
Milwaukee Journal
at one point in the 1942 season, “how that boy could be so repulsive. His daddy was a fine man, I knew him well. He never feuded with anyone. He was one of the best men the Major Leagues ever had.”
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But Veeck reserved his most provocative and melodramatic behavior for the St. Paul Saints and owner Lou McKenna. At some point early in the 1942 season, for reasons he never made clear, Veeck ordered his gate man to stop McKenna and ask for his ticket. McKenna bought his way in but vowed he would even the score when Veeck came to his ballpark. This response was all Veeck needed to pull out the stops in needling McKenna, his team, and the city of St. Paul. He would show up in the St. Paul stadium as early as five-thirty for a night game and take a seat in the grandstand next to a pay phone. The phone would ring, and he would answer, listen, and then repeat the caller's question: “Are the Saints playing tonight?” He would reply with a grin, “I don't know if the Saints will have the nerve to show up because the Brewers are in town. In fact, the Brewers already are on the field. They've sent a scouting expedition out to find the Saints.”

These calls, which came from a confederate—almost certainly Rudie Schaffer—and Veeck's response were staged for one or more newspaper reporters. When the game began, Veeck would typically relocate to a box seat directly behind the Brewers dugout and cheer loudly and provocatively for his team—all of this designed to anger the home fans. One afternoon when the Brewers were crushing the Saints, a bottle flew out of a box behind him and just missed Veeck's head. The bottle thrower was pointed out to Veeck, who leapt to his feet and confronted the man.

“My little boy who is only four years old has more nerve than you,” Bill shouted inches from the man's face. “He's smarter than you—he wouldn't throw a bottle at a person whose back was turned.” When a group of fans confronted Veeck, a policeman then suggested that he take refuge in a
deserted part of the grandstand. McKenna appealed to Sam Levy to get Veeck to join him in the press box before some fan beat him up. Veeck refused to budge, insisting that the press box belonged to the press and he had every right to stay in his seat until the last out of the second game of the doubleheader. When he got up to leave, the crowd cheered.
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Thereafter when the Brewers played in St. Paul, Veeck saw to it that they stayed only in Minneapolis hotels. He explained to a local writer that he did not want his team living “in a very dreary village where the sidewalks were pulled out every night at nine.” The wisecrack caused St. Paul fans to threaten to boycott the Brewers. Adding insult to injury, Veeck proclaimed that threats didn't bother him any more than the small receipts he got when the team played in St. Paul. “All I am interested in here is to beat your brains out.”

Veeck's pyrotechnics aside, the team had improved vastly on the field, and by midseason in 1942 it was ranked first in the division. Like other teams, Veeck had the added challenge of replacing players who had been called into military service.
The Sporting News
reported on June 4, for example, that Veeck was looking for a pitcher to fill the gap left by the departure of lefty Russ Meers for the Navy.

Veeck employed every trick he could think of to win the 1942 pennant, which added to his growing reputation as someone who believed in bending the rules—even to the breaking point. A Saturday night game in August against the Indianapolis Indians was threatened by imminent rain. The Brewers were batting in the fifth inning with two out and trailed the Indians by one run. If that third out were made, the game would become official, resulting in a loss. As Grimm recalled: “Bill couldn't wait for the rain to come and plunged Borchert Field into darkness.” Before the electric failure was solved, the belated downpour arrived. The game was washed out, and a Brewers defeat was averted. Gabby Hartnett, the Indianapolis manager and an old friend of Grimm's from his Cubs days, was furious, openly accusing Veeck or one of his minions of pulling the plug. Hartnett demanded that the game be finished from the point the lights went out, but Trautman ruled that the game be replayed in its entirety. The Indians won the replay, but Harnett was still angry, and Grimm admitted that he did not blame him.

The season went into its last weeks with the Brewers in and out of the lead, thanks to some outstanding performances, including that of Eddie Stanky, who hit .452 to win the batting title and was named the Association's Most Valuable Player.
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On the last day of the season, the Kansas City Blues were in Milwaukee for a daylight doubleheader that would decide the championship. The Brewers were a half game out and could take the lead by winning the first game, but the Brewers pitching staff was overused and ailing. “Even if there were a second game, the Blues were almost a cinch to win it, our pitching was in such a sad state,” Charlie Grimm later reported. The start of the first game was delayed by rain for more than two hours, and then for an additional half hour after the downpour ended. Roy Harney of the Blues then realized that Veeck had something devious in mind.

Veeck didn't want to play that second game, so the longer he delayed, the less chance there would be that a second one could be played before darkness. Harney appealed to the venerable Tom Hickey, president emeritus of the association, who was representing the absent Trautman. Hickey told Veeck that the lights would have to be turned on to complete the doubleheader. “I wouldn't put the lights on for Franklin D. Roosevelt!” Veeck told the old gent. The Blues were a farm team of the New York Yankees and a call was made to New York for advice, but to no avail: nothing in the rules stipulated that a scheduled day game had to be completed under lights.
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