Bill Veeck (20 page)

Veeck's clown act, however, did not play as well out of town. In Boston, two fans were taken to the hospital after being hit by a ball that Price fired from a special sling he had brought to Boston and reassembled on the field between games of a doubleheader. Patkin got into the act in the second game. After convulsing the fans for his two innings as first-base coach, he then followed Red Sox manager Joe Cronin to his preferred post at third base during the Cleveland half of the inning. Cronin bellowed at the Cleveland bench, “I thought this was the big leagues.” By the end of the season Patkin's act had become stale. The fact that the Indians were well out of the pennant race allowed him to finish the season in uniform without doing harm to the team's chances.

As the season wound down, Veeck staged an event in sharp contrast to the antics of Patkin and Price, which underscored Veeck's belief that putting blacks and whites on the same field was not only acceptable but good box office. In mid-August Indians outfielder George Case and Gil Coan, the speedy Washington Senators rookie, staged a 100-yard footrace in Griffith Stadium for the unofficial title of “fastest man in the American League.” Case won in a flat 10 seconds, merely 0.6 second off the 9.4-second world record held by several track stars, including Jesse Owens, known as “the fastest human” after his stunning four Olympic gold medals in 1936. Veeck then announced that he would dress Owens in a baseball uniform and have
him race against Case between the games of the September 8 Indians–St. Louis Browns doubleheader.
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Owens bested Case by a yard.
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Meanwhile, Veeck added to his reputation as a shrewd financial man as word circulated that he had used a debenture–common stock scheme to finance the team. He would remunerate his partners in the syndicate in nontaxable loan repayments rather than in dividends, which were then taxable at rates depending on one's income. Instead of taking their investment in stock, Veeck's backers got 85 percent in debentures and 15 percent in stock. As he would later explain, “The attractiveness of my plan was based entirely upon the opportunity to put as little as possible into the stock and as much as possible into the debentures.” So if the team succeeded, the loan would be repaid, the investor would have recovered almost all of his original investment, and that $15,000 worth of stock would actually now be worth a full $100,000 on the open market. Veeck observed, “Assuming a real success, it would be worth even more. And if you sold that stock, your $85,000 profit would be taxed not as regular earnings [but] at a flat 25 percent rate. This approach was new to baseball. For decades to come, owners in all professional sports benefitted from it.
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Of the reporters covering the Indians, the ones Veeck became closest to were Gordon Cobbledick, who had been appointed sports editor of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
eight days before Veeck had taken over the club, Franklin Gibbons of the
Press
, Ed McAuley of the
News
, and Franklin Lewis of the
Plain Dealer
. These men and their wives called themselves the “Jolly Set” and would chronicle Veeck's transformation of a team—and a city.

At the end of August, with the Indians thirty-one and a half games out of first place, Veeck was on the road with the team in Chicago and told Gibbons that he needed a half dozen solid players to create a winning team in 1947. “All I can say is that it should be a busy winter,” said Veeck. “There is work to be done in the carpenter's shop.”

The team had been in constant flux since Veeck took over (forty-eight
players wore the uniform from that day until the end of the season) and the offense was terrible—the worst in the league. Bob Feller had what many would consider his greatest year (26–15, 2.18 ERA, 348 strike outs), and manager Lou Boudreau gave Veeck a nice dose of national publicity by creating a novel defense against Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, moving all his infielders to the right side in what later became known as the “Williams Shift.”
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Having quickly established his big-league skills as a producer of entertainment—Veeck boosted the Indians 1946 attendance above the 1 million mark for the first time in club history despite the sixth-place finish and a record under Veeck of 42–53—he began the process of building his team. “A championship as quickly as possible” was his slogan for Cleveland, as it had been at Milwaukee. Veeck also had another goal in mind, which would be achievable as soon as the team began playing all its home games in cavernous Municipal Stadium, also known as simply Cleveland Stadium. The team was splitting games between two parks, but this would end with the 1946 season. Veeck wanted to beat the Yankees not only on the field but also at the box office. In July 1946, the Yankees had surpassed the long-standing attendance record of 1,485,166 set by the 1929 Chicago Cubs. “I wonder how my dad feels about this Yankee record?” Veeck asked a few days after it was posted. “That turnstile mark was his pride and joy. And now—well, dad must be saying ‘It's all for the best and a great thing for baseball.' He had no streak of jealousy in him and he was for everybody in baseball. As for myself, I would feel sore as hell if I piled up an amazing record like that for one season and some guy had come along and kicked it to pieces like [Larry] MacPhail has.”
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In Boston for the World Series, Veeck chatted with MacPhail, who told the Indians owner that he wanted to trade second baseman Joe Gordon for a pitcher. The Yankees had finished in third place, seventeen games behind the Red Sox, and MacPhail was rebuilding as well. There were also published rumors of a possible Joe DiMaggio–Ted Williams swap, which was neither confirmed nor denied by MacPhail. Gordon had been the American League's Most Valuable Player in 1942, had enlisted in the Navy after the 1943 season, and had rejoined the Yankees in 1946. Although he had made his sixth All-Star appearance, his average plummeted to .210. He had been spiked in the hand during spring training and had tried to play before it healed, and then later he suffered a leg injury that slowed him down.

Gordon's maladies led MacPhail to consider him a malingerer. At one point deep in the season, he called Gordon into his office along with his
manager, Bill Dickey. “He accused me of quitting on him,” Gordon recalled later. “That's a damn lie. I never quit on anybody in my life. He called me in his office and insulted me all over the place.” MacPhail then ordered Dickey to take Gordon out of the lineup. According to Arthur Daley of the
New York Times
, this set off two explosions. “Gordon flared up and came perilously close to punching MacPhail in the nose,” and Dickey too erupted. In pointed words, he told MacPhail that no front-office man could tell him how to manage, and that if MacPhail didn't leave him alone, “he could take his managerial portfolio and shove it up the chimney or someplace.”
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Dickey was immediately relieved of his duties.

Veeck, however, had been watching Gordon and said he wanted him, and offered MacPhail a choice of right-handers Allie Reynolds or Red Embree. MacPhail checked with DiMaggio.

“There's no choice,” DiMaggio told him. “Get Reynolds.”
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A few days later, the deal was finalized and applauded in Cleveland.
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Cobbledick spoke for many when he opined: “Reynolds is a pitcher and therefore a defensive unit…. The Indians were a hopeless team because they could not make runs in sufficient numbers to reward good pitching with victories. Gordon may supply the needed offensive power.”
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On October 24, 1946, Veeck entered the Cleveland Clinic for treatment of his infected right foot. It was the third hospitalization for the infection since he had bought the Indians in June. A little more than a week later, he realized he might have to submit to amputation. “There's a possibility—a good possibility—that I'll lose the foot before I leave this hospital,” he told the
New York Times
. He added, “Right now, the doctors are trying to get all the infection confined to the foot. I'm so full of penicillin that if you were to wring me out, you'd have enough for a dispensary.”
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For the first time, Veeck was willing to discuss the fact that the injury to his severely damaged right foot had been caused by the recoil of a 90-mm antiaircraft gun while in Bougainville more than two years earlier. Veeck had never mentioned this while in uniform, and his military record contains
no mention of it either. He had osteomyelitis, an acute bone infection common to injuries to extremities, in his foot.

On November 1, Veeck lost not only his right foot but a major portion of his right leg as well, leaving him with a stump below the knee. That afternoon, Frank Gibbons of the
Cleveland Press
got a call at the office and for a moment did not recognize the weak and distant voice.

“Hello, Gibby.” There was a long pause. “This is Bill: What's doing?”
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When the news got out, Veeck's hospital room was buried in floral tributes and thousands of letters and get-well cards. Soon he was holding an open house in Room 601. An Associated Press wire photo taken on November 2 ran with a caption noting that Veeck's familiar smile was ever present.
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A week later, Bob Hope visited Veeck in the hospital, which made for a perfect photo opportunity, especially when Hope crawled halfway across the bed and gave Veeck a peck on the cheek. Veeck beamed with delight.

Two weeks after the operation, Veeck was spotted at a Cleveland Browns football game, where he told a reporter he planned to return to the Cleveland Clinic the next day. Veeck would follow this pattern through countless future hospital stays, checking himself out to take in an important sporting event and then returning to the hospital to finish recovering. He was finally released on November 18 and quipped, “My only regret is that I wasted two years before the operation when I could have been mastering the use of an artificial leg.”
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Veeck went to the Winter Meetings in Los Angeles ready to deal. Shortstop Boudreau had been teamed with second baseman Ray Mack for several seasons, but with Joe Gordon now on the club, there was no place for Mack. Veeck shopped around a bit and then zeroed in on MacPhail once more, bundling Mack and rookie catcher Sherman Lollar to New York in exchange for outfielder Hal Peck, right-hander Al Gettel, and a left-hander named Gene Bearden, whom the Yankees had just acquired from the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. Bearden was regarded by many as the “throw-in” to sweeten the trade.

When the deal was completed, much was made of Peck's being reunited with his old Milwaukee boss. Gettel was a known quantity, with a 15–15 record over the previous two seasons with the Yankees. Little was known about Bearden except that he was a knuckleballer about whom Casey Stengel, his manager on the Oakland Oaks, had given Veeck a thumbs-up. On the eve of the trade, the Associated Press distributed a wire photo of Stengel, Veeck, and Grabiner having drinks, clearly underscoring Stengel's role as a talent scout for Veeck.
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In mid-January, Veeck announced that he was being fitted for an artificial limb and would soon throw a party in the Vogue Room of the Hollenden House Hotel in Cleveland to celebrate the discarding of his crutches. He fulfilled the promise less than two weeks later. “He was on the dance floor all night,” his director of public relations and childhood friend Marsh Samuel later recalled. “The blood soaked his leg and got on the floor. It was not one of his better moves.” Foolish or not, to a nation still awed by the sacrifices of members of the Armed Forces, Veeck's determination to dance on his injured leg became a symbol of the American spirit.
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On February 2, 1947, the
Chicago Tribune
carried an article on ranches in Tucson where notable Chicagoans were wintering. One ranch featured was the Veecks', which was described as an immense spread, buried in the Rincon Mountains, that featured a main house with five bedrooms, along with a number of outbuildings. “The Bill Veecks, owners of the ranch, are unique in that they cater to parents with children,” the article said, adding that a governess and Spanish nursemaids were on hand to attend to the “child colony” at the ranch. A number of people were mentioned as being guests at the ranch that winter, including Eleanor's mother, her sisters (who were assisting in running the ranch), and the Boudreaus, who were spending the winter there with their three children. Another source reported that Hal Peck and his wife, mother, and two children also stayed at the Veeck ranch for several months during the winter of 1946–47.
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No mention was made of Veeck himself in the article, and during most of late January his name appeared often in articles with a Cleveland dateline. The day the article ran in the
Tribune
, he was in New York City as a featured speaker at the Baseball Writers' Association of America dinner; two nights later he was in Boston for a similar event.
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One of his promotions before the 1947 season was a batboy contest, in which he invited boys ages twelve to sixteen to compete for the position and $1,000 to be set aside for college tuition. Applicants needed to submit an essay explaining why they wanted to be a batboy. Thousands of boys entered the contest, as did one girl, Diane Heidkamp, to whom Veeck sent a regretful letter explaining why she was not eligible.

Veeck's attachment to Patkin and Price remained despite their excesses the previous fall. Early in March 1947, at spring training in Phoenix, Veeck found Max Patkin sitting in the Indians dugout. As Patkin later recalled: “He had on his new wooden leg, and he was just like a kid with a new toy. Then he challenged me to a race. He said, ‘I'll bet you $20 I can beat you
from here to the outfield fence.' I gave him a head start, but darned if he didn't beat me to that wall. It was amazing. And I had to pay the twenty bucks too.”