Bill Veeck (24 page)

However much Shirley Povich considered the Indians a “dark horse,” after a strong preseason the local writers predicted modest success for the 1948 team. Franklin Lewis at the
Cleveland Press
expected them to finish fourth, and Gordon Cobbledick at the
Plain Dealer
had them in third place.
Lou Boudreau, after a bit of arm twisting by a reporter, said he thought the Indians would finish in second place behind the Yankees.
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The season opened on a good note with eleven wins in the first sixteen games, including a three-game sweep of the Boston Red Sox in Fenway Park. Veeck worked the home crowds during the early days of the season as he had in Milwaukee, this time with Greenberg on his self-appointed rounds, introducing him to fan after fan.
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Other good omens emerged in the season's early weeks. Joe Gordon was proving to be exactly what Veeck had hoped for. Veeck relished Gordon's anger—especially when it was directed at the Yankees. In his first appearance at Yankee Stadium in an Indians uniform he walked twice, singled twice, and hit a home run—virtually beating the Bronx Bombers on his own. “I hope Old Liver-Lips was watching that one,” Veeck intoned after the game, referring to Yankees general manager Larry MacPhail. Observed Arthur Daley of the
New York Times:
“[Veeck's] eyes twinkled but there was no mistaking the venom which dripped from his words.”
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Amid the team's success, Veeck endured his third amputation on May 5. In the second, during the summer of 1947, his stump had been cut to a point eight inches below the knee, and this new procedure took another critical inch. His doctors at the Cleveland Clinic expected him to be in bed for six weeks, but—fully in character—Veeck used the hospital as a platform for meetings and announcements, and slipped away on occasion.
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A few days after his surgery he announced that he had appointed Abe Saperstein to be in charge of a nationwide scouting program to find more Negro ballplayers for the Indians farm system. The plan had the backing of his two vice presidents, Grabiner and Greenberg, who had held two days of meetings with Veeck in the hospital.
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Wendell Smith of the
Pittsburgh Courier
spotted Veeck a week or so after his surgery on crutches at a meeting of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and noted that when he left the luncheon, he stowed his crutches in the backseat of his car and headed to Ashtabula to deliver an address on brotherhood and diversity, using the 1948 Indians as his prime example.
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On May 8 rookie left-hander Gene Bearden pitched his first game, a magnificent 6–1 three-hit victory over the Washington Senators, his knuckle-ball dancing to devastating effect. After eight dominant innings, Bearden
tired in the ninth, and Russ Christopher came in to gain the final out. Larry Doby also shone, clubbing a home run to dead center that struck the top of the thirty-five-foot wall, hit a speaker, and bounced back onto the field. It made Griffith Stadium history, besting a 1922 homer by Babe Ruth as the longest ever hit there.

After the game, Bearden revealed for the first time that he had been severely wounded in the war. He was a machinist's mate on the cruiser USS
Helena
, one of the few ships in Pearl Harbor that had survived the Japanese attack. On July 6, 1943, the ship was in the South Pacific near the Solomon Islands, part of an American task force battling the Japanese. Bearden was in the engine room when the first torpedo hit; the damage was severe, and the order was given to abandon ship. As he scrambled up the ladder leading out of the engine room, a second torpedo hit, the ladder crumpled, and he was hurled to the deck. His knee was twisted and crushed, his head was split open by flying shards of metal, and he lay unconscious in the pit of a sinking ship. “Someone pulled me out,” he recalled. “They told me later that it was an officer. I don't know how he did it. The ship went down in about 17 minutes. All I know is that I came to in the water some time later.”

In a semiconscious state, he spent the next two days in a rubber life raft and was finally rescued by a U.S. destroyer and shipped back to the States. He was operated on at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, in August and told he would never be able to play baseball again. For the better part of the next two years he was in the hospital, where a plate was inserted into his skull and a hinge placed in his damaged knee. He had kept all of this to himself until after his first game “because they might get the idea that I'm not strong enough to pitch.”
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Bearden's second start, ten days later against the Philadelphia Athletics in the first night game of the season at Municipal Stadium, became known as the “Purple Heart Game.” His opponent was Lou Brissie, another tall southpaw who had been awarded a Purple Heart for wounds suffered on December 2, 1944, when a shell exploded, hitting him with fragments that shattered his left tibia and shinbone. Army doctors wanted to amputate his leg, but Brissie refused. After two years and twenty-three operations Lou was able to return to baseball with a metal brace on what remained of his leg. Signed by the Athletics in December 1946, he won twenty-five games in the Southern League in 1947. The A's called him up and on September 28 he realized his “life's ambition” of pitching in the major leagues.

Bearden pitched the full nine innings, giving up six hits to defeat the
Athletics 6–1. Brissie faced only ten batters before being relieved by Bob Savage, who had two Purple Hearts himself and a piece of shrapnel still in his shoulder.
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The powerful symbolism of the game was quickly forgotten, but Bearden, Brissie, and Savage—and Veeck for that matter—were among many who prevailed over war injuries and disabilities. First baseman Eddie Robinson had been in the Navy when, in 1945, a bone tumor paralyzed his right leg. He was operated on and wore a brace until the first day of spring training in 1946. In August 1947 he fractured an ankle and spent the remainder of the summer on the disabled list. Like Bearden and Brissie, he was told that he would never play baseball again. Other veterans of the Armed Forces were on the field that night as well: Indians Bob Feller, Ken Keltner, and Larry Doby had served in the Navy, as had A's centerfielder Samuel Chapman.

The game underscored a subtle bond that existed between those who had served. Announcer Ernie Harwell, who had served four years in the Marines, recalled “a subliminal feeling that a man who had served was a little bit better than one who hadn't.”
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Eighty thousand fans jammed into Cleveland Stadium for a doubleheader against the Yankees on May 25—a sellout by ten-thirty in the morning, with thousands clamoring for standing room. In the fourth inning Veeck, against his physician's orders, arrived in a wheelchair and was rolled into his favorite perch in the press box. Veeck wanted not only to see his team play but also to make sure that the rain that had been forecast for that day would not result in the first game being called off in the fifth or sixth inning, making it a legal game and sending fans home with worthless rain checks. He had a special public address microphone installed in the press box that he planned to use in case the umpires called the game, to assure fans their rain checks would be honored or their money refunded if they preferred. Veeck's spirited generosity—not tested that day, as the rain held off—would have cost him some $90,000, since he would have owed the Yankees their share of the gate. But he believed this was the best way to keep faith with his fans.

In the midst of a tight American League race, the Indians played the Yankees on Old-Timers' Day at Yankee Stadium. Unbeknownst to fans unaware of his illness, this would prove to be the penultimate public appearance of Babe Ruth. Unaccountably, he emerged from the Indians dugout to take his final curtain call, leaning on a bat he had borrowed from Bob Feller. It seemed like a good omen.
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With the scouting help of Abe Saperstein, Veeck put other black players into his organization. Three of Saperstein's finds were brought in at the end of June for trials, and one, Fred Thomas, was signed and sent to the Indians farm club in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. During this same week Josh Gibson Jr. was signed by the Youngstown Colts, a team with a working agreement to develop talent for the Indians.
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With Feller flailing at the beginning of the summer, Veeck and Boudreau were looking for pitching help. They made a couple of trades and toyed with moving some of their second-rung pitchers up the ladder; but nothing seemed to be working.

“If only I could find a guy who could strengthen our bullpen,” Veeck told Saperstein one night in the press box as the Tigers were making a shambles of the Cleveland pitching staff. “We're desperate for someone who can come in and stop a rally.”

“I know just the pitcher you need.” said Abe. “If you sign him, you won't have any more bullpen worries.”
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Saperstein suggested Veeck sign the forty-one-year-old Satchel Paige. Veeck looked at Abe and smiled. The idea was hardly novel. In 1947 Paige had actually wired Veeck and asked when he was going to bring him in. “I wrote him back and said it'll happen but let's just take our time,” Veeck explained years later. “I knew that there was going to be a hue and an outcry from the traditionalists, the purists if you will, that I was making even more of a travesty of the game. And I didn't believe that in '46 or '47 I had any chance to win anything. And so I didn't see any sense in causing a great hullabaloo for no particular reason. I felt that in '48 when I brought him in that he could well be the difference between winning a pennant and losing one.”
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The next day Saperstein was back in Chicago working on his winter basketball schedule for the Harlem Globe Trotters. “I received a long-distance call from Veeck,” he recalled. “He wanted to know if I could bring Satchel to Cleveland so that Lou Boudreau … and Hank Greenberg could take a look at him.” Greenberg was in favor of it, and Feller, who had barnstormed with Paige during the previous two off-seasons, had often talked of his pitching prowess.

Paige was pitching in Seattle. Saperstein told him to get back to Chicago, and left him a plane ticket on to Cleveland with orders to report to Veeck. But Paige stayed in Chicago waiting for Saperstein to return, playing pool every day in a pool hall on the South Side. Finally the date was set for a secret tryout, but meanwhile, Veeck had a fire to put out.
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The team returned to Cleveland for a July 5 doubleheader against the Tigers in an atmosphere that was anything but cordial. Days before, an unidentified veteran player had publicly blamed the loss of nine of the previous fifteen home games on the behavior of the fans. “I can speak for just about the whole ball club,” he said. “I travel with them and I live with them and I know what they all talk about. We just don't play the same kind of ball at home that we do on the road, simply because of the fan reaction there.” He complained of constant booing and said the fans' treatment of the home team was worse in Cleveland than in any other city in the American League. The anonymous indictment also contained an indirect slap at Veeck: “A pitcher throws two or three balls in a row and the crowd hollers: ‘What's the matter with him? Get him out of there.' A hitter takes a swing and misses and they holler: ‘Sit down, ya bum!' But the payoff is when they start yelling to get the ball game over and start the fireworks when we're behind.”
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Veeck was incensed at his player's attitude, and felt it was one more reason to expedite Paige's arrival. “We brought him in the dead of night because if I couldn't convince my … manager and coaches, I didn't want to shove him down their throats and create disharmony in a club where … I thought I could win something.”
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The morning after Paige reached Cleveland, Veeck phoned Boudreau and said he had a pitcher he wanted him and Hank Greenberg to have a look at. Lou blinked in disbelief when he saw Paige. “Leroy,” as Veeck always called Paige, warmed up, slowly jogged about halfway around the park, flipped two balls underhanded, and declared he was ready for his tryout.
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“He handed me a folded-up handkerchief,” Boudreau remembered, “told me to put it on the plate wherever I liked. He wound up and threw ten pitches—and nine of them were right over the handkerchief. He told me to move the handkerchief to the other side of the plate, and he threw ten more pitches the same as before. Seven or eight of his pitches were right over the handkerchief, and those that missed, didn't miss by much.”
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Veeck described the two pitches Boudreau connected with: “One Boudreau hit sufficiently well that it might with luck have been scored as a base hit and the other was a ground ball which kind of trickled over…. So he dropped the bat and Hank was going to take a few swings and Hank walks up to me and he says never mind, I'm convinced. And then he says … ‘just don't let him get outta here unsigned alive.'” “Now I can believe some of the tall stories they tell about his pitching,” Boudreau exulted.

On July 7, his forty-second birthday, Paige was signed in a move that
Veeck termed “pennant insurance” but which nonetheless caused much negative reaction. General manager Billy Evans of the Detroit Tigers tore into Veeck at a meeting of American League club executives before the All-Star break, calling him “a pop-off and a publicity-sensationalist” and Paige's signing “outright exploitation and an affront to major league baseball.”
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