Bill Veeck (27 page)

One ingredient of the game, unknown to all and not revealed until 1967, when Boudreau told the story, was that Bearden had been sipping brandy between innings. The brandy was contained in a hidden compartment in the little black bag carried by trainer Harold Weisman, who kept walking up and down in the dugout during the game. Boudreau kept telling him to sit down. When he did, he sat next to Bearden and surreptitiously slipped him a few sips.

Having defeated the Red Sox, the Indians stayed in Boston to open the 1948 World Series at Braves Field. In a brilliant pitchers' duel, one of Boston's two aces, Johnny Sain, beat Feller 1–0, despite the Braves managing only two hits and being aided by a blown call on a pickoff play. “Sixteen years before,” noted Frank Graham, “when Walter Johnson, with whom Feller had frequently been compared, lost his first World Series start after years of waiting—as Feller now has done—millions of fans mourned. But no one seemed to care that Feller had lost. Apparently they thought it served him right.”
¹⁹

In the second game in Boston, Bob Lemon beat Warren Spahn 4–1. The contest made television history, as a live broadcast was shown on a passenger train traveling between Washington, D.C., and New York. Bearden returned to the mound in Cleveland to shut out Vern Bickford 2–0 in the third low-scoring game. The next day Larry Doby became the first black man to hit a home run in the World Series, a solo drive off Sain that proved the winning run in the Cleveland victory. “Larry Doby is best remembered for his home run in the fourth game of the 1948 World Series,” said Negro league star Buck O'Neil fifty years later. “His home run won the game for the Indians, 2–1. Indians president Bill Veeck told me years later that the Indians received nearly 20,000 pieces of mail in 1947 expressing opposition
to Larry's signing. Simply because he was black. But Veeck said that none of the 81,000 fans who were on their feet cheering Larry's World Series home run in 1948 seemed to care about the color of his skin!”
²⁰
The game set a new World Series single-game attendance record, and the Indians were one game away from the championship.

Afterward the clubhouse picture of winning pitcher Steve Gromek hugging Doby went around the world on television screens and in hundreds of newspapers. Doby told his biographer many years later: “The picture was more rewarding and happy for me than actually hitting that home run. It was such a scuffle for me until that picture. The picture finally showed a moment of a man showing his feelings for me. I think enlightenment can come from such a picture.”
²¹

The night before the fifth game, in the press headquarters at the Hollenden House Hotel, somebody asked Veeck who was going to pitch for his club.

“Feller,” Bill said.

The reporter shook his head. “He can't win.”

“Why not?” Bill asked.

“It just wouldn't be right, somehow. Things like that All-Star game have to catch up with him.”
²²

The crowd of 86,288 for the fifth game eclipsed the previous game's record and was the largest that had ever seen a major-league ball game. The Braves had seemed dispirited over their three straight losses, their pitching strength had been depleted, and manager Billy Southworth had no one to call on as a starter but the veteran Nelson Potter, who figured to be easy prey for the Indians.

Feller seemed to have every chance to win because, despite a rocky first inning in which he gave up three runs, the Indians rallied to knock out Potter, who was relieved by Warren Spahn, and were leading 5–4 going into the sixth inning. But then Bill Salkeld, a .242 hitter during the season, hit a home run to tie, and the Braves scored six runs in the seventh to knock Feller out. As he walked off the mound, the hooting and jeering were deafening. In the press box, Moe Berg said: “They don't feel sorry for him, but I do. He waited all this time to get into a World Series and when he finally made it, he couldn't win.” Satchel Paige came in to relieve Feller, becoming the first black pitcher to take the mound in World Series history.
²³
Boston won 11–5 to narrow the Indians lead to 3–2. Spahn got the win.

At the end of Sunday's game, a reporter from
Time
magazine found Boudreau in the Cleveland dressing room and asked who would pitch the nextday.
“It'll be Bob Lemon tomorrow,” said Boudreau. When the reporter asked, “How about Tuesday?” Boudreau snapped: “There'll be no game Tuesday.”
²⁴

The sixth game was tight all the way. Twice the Indians took the lead, but the Braves kept coming back. In the last of the eighth, trailing 4–1, Boston rallied again and put the tying run on base. Boudreau was in a difficult spot. Lemon was obviously tiring and had to be relieved, but Feller had worked the day before, and if he put in Bearden and lost, the Braves would have the edge, with Johnny Sain primed for the seventh game. Boudreau took the chance and called on Bearden, who stopped the Braves cold, saving the 4–3 championship victory for Lemon.

That night Veeck held an impromptu victory party, during which someone noticed that Doby and Paige were missing. Practically the entire team went searching for them at their hotel and brought the two men back to the party. Jackie Reemes of the
Amsterdam News
reported this story in his column as evidence that the team had become a model for racial harmony. He added that this was done in Boston, where “numerous signs of Jim Crowism pop up on the horizon and speak well for the guys who comprise the Indian roster.”
²⁵

The party on the train home was memorable. Before the train left South Station, Veeck walked into the dining car and all the players and their wives gave him a standing ovation. As the champagne corks popped, Boudreau proposed a toast to Don Black. Veeck poured milk, water, and champagne on everyone. Bottles of sparkling burgundy were shaken, opened, and aimed like guns. The entire dining car was a shambles, and a worried conductor demanded payment for the damage. Traveling secretary Spud Goldstein told him to send a bill, which came to $3,000.

When the players arrived at the terminal, they were greeted by a howling mob. Fortunately, most of them had topcoats to throw over their burgundy-stained clothes, which Veeck had promised to replace with new tailor-made suits. The victory parade down Euclid Avenue delighted a crowd estimated at more than 300,000 people, who cheered wildly as a caravan of convertibles went by. Oceans of confetti flew out of downtown office buildings, and the police had to struggle to create a path for the cars. Veeck, Boudreau, and Boudreau's wife, Della, occupied the lead car, which was hubcap-deep in confetti by the end of the parade. Inside the rest of the convertibles were the world champion Indians, who, in the words of Hal Lebovitz, “had just taken part in the wildest, wackiest, most dramatic—and melodramatic—season in the history of the American League and, possibly, in the history of all baseball.”
²⁶

Before bidding them goodbye, Veeck told his players they could keep their uniforms and jackets as mementos of the season—a far cry from the pre-Veeck days, when balls hit into the stands were considered property of the club and collected from the fans.

Veeck watched as the crowd dispersed and his players went their separate ways. “Everybody seemed to have somewhere to go except me. If we had come home at night I would have been all right, but where, I wondered, did people go in the daytime?”

He walked home alone to an empty apartment to savor his moment of triumph and quickly realized triumph has no flavor unless it can be shared. “I sat in my empty apartment, with the sunlight all around me,” he recalled years later in
Veeck—as in Wreck
, “and I thought of my son who was something less than proud of me. And I thought of my wrecked marriage and my lost family. And I thought of Harry Grabiner in a deep coma, waiting for death. I'd had it all, everything I'd hoped for when I came to Cleveland. Everything and more.” He then wrote perhaps the most moving sentence in
Veeck–as in Wreck:
“I had never been more lonely in my life.”
²⁷

In the days after attaining the World Championship, Veeck continued to display his generosity to his players—or “ath-a-letes,” as he called them—with pen and checkbook. Steve Gromek was a case in point. In 1947 the pitcher had hurt his knee and not pitched often, so Veeck had cut his 1948 contract by $2,500, adding that he would make it up to him if he had a good year. He pitched sparingly during spring training and worried that he would not make the twenty-five-man squad, but he ended up with a 9–3 record and won game 4 of the World Series. After the season, Veeck called Gromek at home and told him he had a bonus check for him. “So I asked him what the amount was,” Gromek recounted decades later, “and it was $5,000. I told him he was a real Santa Claus. Bill Veeck was a great guy and I just loved him.” Gromek was not alone. Batboy Billy Sheriden got his World Series share of $1,693 plus the customary tips from the players, but Veeck tossed in an extra $1,000, sending him home with about $3,000.
²⁸

Don Black received his World Series share of $6,970 from Veeck on November 8, two weeks after he left Mercy Hospital. The presentation was photographed and put out on the Associated Press wire. Black looked elegant in a jacket, natty tie, and vest. And Veeck smiled as though he knew Black was worth everything he had paid him and then some.

The Indians drew 2,620,627 to the stadium that year, a record that stood until the Los Angeles Dodgers broke it in 1962. What had happened was unprecedented. Veeck had created a “people's team” and a market for that team that not only drew from the immediate area but also attracted fans from Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Shirley Povich of the
Washington Post
had been in the stadium one Sunday in July and heard the public address announcer say: “The special train for Detroit will leave a half hour after the game”—this on a day when the Tigers were playing at home three hours away.
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Povich was so impressed he featured the episode in his column, and the announcement implying that fans from Detroit were chartering trains to get to the game in Cleveland stood as a metaphor for Veeck's drawing power.
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Sadness followed the triumph. On October 24 Harry Grabiner died two days after an operation to remove a brain tumor. Veeck had regarded him as his closest friend, his balancing wheel, and “the smartest man I ever met in baseball.”
³⁰

Neither Don Black nor Russ Christopher would ever pitch again. Veeck signed Black for 1949, but Black was unable to make a comeback in spring training and was paid in full for the season. He died at age forty-two in 1959 while watching the Indians on television. Christopher's heart finally gave out in 1954, when he was only thirty-seven.

Gene Bearden would never come close to his magical 1948 performance. Over five more years in the American League he would win only 25 more games and never approach the sparkling 2.43 earned run average of his rookie season.

Joe Earley would fall back into relative obscurity, and more than sixty years later Cleveland fans would still be waiting for a season as satisfying as 1948. For Veeck the satisfaction came at a number of levels, beginning with the World Championship and extending through his deep pleasure in seeing Paige triumph over those who thought he was past his prime. Veeck later summarized Paige's record in 1948: “Six and one. And the one ball game he lost was an unearned run. And he also worked in relief, and
saved us a couple ball games…. And obviously you can see that he did win the pennant for us. But then I felt I could justify any attack based on the fact that he was going to be the decisive factor and I couldn't find another pitcher of equal ability that was available to me from any other club.”
³¹

The team harbored a deeper secret that helped it during the season, one that became known only years later: Boudreau and the Indians were involved in an audacious sign-stealing scheme that had, at the least, Veeck's passive blessing and involved three future Hall of Famers: Boudreau, Feller, and Lemon.

To pick up pitch signs from opposing catchers, the Indians employed a telescope that Feller had used as a gunnery officer on the USS
Alabama
during the war. “I used it to pick up enemy aircraft coming in at us,” Feller recalled. “It's only about three feet long, maybe a little less, about 2½ feet. I've still got it at my home.”
³²
The telescope was mounted on a tripod, placed in the Cleveland scoreboard, and operated alternately by Feller or Lemon, the latter recalling that he could see the dirt under the catcher's fingernails. They would call out the next pitch to groundskeepers—brothers Marshall and Harold Bossard or their father, Emil—who would then use another opening in the scoreboard to relay the signs to Cleveland hitters by a variety of changing signals.
³³

The Indians were also involved in what has been euphemistically termed “creative groundskeeping.” Groundskeeper Emil Bossard carefully custom-built the diamond for every home game. Other teams did this too, but Bossard was incomparable. The pick-and-shovel artist slanted the foul lines to favor the Indians. And because Keltner, Gordon, and Boudreau were slow, Bossard made the infield soft and slow, giving them time to catch up to hard grounders. This was certainly well known to Veeck, one of whose oft-stated maxims was “A good groundskeeper can be as valuable as a .300 hitter.”
³⁴

The Indians were hardly alone in this skullduggery in the late 1940s and 1950s. “Hey, all's fair in love and war, and when you're trying to win a pennant,” said Feller, who admitted that he was “probably” the instigator of the sign-stealing ring, which began a few weeks into the season when the Indians discovered that bullpen spies in Detroit and Boston were keeping them under surveillance. Other teams had a pretty good idea what the Indians were up to; on one occasion, as an Indian home run hit off Joe Page landed
in the seats, the whole Yankee bench jumped up and began pointing at the scoreboard.
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