Bill Veeck (3 page)

The Cubs announced they would play the Series at Comiskey Park rather than their own, much smaller Weeghman Park. They had an impressive 84–45 record and a dominant pitching staff: Jim “Hippo” Vaughn had led the National League with 22 victories, Claude Hendrix had won 20, and George Tyler 19. The Red Sox, with an elite pitching staff of their own that included Carl Mays, Sam Jones, Joe Bush, and the multitalented Babe Ruth, had won the shortened American League pennant race with a 75–51 record. The young Ruth split time between the outfield and the mound, winning 13 games, batting .300, and hitting a league-leading 11 home runs.

On the eve of the World Series, Veeck—who covered both the Cubs and White Sox and had seen the Red Sox often during his reporting on White
Sox games—wrote that Boston could “murder speed, but they certainly do have their troubles with the soft stuff,” observing as well the difficulties the Red Sox had against left-handers and that the Cubs had two excellent lefties in Vaughn and Tyler. To Veeck, the margin of victory was Cubs catcher Bill Killefer, the “smartest catcher in the National League,” and he predicted that the combination of Killefer and Tyler would be unbeatable.
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So confident was Cubs manager Fred J. Mitchell that he predicted, “We will win for sure. I think the Cubs form the better, stronger ball club. The pitchers are in great form, the men have been hitting, are chock full of confidence, and I don't see a chance for them to lose … we will be victorious in the end.”

With Babe Ruth on the mound for the first of three games at Comiskey Park, the Red Sox took the first game of the Series with a 1–0 shutout over Vaughn. Tyler evened the Series the next day, allowing six hits and driving in two runs in a 3–1 win. Vaughn returned in game 3 but lost a 2–1 heartbreaker to Carl Mays. Ruth led the Sox to a 3–2 game 4 win in Fenway Park, driving in two runs with a booming triple in the fourth, his only hit of the Series.
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His consecutive scoreless innings streak in the World Series, dating back to his 1916 appearance, was stopped at 29⅔, when the Cubs scored two runs in the eighth inning.

The next morning in Boston, players from both sides, concerned about the poor attendance in both cities, threatened to strike unless the winners were each guaranteed $2,500 and the losers $1,000. They finally backed off, but no World Series rings or mementos were given out. On the field, Vaughn came back for his third start with two days of rest and blanked the Red Sox 3–0 on five hits in game 5.

Game 6 would be the Cubs' last stand, as Carl Mays won his second game with a three-hit 2–1 triumph that ended the Series and crowned his franchise as five-time World Champions. With two on and two out in the third, Red Sox outfielder George Whiteman lined a hard drive to right field. Max Flack dropped it, allowing the only runs off Tyler, who also was pitching his third game of the series. Righty Claude Hendrix, 20–7 during the year, finally made his first appearance, tossing a final inning for the Cubs.

In his post-Series analysis, Veeck identified game 4 in Boston as the turning point in what he termed “a disastrous series.” In a column entitled “Tyler's Lapse of Memory Fatal,” he accused Tyler of violating Cubs manager Fred Mitchell's directive to pitch around Ruth in key situations. With runners on first and second and two outs in the fourth, he appeared to be following Mitchell's instructions, with three pitches off the plate. Ruth clearly expected the walk, taking two perfect strikes. Killefer then called for a curve, but Tyler shook him off. “Killefer,” wrote Veeck, “certain that Tyler would never get the ball anywhere near the plate, let him have his way. The pitch was squarely across the heart, there was the swish of the bat and the game was gone.”
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In the eighth, the Cubs having rallied to tie with two runs, George “Lefty” Tyler was relieved by Phil Douglas, who took the loss when he allowed an unearned run on a single, a passed ball, and his own throwing error to first base.
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At the very least, Veeck was decrying the lack of discipline of a key pitcher compounded by the ineptitude of his reliever, but from the tone of his writing, it would seem he was implying something more sinister, namely, a fix. Veeck was as savvy as any other reporter, and it is all but certain he was aware of the fact that games were sometimes fixed. “A lot of people have the idea that the Black Sox scandal was the only fix of that era,” acknowledged Jacob Pomrenke, the chairman of the Society for American Baseball Research's Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. “To tell the truth, there were so many games that were either fixed or had players easing off. It was kind of the culture of that time.” Gamblers rode on the trains with the players and bet openly at games. “At Fenway Park they even had their own section.”
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William Wrigley Jr., a man who had made a fortune manufacturing and selling baking soda and chewing gum, became interested in baseball during a smoking-car discussion with a group of Cincinnati fans on a train in 1913. They took him to task for the fact that the Cubs were owned not by a
native but rather by a Cincinnati man named Charles P. Taft. In January 1916, Taft—the half brother of President William Howard Taft and an increasingly unpopular figure in Chicago because of his absenteeism—sold the Cubs to fast-food impresario Charles Weeghman, who had owned a team in the upstart Federal League, which had folded after the 1915 season. Weeghman had built a stadium for that team and moved the Cubs from their run-down West Side Park to the new facility in 1916. Wrigley took an increasing interest in the game and became a dedicated fan in the spring of 1918 when the Cubs were training in Pasadena, California; he invited the players and baseball writers, Bill Veeck included, to his home on Catalina Island for dinner. Having covered the two Chicago teams for nearly a decade and a half, Veeck outlined what he saw as the stregths and weaknesses of the Cubs, and he also opined on such matters as building a large fan base while creating a strong team. Veeck hated the growing influence of gambling on the game and in his columns pioneered the effort to prevent its further spread.
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Following the 1918 World Series, Wrigley, A. D. Lasker, and J. Ogden Armour purchased a controlling interest in the Cubs from Weeghman, who needed money to keep his chain of restaurants and bakeries afloat. The business had suffered a double hit, from carrying a German name during a war with Germany and from the effects of the great influenza epidemic of 1918, during which public health officials cautioned people to stay out of public places, especially restaurants. Weeghman was also a gambler who was increasingly over his head in debt.

On November 19 at a club board meeting, Wrigley took control of the team. He invited Veeck in for a second talk in early December. At one point in the conversation, Wrigley asked about the group that had run the Cubs up until this point. “Could you do any better?” he challenged Veeck.

“I certainly couldn't do any worse,” replied Veeck.
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Veeck was hired on the spot as vice president and treasurer and given stock ownership in the club. Fred Mitchell became club president, and for the moment also doubled as team manager. Whether Veeck was brought aboard to manage as well as tend to any corruption on the club is not known, though all the evidence suggests that Veeck knew something was not right with the Cubs and that Wrigley was a man of scrupulous honesty.
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Harry Neily of the
Chicago American
noted that while the appointment came as a surprise, Wrigley could not have made a better choice, because
Veeck possessed a “keen knowledge of the politics of the game and the peculiar code that governs it.” Harry Hochstadter of the
Evening Post
called Veeck an “ardent booster” of the game who was known for being fair and impartial and who was now in a position to implement some of the ideas on running a club he had for years shared with fellow members of the press box. Veeck's mission was to turn a second-rate business property into a profitable first-rate baseball operation.
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Wrigley and Veeck's first task was to make the ballpark more attractive to patrons of both sexes, with a high priority given to the women's restrooms. Believing players were more attractive clean than dirty, Veeck issued each player six changes of uniform instead of the customary two.

Veeck's first Opening Day in 1919 was a crowd-pleaser. Instead of having a politician throw out the opening pitch, Veeck opted for a battery of two men just back from the service: Sgt. Grover Cleveland Alexander, recently returned from duty in Germany, pitching to Sgt. Bill Killefer, who had served his time at a base in Michigan. In their honor and in honor of the fact that the Great War had ended with an armistice the previous November 11, a new American flag was to be raised over the park. Yet the war debts were immense. Victory loan drives were still ongoing, and the Cubs, like other American businesses, remained under a federal allotment for the sale of war bonds.

Veeck came up with the novel idea that the Cubs would play the New York Giants by telegraph following a set of unique rules: a virtual game in which the players moved around the bases as money was raised to retire the nation's war debt. The Cubs' “home field” was the dining room of the Blackston Hotel. Fans were admitted to the hotel suite for free, with no limit on how much they might spend to win the game.

The rules were simple. Max Flack, the Cubs' leadoff hitter, would be announced, and his “at-bat” would last two minutes. If $5,000 was raised in that time, Flack would be credited with a base hit and go to first base. If the money was not raised, he was out. Should double that amount be raised, he would get a double, and for three times that amount a home run. Each batter would “hit” under the same rules.

While this was going on in Chicago, the Giants played a similar game in New York, with the results going back and forth by telegraph. The Giants “walked off the field” when the first million-dollar pledge was made by Albert Loeb, the executive in charge of Sears, Roebuck, and Company's
prosperous mail-order business.
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This was followed by a flurry of Chicago pledges, including another million from the International Harvester Company. Wrigley himself wired in $70,000 from Pasadena. The total pledged for war bonds was $4 million.
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Veeck quickly showed himself to be one of the most innovative front-office men in baseball. On July 7, 1919, his mandate grew: Fred Mitchell, challenged by being both club manager and president, resigned the executive position to concentrate his energies on the field. Veeck became president of the Cubs, an appointment he would hold for the rest of his life.

He rapidly became the voice of the Chicago Cubs. In his own articles, syndicated in newspapers around the country, he explained trades, discussed the pennant races, and exhorted readers to believe in the Cubs. As he told readers of the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
and other newspapers, “We're not quitters; [we're] not going to be counted out of that race until someone throws us out of it.”
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Veeck, with Wrigley's blessing, was doing with his baseball team what Wrigley had done with his chewing gum: advertise, promote, and create goodwill. An open date at the ballpark was a vacuum Veeck felt he had to fill with something newsworthy, so, for a Saturday late in August when the team was on the road, he staged an Army-Navy baseball game The game benefitted the Chicago Babies' Free Milk Fund and featured enlisted men who had played baseball overseas during the war.
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Off the field, the biggest issue facing Veeck, and indeed all of baseball, was the persistance of gambling and the specter corruption cast over the sport. In September of Veeck's first year with the Cubs, what became known as the infamous “Black Sox” episode was played out across town during the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and Cincinnati Reds. A few influential journalists, including Veeck's friend Hugh Fullerton, suspected wrongdoing. The story finally broke almost a year later, and baseball faced the worst scandal in the history of the game. Eight members of the 1919 White Sox were eventually banished from baseball for taking money from gamblers to throw games in the World Series, handing the championship to Cincinnati.

How and when Veeck learned about what transpired is unknown, but he was acutely sensitive to the issue of gambling in baseball, and even more so after hearing a confession by a utility infielder named Lee Magee. On February 22, 1920, Veeck announced that the Cubs would not offer Magee a contract for the upcoming season. No reason was given at the time, but Magee, who joined the Cubs in 1919, told Veeck and the National League president, John Heydler, on June 10, 1919, that he “wanted to make a clean breast of things” and admitted to trying to fix a game in 1918 while playing for Cincinnati. Unable to land a job with another team, Magee claimed that he was being unfairly blacklisted and took his case to the press, which eagerly fanned the flames of a public argument between Magee and his lawyers and the league president. He finally recanted his confession, sued the Cubs for $9,500, and lost. The Cubs organization was lauded for dealing firmly and decisively with a clear case of game-tossing, even though Magee's team had won the game in question. It was termed “an everlasting warning to other intending wrong-doers.”
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At the beginning of the 1920 season, Veeck spearheaded an effort to prevent betting on baseball games by banning the practice at his ballpark and by instituting a policy of not naming the Cubs' starting pitcher until the last minute, because many bets were wagered on the strength of that day's pitchers.
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This had limited success, as most teams, including his own, had a regular and predictable rotation of pitchers.