Bill Veeck (33 page)

A decade later in his own autobiography, however, Veeck dispelled the notion of Thurber's inspiration, explaining that it had instead come from overheard after-dinner conversations between his father and John McGraw at the Veeck home in Hinsdale, Illinois. “McGraw had a little hunchback he kept around the club as a sort of good luck charm. His name, if I remember, was Eddie Morrow. Morrow wasn't a midget, you understand, he was a sort of gnome. By the time McGraw got to the stub of his last cigar, he would always swear to my father that one day before he retired he was going to send his gnome up to bat.”
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Veeck never denied that he had been informed by the Thurber story, which itself may have been inspired by Eddie Morrow. In an attempt to referee this debate, James Tootle wrote a paper for the scholarly baseball journal
NINE
entitled “Bill Veeck and James Thurber: The Literary Origins of the Midget Pinch Hitter.” He points out that Thurber was a avid baseball fan working in New York for the
New Yorker
magazine during McGraw's years with the Giants. “There is a striking similarity in both the names and the irascible personalities of managers John McGraw and Squawks Magrew. In a roundabout way, the germ of the idea of using a mascot in a game could have come to both men from John McGraw.”

Tootle also concluded, “The point remains that in hiring Eddie Gaedel in 1951, Veeck owed a debt to Thurber. Thurber gave the idea of a midget pinch hitter shape and substance by showing him how to get the midget in uniform and on the field and by foreseeing the way to get around the objections to his actual participation in the game. Veeck deserves credit for being both an avid reader and a risk taker. But it is clear that the blueprint for actually employing a midget in a game (and for making sure he didn't swing) was drawn in Thurber's whimsical and imaginative story published ten years before three-foot-seven-inch Eddie Gaedel stepped to the plate at Sportsman's Park in 1951.”
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Two decades later, the incident remained fresh to Veeck. “Were it in my power to turn back the clock,” he observed, “I'd never send a midget to bat. No, I'd use nine of the little fellows, including the designated hitter.” Veeck
speculated that his tombstone would probably read HE SENT A MIDGET UP TO BAT, but he hoped that the epitaph would instead read HE HELPED THE LITTLE MAN.

The Gaedel stunt was received variously by other teams. Ted Williams noted in his autobiography that it worked because it got people interested in the game, but Larry Doby, a great Veeck supporter, told an interviewer many years later there were very few promotions that had not worked for Veeck. “The only thing that I can think of that really worked against him was the midget.”
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But the greatest impact of the incident came off the field. Despite the hand-wringing reaction of league officials and other team owners who at the time feared losing audience to the new medium of television, Veeck's moment of frivolity had tremendous visual impact and got everyone talking about the game, boosting the idea of baseball as appropriate for the television age.
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His next stunt was almost as visually compelling. Making good on Veeck's promise to fans from two weeks earlier, on August 24, 1951, manager Zack Taylor took the field in civilian clothes and bedroom slippers, smoking a curved-stem pipe. He seated himself in a rocking chair near the dugout, picked up a newspaper, and read leisurely as the game proceeded, managed by fans. Two of them had won an essay contest to be manager for a day, but after league president Will Harridge banned them from being on the field, Veeck decided these two would direct everybody who had entered the contest.

Some 1,115 fans—including the newly retired Connie Mack—were given placards marked YES and NO, which they held up to determine what the Browns should do next. The Browns won the game 3–2. The fans had even voted on the starting lineup, opting to replace Taylor's choice of catcher, Matt Batts, with Sherm Lollar.
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Clark Mitze, one of the two fan-managers who had won the essay contest, later observed: “We only made one bad call
which was to tell Hank Arft to steal and he was out by 20 feet.” Veeck gave Mitze a trophy, and the two became friendly, with Mitze occasionally dropping by to discuss team matters with Veeck.
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In a matter of weeks Veeck had become more fun to watch than his team; as one writer later put it, he was “as hard to ignore in St. Louis as a team of runaway Clydesdales.” He was impossible to ignore elsewhere as well: as Arthur Daley archly observed in the
New York Times
, “Bill Veeck not only never lets sleeping dogs lie, he ties tin-cans on every wagging tail he can reach.”
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At this time, all of baseball was slavishly bent on appeasing the U.S. House Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee to protect the sport's unique set of privileges, including the reserve clause. Many in Congress felt that baseball, with its networks of farm clubs and its movement of teams, should be subject to the rules regulating interstate commerce. Veeck was a well-established foe of the reserve clause, but he also had little tolerance for those in power who meddled with the game. He said nothing until the chairman of the committee, Rep. Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, mentioned on television that if not for the reserve clause, pitcher Ned Garver would be making about $90,000 a year instead of the $18,000 he was being paid for the current season by Veeck. “What was Garver's record in 1950?” Veeck shot back, alluding to Garver's 13–18 record. “I've never heard yet of anybody paying $100,000 to a pitcher who lost five more games than he won. I doubt very much if Mr. Celler knows about the intricacies of baseball. I certainly wouldn't assume to tell Mr. Celler about politics. I suggest you reciprocate. Stick to politics, and let the baseball people run baseball.” Veeck's fellow owners were not amused by his flippant attitude toward Congress, which held the power to upset their monopoly.

All his promotions aside, the Browns remained a bad team on the field and would end the year with a mere fifty-two wins, forty-six games behind the pennant-winning Yankees. An astonishing twenty of those wins came on the arm of Ned Garver, the lone bright spot on the team, who enjoyed by far the best of his fourteen seasons in the majors. One small consolation occurred on September 11, when the Browns temporarily knocked the Yankees out of first place by taking both games of a doubleheader. Yankee president Dan Topping blamed the twin losses on Max Patkin's clown act at first base. Cleveland executive Hank Greenberg then threatened to trade one of
his Indians players for Patkin in order to jinx the Yankees in an upcoming series. Veeck shot back to his former partner and still good friend: “There's no one on the Indians I would take for Patkin.”
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Heading into 1952, Veeck decided to hire as many ex-Cardinals as he could afford. At the end of the 1951 season, a rumor circulated that Fred Saigh was going to hire Rogers Hornsby as the Cardinals manager. Hornsby had piloted the Seattle Rainiers to the 1951 Pacific Coast League pennant, and while in New York for the World Series, Veeck hired him to replace Zack Taylor as manager of the Browns. A Hall of Fame player, Hornsby's lifetime batting average of .358 was topped only by Ty Cobb's .367. But as a manager, Hornsby had achieved less success. He had been fired as player-manager of the Cardinals despite winning the 1926 World Series. Six years later, Veeck's father had fired him during the Chicago Cubs' pennant-winning 1932 season, and the Browns themselves had axed him during their dismal 1937 season, Hornsby's last as a player. Each time the reason was Hornsby's gambling; he would not stop betting on horses. Veeck thought Hornsby had mellowed after almost sixteen years out of the majors and gave him a three-year contract, the most generous ever accorded to a Browns manager.

At the signing, Veeck declared: “This is the dawn of a new era in Browns history.” Hornsby declared it would be a new era of “no midgets, no gimmicks, but good baseball.” At Hornsby's insistence, Veeck released all of the Browns 1951 coaches, including Veeck's pal and former Cleveland Indian Johnny Berardino. By the end of the month Hornsby vowed that the Browns would never finish in last place again. When asked what guarantee he had against that eventuality, he answered, “Me!”
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Hornsby was, as one columnist put it, “a man apart in baseball.” Hardboiled and demonstrably humorless, he eschewed social gatherings, music, books, movies, alcohol, cards, tobacco, and even the company of other ballplayers. He never went to the movies, and when television came along, he avoided it as well, for fear of straining his batting eye.
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His hiring by Veeck was a surprise given Hornsby's objection at the time to Jackie Robinson's signing. “Negro ball players and white ball players will never get along. It is socially impossible for them to do so. Not only that,” he had argued, “but I don't think there are any good enough to make the majors.” But Veeck believed he was no longer prejudiced.
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After the season Veeck and Fred Saigh, who had hardly spoken to each other other for the previous six months, called off their feud long enough
to appear as Romeo and Juliet on a local radio show for the Red Cross blood bank. Picked by the studio audience, Veeck played Romeo to Saigh's Juliet. Said Veeck later, “I congratulated him. He made a dignified Juliet. It was purely platonic.”
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At the end of November, Saigh fired the very popular former Cardinals shortstop Marty Marion after his first season as the team's manager. Veeck immediately hired him, paying Marion $35,000, which was $10,000 more than he had ever made with the Cardinals, to come out of a retirement as a player, while signing him to a $17,000-a-year contract for three years as a Browns coach.
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Aiming to improve on his 1951 squad, Veeck acquired his former Cleveland ace Gene Bearden and dramatically overturned his roster. He tried to attract a name from the list of prominent black players that Abe Saperstein had created for him ten years earlier. Negro league star Buck Leonard got a call from Veeck while playing baseball in Mexico. “He wanted to know would I like to play for his team. I said no thank you,” Leonard later recalled. “I was forty-five years old, too old to play major league ball full time. It was all right to play in Mexico where we only had three games a week and the competition was not so rough. But not major league. He said, ‘I'm gonna call you back tomorrow evening,' but I still told him no. He even wanted me to come up to L.A. for spring training. I was supposed to ask Bill Veeck for a job, and he was going to give it to me. In that way, he wouldn't be accused of recruiting me for publicity. But I told him no. My
legs
were too old. You know, your legs will always tell your true age. He said, ‘You don't have to play the field. We just want you to pinch-hit.' But I didn't want that—to bat just once in a game. Now, if they'd had the DH back then,” Leonard added, “I might've gone.”
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However happy he was to have Hornsby as his manager, Veeck was quickly at odds with him on the issue of Satchel Paige. Hornsby wanted Paige traded, and when Veeck refused, he said that Paige would have to earn a spot on the team as if he were a rookie. Flexing his owner's muscles, in February 1952 Veeck delivered a Brotherhood Week speech at Vashon High School at which he said he had a “firm position” that wherever he operated a baseball team, Paige was going to pitch.
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If Veeck had a problem outside the lines, it was at the box office. “Veeck really went into action that winter,” says Hank Peters of the winter of 1951–52. “He went anywhere and everywhere he could to sell the team.” His problem was that he had so little to sell. But maybe Hornsby could help.”
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At spring training that year, however, Hornsby insisted on an understanding
that he would stand for no tactical interference from Veeck, whose fondness for stunts and promotions went against Hornsby's rough-hewn grain. Early in March two cars pulled up to the practice field and out popped seven midgets led by Billy Curtis, one of the Munchkins in
The Wizard of Oz
, who were there leading the Hollywood Midgets to challenge the Browns to an exhibition game. Hornsby had been tipped off to the publicity stunt and went along with the gag for a few minutes, but then suddenly ordered them to leave. “One of those little old midgets just stared at me,” he later wrote in his petulant and aptly titled autobiography
My War with Baseball
. “So I picked him up by the seat of the pants and collar and threw him over the railing…. We didn't have any more midgets around after that.” When the Browns traveling secretary, Bill Durney, heard about it, he said that Veeck had had nothing to do with it, and he was surprised Hornsby had not greeted them with a shotgun.
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All through spring training Hornsby drove his players ruthlessly, trying to instill a little of his own spark into the lackluster group. Impatient with imperfection, he bawled them out repeatedly and publicly. Joe DeMaestri would later talk of the “horror of playing for Hornsby who got on his players for everything. He tried to teach everybody his way. He'd say ‘You can't hit that way,' grabbed the bat to show you how he did it like you could have .400 doing it his way, too.”
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His rules were draconian. Once you were at the ballpark there was to be no talk about anything other than baseball. He banned beer from the clubhouse and enacted a strict ban on smoking, card playing, and any other recreation not associated with the game. Radios were banished for the season. “He was really a tough nut,” said Hank Peters, who tried to work with him. “I was working with a new pitcher and he passed by and I asked him how he liked the kid and he looked at me and said, ‘That's your job,' and turned away.' He just wouldn't give me the time of day and I was responsible for getting new talent ready for the team. He just didn't like other people.”
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