Bill Veeck (38 page)

Veeck's group included Hoffberger, president of the National Brewing Company of Baltimore. The other seven groups initially interested included one headed by matinee idol Clark Gable and another involving Cy Block, a onetime Chicago Cubs infielder and now an insurance executive in New York City who specialized in selling life insurance to ballplayers.

Gable and Block dropped out or joined other groups, so the final group that presented sealed bids included Chicago insurance executive Charles O. Finley, backed by the same Chicago men—Philip R. Clarke and Lester Armour—who had helped finance Veeck's purchase of the Indians ten years earlier. Finley, whose office was in the same building as those of Major League Baseball in Chicago, was eager to become a force in baseball, and this was his first attempt to buy in. All groups were told that they should expect to pay at least $5 million for the club and that any deal would require keeping Spike in a top management position for five years.
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Detroit News
sports editor H. G. Salsinger, the most powerful and persuasive voice in Detroit sports, did not hide the fact that he disliked Veeck. His column on July 11, under the headline “No Veeck Circus,” cautioned that if Veeck's bid for the Detroit franchise was accepted, Detroit's fans would have to “view the city's baseball future with apprehension.” Recounting Veeck's use of fireworks, clowns, and a midget to get people into his ballparks (Eddie Gaedel had, after all, batted against the Tigers), Salsinger called for the heirs of Walter Briggs to put the future of Detroit baseball in the hands of “those resolved to continue the game with the same affection that he had for it.”
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Veeck asserted that if his bid was accepted by the Briggs family but turned down by the rest of the American League because of owners who did not like him, he would go to court.
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A few nights before the bids had to be in, Veeck met with Briggs at the Statler Hotel bar in Detroit and said he would make him chairman of the board but would not let him operate the club. Briggs said that the group headed by Fred Knorr was promising to let him run the team. A close friend, Knorr headed Dearborn-based Knorr Broadcasting, of which Briggs was a stockholder and a member of its board of directors. “All right,” Veeck replied. “But watch out. These guys are going to get the club and then throw you out.”
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On July 16, 1956, an eleven-man syndicate including singer Bing Crosby and headed by Knorr and radio and television executive John Fetzer bought
the Detroit Tigers and Briggs Stadium for a record $5.5 million, nearly $1 million higher than any previous transaction in baseball. Veeck attempted to up his bid of $5.25 million by $500,000 to make it the best offer, but it was disallowed. Spike had the control he wanted over the club, and the announcement declared that the sale meant the Tigers would remain a “dignified” operation: “no midgets, no farm nights, no roving musicians, nothing to distract the keen interest of the tie and jacket folk in the audience.”
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To some, dignity also meant keeping the team safe from racial integration. Nine years after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby broke the color barrier, the Tigers still had not signed a black player. This had first become an issue before the 1952 season, when Tigers manager Red Rolfe said the club had faltered because it had not maintained a strong farm system and had determined not to sign players from the Negro leagues.
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At the time of the sale, the Tigers still had no Negro players and had been taken to task a few days earlier by the National Negro Labor Council for maintaining a “lily-white” organization. Veeck, needless to say, had the strong backing of Detroit's large black population.
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Veeck no doubt would have signed African American players upon taking over. Veeck believed strongly that Satchel Paige was the best two-inning pitcher in baseball and would have signed him, which to some would have been an affront to the much-touted “dignity” of the club. The African American press insisted Veeck was still paying a price for signing Doby in 1947, Paige in 1948, and the other players he had brought to Cleveland in 1949: As Leslie Matthews wrote in the
Daily Defender
, “The reason why Bill Veeck did not latch onto the Tigers is because the AL moguls never forgave him for ending the loop's racial bar.”
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As the Detroit deal was crashing, Veeck, wanting to show that Miami was a major-league city, hit on the notion of setting a new all-time attendance record for a minor-league game, which he aimed to accomplish with Satchel Paige pitching on August 7, 1956, in the Orange Bowl, never before used for baseball. Paige's agreement with the Marlins required them to get his permission before he would start a game, and he would agree to start in the Orange Bowl only if the team paid off a $500 bill he had incurred in
Memphis. It was promptly paid. Thanks in part to pre-game festivities that included jazz and blues legend Cab Calloway and TV personality Merv Griffin, a crowd of 57,713 filled the stadium. Paige wandered about taking pictures of the celebrities and regular folks who had come to see him pitch. As the crowd sang “Hi-de-ho!” along with Calloway, Osborn implored Paige to take some warm-up pitches. Three minutes before the game was to start, Paige finally put his camera down, flicked a half dozen pitches, and declared himself ready to go.

The right-field foul pole was only 200 feet from home plate, and the Columbus Jets had loaded their lineup with left-handed batters eager to show Paige up.
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But only one hit went to right as Paige kept nipping the outside corner, forcing the batters to hit to left. In the 6–2 victory, Paige not only pitched into the eighth inning but also drove in three runs with a 330-foot double to left center. Osborn later called it “one of the greatest pitching exhibitions I ever saw.”
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The game raised more than $30,000 for charity, and to Veeck's satisfaction, the crowd was officially acknowledged as the largest ever to attend a minor-league game. A week later, Paige pitched a complete-game one-hitter against Rochester that earned him a standing ovation.
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In October 1956, it was widely reported that a deal was brewing between Veeck and John Ringling North to keep the big top operating by buying North's Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Veeck's group, which included his old pal Abe Saperstein, reportedly offered $21 million for performers, tents, and animals, but North wanted more, and the deal went cold quickly. Veeck and Saperstein had come up with the notion of creating a circus tent that could be inflated by water, and this would have been their moment to test the idea.
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By the end of 1956, Veeck had tired of the commute between the ranch and Florida and become dispirited by the generally poor attendance in Miami (the Orange Bowl game aside) and the realization that the team would not reach the majors. He helped his fellow owners sell the team—remarkably, with a handsome profit. Before leaving Miami he managed to find a secure berth for Paige, who remained on the Marlins' roster for two more years.
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With the sale of the Miami franchise, Veeck was, in the words of Franklin
Lewis, a “vagrant, wholly without roots,” though no less desirous of returning to baseball.
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During 1957 Veeck did some public relations work for the Cleveland Indians, whose attendance was falling steadily, to a decade low of 663,805 in 1958; there were rumors that the team would soon move to Minneapolis.

Veeck's leg was a constant source of pain, and he still had to soak his stump for several hours every morning to mitigate the discomfort of the prosthesis he would wear for the rest of the day. Lou Brissie, now working for American Legion Baseball, ran into Veeck at the 1957 World Series and they talked about their mutual affliction of osteomyelitis. Veeck put it directly to Brissie: “If they want to cut it off, let them cut it off and you will save yourself a lot of pain.”
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During the 1957–58 off-season, Veeck enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing his West Coast planning come to fruition as Walter O'Malley moved his Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles and Horace Stoneham's New York Giants remained their rivals by relocating to San Francisco. Other chickens were coming home to roost. When Veeck had been given the job of preparing the West Coast for major-league baseball, he had told anyone who would listen that revenge was at least partially on his mind. His prime target was almost certainly Del Webb, who had been promised first shot at the West Coast by the American League in return for his vote to send the Browns to Baltimore. When the National League upstaged the junior circuit by claiming Los Angeles and San Francisco, the American League would have to wait and settle for Anaheim and Oakland.
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In midsummer 1958 Veeck penned a widely syndicated series of five articles entitled “I Know Who's Killing Baseball.” Concerned that the game was on a “toboggan slide” downhill, Veeck argued it could only be saved by a series of reforms—most notably an unrestricted player draft, a scouting pool, and shared television revenues. Predictably, Veeck pointed to the existing group of owners as those who were “killing” the game. The series provoked its share of negative response, including op-ed columns in some of the newspapers that ran the Veeck series, but gained a surprising adherent in no less a figure than J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, who was a well-known baseball fan.

George Davis, sports editor of the
Los Angeles Herald Express
, ran into Hoover at the Del Mar racetrack in California and chronicled their conversation, during which Hoover told him of his appreciation for Veeck's ideas, especially those relating to a common pool for drafting players. “This could
work out like they have in professional football, and would give the weaker clubs a chance to build, instead of the wealthy ones skimming off the cream.” Sounding almost like Veeck himself, Hoover said: “Competition—fair, open and vigorous—is the backbone of our American system. It's what we call free enterprise, and there should be no place for monopoly in sports, any more than any other business.” He then added: “Baseball is our national pastime and I'm glad to see people like Bill Veeck doing their part in maintaining it as the great institution it is on the American scene.”
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Many people agreed with Veeck's opinion that the American League was in especially bad shape. Red Smith of the
New York Herald Tribune
called it “sickly,” stemming in part from the unchallenged dominance of the New York Yankees. Smith believed that what the league needed most was a challenger to the Yankees and a spark to “the bile-green depths where the Senators lie feebly twitching.”
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As 1958 drew to a close, Dorothy Comiskey Rigney, who was granddaughter of the original Charles Comiskey and who was married to former White Sox pitcher John Rigney, grew tired of a protracted legal battle with her brother, Charles, over control of the Chicago White Sox and decided to sell her 54 percent interest in the club, which she had inherited from their mother, Grace. Charles fought bitterly to gain control of the team, which he felt should have belonged to him.
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Veeck let it be known that he was putting together an offer for her shares and thereby a controlling interest in the club, which would, in the words of Red Smith in his Christmas column, be the brightest holiday news the American League had had in years. “It might be like a crackling log on to the whole dreamy organization. They don't deserve to have him back in the lodge, probably don't want him, and will be shot with luck if they get him.”
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Veeck moved quickly with seven backers and snapped up her stock for $2.7 million. Veeck's associates included both Arthur C. Allyn Sr. and Arthur C. Allyn Jr., Newton Frye, Abe Saperstein, and Hank Greenberg, who had sold his stock in the Cleveland Indians the previous November and was eager to get back into baseball, especially with Veeck as a partner. The team had been in the Comiskey family since 1901, and as a concession to its heritage, Veeck allowed minority stockholder and part owner Charles Comiskey to retain his luxurious, memorabilia-festooned president's office. Veeck was
content to run the team from an open area just behind the team's switchboard.
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Veeck had taken control of a team with a winning record from 1951 through 1958, though perennially behind the Yankees and Indians. Its fan base was declining and its stadium, Comiskey Park, was what Veeck termed “a dun-colored roach pit.” His first priority, as usual, was to improve the stadium. “If you remember, it was dark and dank when you came in; it was like going into a dungeon, so we painted everything under the grandstand white, tore down a few useless pillars, and ripped out everything that hung overhead, that loomed over you. We wanted to get away from that dungeonlike atmosphere to one of cleanliness and airiness.” He put cloth towels in the restrooms, eradicated the smell of rancid butter around popcorn stands (“We tried 15 chemical sprays before we found one that worked”), and set up a radar system to detect approaching rainstorms so that ushers could distribute free plastic rain capes before patrons got wet.
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Veeck attacked what he termed the historic and determined dislike women had for Comiskey Park. He stationed ushers just inside the gates to look for women who appeared to be on their first visit to the stadium and then escort them personally to their seats. He redecorated the once-nauseating powder rooms, tearing out the harsh fluorescent lights and installing flattering lighting as well as full-length mirrors and vanity tables. The men's rooms were magnets for graffiti, so, as he had done in Milwaukee, he installed blackboards, observing, “People write on walls, so why not let them write on a blackboard.”
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