Bill Veeck (44 page)

Noting that Ford Frick was making retirement plans, David Condon suggested in the
Chicago Tribune
that Veeck might make an ideal commissioner, the one person who could put baseball back in competition with pro football and regain the confidence of the fans. But he knew most of the owners didn't want Veeck back in any capacity. “They don't want him as an owner. They don't want him as a general manager. Some I know don't even want him as a paying customer, although it is an unwritten baseball rule that an owner never passes up a dollar from any source.”
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Veeck immediately called Condon and proposed what he would do as commissioner. First and foremost, he would base his commissionership on that of the late Bert Bell of the National Football League, who equalized the distribution of talent. “Baseball owners must come to realize that if we are to sell the game on its merits, the talent must be sufficiently distributed to equalize competition.” He pointed out that this was the main reason the Green Bay Packers could exist in the NFL. “You know how long Green Bay would last in pro baseball? 30 min, I'd say.”
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But the year ended sadly for Veeck with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a man he and Mary Frances deeply admired. Following the assassination, Veeck flew from Easton to Washington with his son Mike to pay his respects in person. His nephew Fred Krehbiel joined them, and the three took their place in line to pass by the closed coffin. Veeck's war service in the Marine Corps was well known and his disability obvious, and members
of the Marine Corps guard encouraged the three of them to take a place at the front of the line. A request then came from a representative of the Kennedy family to move forward, but Veeck declined, insisting that he was just an ordinary citizen standing in line with his son and his nephew. “We stood in line for fifteen hours,” remembered Mike. His father's pants were soaked in blood from the standing, but they held their positions in the cold.
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Veeck's plan for the Maryland Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair had been adopted and was under construction when
Popular Science Monthly
asked him to design “The Perfect Ball Park,” which was depicted in the March 1964 issue of the magazine: a 50,000-seat single-use baseball stadium with a retractable roof, removable sod, foam rubber seat pads, and moving walkways. Human vendors would be replaced by roaming robots. It gave Veeck another chance to take a poke at the stodgy baseball establishment. “Baseball has never been accused of being progressive” was his lead to the article, which continued, “In the words of one ballpark operator, ‘If it wasn't done in 1901, it can't amount to much.'”
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On August 19, 1964, Bill's mother, Grace DeForest Veeck, died at her home in Hinsdale and was buried under a marker that did not list the year of her birth—a final attempt to obscure the fact that she had married a man who was younger than she was. She had lived a comfortable life in good measure because of the sale of her shares in the Cubs.
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In 1964 Veeck became a commentator on ABC's
Wide World of Sports
, which—wisely—taped his pieces to guard against libel. Being on the show put Veeck on the road to major-league cities, where he generated considerable press attention beyond the broadcasts themselves. He was anywhere and everywhere during the mid-1960s, including Harlem Globetrotter events and fund-raisers. Just showing up somewhere often yielded ink. “Bill Veeck was sitting in the manager's office at the White Sox ball park yesterday,” commented David Condon in the
Chicago Tribune
, “[and] looked more at home than Whistler's Mother in the rocker.”
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Veeck continued to let others know that he still wanted to get hold of the Senators or, as he told several writers, the Cubs. “Either of those two would be great fun. The potential with both of them is tremendous,” he said at a moment in the 1965 season when the Cubs were in ninth place and had lost ten of their last thirteen games, adding, “Both have more or less fallen into evil ways.”
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He lobbied constantly to have Hank Greenberg made commissioner. He also gave a steady stream of interviews to reporters who never seemed to get
enough of his fresh and/or irreverent take on baseball and the world beyond it. It was as if the writers now needed Veeck as much as he had needed them in the past. The game was becoming blander and more corporate, and Veeck was, as one of the Cleveland papers called him, “baseball's vitamin pill.”

His interviews became more and more far-ranging and increasingly political. “Uncle Ho [Chi Min] is a mystic,” he told Scott Smith of the
Washington Star
while discussing the Vietnam war in 1966. “I don't think his people are fighting for a cause. They're fighting, I think, because we bomb them. You drop bombs on some guy's rice paddy and he gets mad at you.”
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At the end of 1966, Veeck published another book written with Ed Linn,
The Hustler's Handbook
, a series of caustic essays on various aspects of baseball. It had been preceded by excerpts in
Look
and
Sports Illustrated
and had one constant refrain—that baseball owners were not to be trusted to do the right thing. A wistful chapter entitled “Where Are the Drunks of Yesteryear?” contained the observation: “Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober.” Another chapter addressed the issue of race, which Veeck discussed with an edge: “The National League is superior to the American League these days because … the National League stocked up on Negro players while the American League was sitting back and admiring how nicely the Yankees were getting along without them.”

The big surprise was the fifty pages devoted to the 1919 Black Sox and the scandal that had ensued after that year's World Series. When Veeck had taken over the White Sox in 1959, he had sent his nephew Fred Krehbiel down to clean out three adjacent storerooms underneath Comiskey Park. Krehbiel recalled, “I spent days down there getting rid of junk. In the third room in the back there were shelves with a door behind which was this notebook,” which Veeck identified as belonging to Harry Grabiner.
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An official for the White Sox during the Black Sox scandal, Grabiner had kept the notes that a private detective had prepared about corruption on the team. Veeck revealed the notes in his book, with this observation: “Looking back at the Black Sox scandal from this comfortable distance it becomes easy to take another drag on your cigarette and sneer that everybody did their best to cover up everybody. Everybody from the Commissioner on down.
Everybody.
From the Commissioner on down.”
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The most interesting detail in the notebook, on page 27, was the name
Eugene Milo Packard attached to the chilling words “1918 Series fixer.”
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“Oh Boy,” wrote Veeck. “That was the Series where the players struck before the start of the fifth game for a higher share of the receipts.” This was, he well knew, also the Series involving the Chicago Cubs that his father had covered and criticized as a journalist just before being hired by the team. Packard had pitched for the Cubs in 1916 and for two games in 1917 before being traded to the St. Louis Cardinals, for whom he pitched in 1918.
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This section of
The Hustler's Handbook
succeeded in making the worst scandal in the history of the game look even worse, even more widespread, and perhaps like it was still lurking: “Anyone who thinks the moral climate of the United States today is higher than it was in 1919 hasn't looked out the window lately.” The critics loved
The Hustler's Handbook
, some calling it one of the best baseball books ever written.
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Earlier in 1966 Veeck had launched
The Bill Veeck Show
, a five-minute radio show that aired daily on eighty commercial stations and worldwide on Armed Forces Radio. Veeck was introduced by announcer Bill Cunningham as “That outspoken friend of the fans,” or “Now, the explosive man, Bill Veeck.”

Unscripted, Veeck spoke in his own distinctive vernacular. He was formal with names: There was Lawrence Doby and Leroy Paige, of course, and he referred to Stan Musial as Stanislaw, Boudreau as Louis (pronounced as if he were a French king), and Aaron and Greenberg as Henry. In hours of broadcasting, he never used the word
woman
, instead always referring to “the female of the species.” A notoriously slow infielder became “no gazelle of the greensward”; spring training was simply “spring,” as if nothing else was going on; sports were called “ath-a-letics.” As always, he called his father “my daddy.” His declarations were memorable: “A ballclub is no better than its scouts,” or “Beware of pitchers who think. They can get you killed.”

On these broadcasts Veeck loved to talk about Satchel Paige, whom he termed the ninth, tenth, and eleventh wonders of the world. “He could still pitch in the majors because he is better than half the relief pitchers in the
big leagues.” Paige, he stated, had more ways to cheat legitimately than anyone else he knew. Veeck added with discernable glee, “Larceny is a part of this great old game.”

The show was spontaneous and likely to strike out in any direction at any point. Veeck would never miss an opportunity to refresh his reputation as the burr under the saddle of the New York Yankees. On one show, the subject of what city produced the best hecklers came up. Veeck responded: “There was a guy in Philadelphia who was so good that I finally paid him to root against the Yankees.” When Cunningham told him on a fall 1966 broadcast that one of his Yankee nemeses, George Weiss, had retired from the position he had taken with the expansion New York Mets, Veeck said: “Happiness is not a thing called George. He was a good operator, but he could have been a front man for a string of mortuaries. He could have sold everyone in Vermont a tombstone. The great triumvirate of murder, manslaughter, and mayhem are all gone—Topping, Webb, and Weiss. I'll miss them like the seven-year itch.”

Veeck reveled in the Yankees disastrous 1966 season as they finished in last place, twenty-six and a half games behind the Baltimore Orioles and “playing like a tenth-place club.” Veeck remembered: “They used to beat you with espirit de corps; now they are losing because they lack it.” Toward season's end, on September 21, 1966, the Yankees drew only 413 fans to a home game, which Veeck likened to “going to a nightclub and being the only person there.” He mentioned gleefully that this was the smallest crowd in the majors that year and the lowest at the stadium since World War II. Allegedly, the fact that Yankee announcer Red Barber mentioned the attendance on the air was enough to get him fired. Veeck defended Barber with relish, caustically remarking that the Yankees were starting their rebuilding process by firing the announcer.

But after crowing that he had “waited twenty-five years to see them abjectly humiliated” and that he had “enjoyed every second” of their fall into the cellar, Veeck admitted in a later show that watching the Yankees crumble was not as much fun as he had thought it would be. “It is not good for baseball to let them languish. Their farm system is depleted…. Let them sneak out of the cellar.”

On the air, Veeck took deep umbrage at the maltreatment of people with physical disabilities. In Veeck's opinion, a ruling by the National Federation of High Schools prohibiting amputees from playing football set an “all-time track record for stupidity.” As a result of the ruling, Dave Bartlett of North Chicago found he was banned because his leg was amputated below the knee
and he wore an artificial leg. The federation reasoned that the 220-pound, six-foot-four lineman might hurt himself if he played any more games. What really irked Veeck was that the federation had the backing of the American Medical Association, which he insisted “hasn't been right since 1906. They have a worse win-and-loss record than the Chicago Cubs.” He concluded, “Point here is that the kid, his parents, his doctor, and his coaches all want him to play. He was second-team all-conference in his prior year, and this will cost him his senior year and presumably a scholarship.”
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One of Veeck's prime targets on the radio and elsewhere was the new commissioner, William Dole “Spike” Eckert, a former three-star general who had been selected in November 1965 from a field of more than 150, after a fifteen-month search, to replace Ford Frick. Recommended by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, who had turned down the job himself, Eckert was a poor choice but an ideal foil for Veeck—the personification of all that he thought was wrong with baseball in the mid-1960s.
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Veeck's relentless disdain for the sitting commissioner was based on Eckert's stodginess, his timidity, and the fact that his baseball knowledge was extremely limited. “His baseball background is shallower than the premier of Japan's. The Japanese premier has seen more games.”
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On one broadcast Veeck noted that when Eckert attended the All-Star Game, “people came to see if there was such a person.”

In contrast, he was effusive when discussing those he admired, such as Marvin Miller, the new executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. “I talked with him a few days ago,” Veeck related. “Miller is a professional negotiator. The tougher they make it for him, the tougher he'll make it for them.” Veeck was delighted to see someone represent the players.

His protégé Pat Williams, having successfully entered management, had been setting attendance records with the Class A Spartanburg Phillies in South Carolina. Veeck noted that during the 1966 season Williams had staged an Impress Bill Veeck Night—replete with a strong man who pulled loaded automobiles around the bases with his teeth. But what really impressed him was one particular feature of the park: “It has the finest ladies'
rooms I have ever seen in any minor league. This is second only to a winning team in importance.” Praising Williams, he concluded, “Minor-league baseball isn't dead, but too often the guys who run it are.”
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