Bill Veeck (48 page)

Veeck was scheduled to be one of the keynote speakers at the seventy-second annual convention of the American Booksellers Association at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington in early June 1972. Despite the book's delay, Veeck won over his audience, acknowledging he read five to six books a week, revealing that he had read almost all of Shakespeare and that he loved to buy and give away books, and describing his increasing role as a book reviewer for such papers as the
Baltimore Sun
and the
Chicago Tribune.
When Alvin Beam, the book editor of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
, asked him if he might someday return to own the Indians, Veeck replied that he probably would not because—quoting Robert Browning—he felt he could never recapture that “first fine careless rapture.” Veeck quoted other bits from English poets, much to the delight of those assembled. Appropriately, another luncheon speaker was Jackie Robinson, who was there to promote his own book. “I happened to fall in behind the two men as they left the hall,” Beam reported in his column. “It was good to watch them.”
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On June 19, 1972, the Supreme Court, by a 5-to-3 margin in the matter of
Flood v. Kuhn
, upheld the antitrust exemption granted Major League Baseball, denying Curt Flood damages and relief from the reserve clause. However, even though the court had ruled in baseball's favor, the ruling admitted that the original grounds for the antitrust exemption were tenuous at best, that baseball was indeed engaged in interstate commerce for purposes of the act, and that its exemption was an anomaly. The contradictory nature of the decision invited a closer look at the sport's status and set the stage for new attempts to achieve free agency.

Veeck returned to Easton following the collapse of Suffolk Downs. All the while the Veecks lived in Maryland, he maintained a large wooden idea box into which hundreds of promotional ideas were stuffed, some of them
written on cocktail napkins. Mike Veeck recalled that because of the nature of the house, periodic fire drills were staged, and “my job was to carry the box in case of fire.” The box was maintained in preparation for Veeck's eventual return to the game.
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Veeck was still a baseball man at heart and always had an eye out for talent. In 1972 Bob Boinski, a local waterman and friend who was also Veeck's house painter, reported that he had spotted a thirteen-year-old player named Harold Baines who was worth a look. “I recommended him to Bill,” said Boinski. “In a small area like this, you get to see all the local kids. Everybody was talking about him. Everybody had heard of him. You could already see that he had all the tools.” Veeck was impressed with his flowing swing and told his lifeguard friend Roger Clark, “This guy's got it.” He befriended Baines and vowed to maintain contact with him.
⁴²

Thirty Tons a Day
was finally released in late November 1972, allowing Veeck a press conference in Manhattan, where his comments, as usual, made the wires: “Baseball and horse racing are similar sports—both are moribund,” he said at one point. Addressing the issue of owners and general managers who insisted on baseball's mystique, he scolded them: “What mystique? Remember Little Leaguers play it.”
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By early 1974 he was far enough out of the public eye that the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
could run a feature entitled “Whatever Happened to Bill Veeck?” He told the reporter assigned to the story, “I'm a bum living on the Eastern Shore who will occasionally foray into the outside world. The last six weeks I've been carting wood because I can't move around. I recently had another operation, number five on my good leg.” The good leg was in a cast, and he told the reporter that he was facing knee replacement surgery in the fall.
⁴⁴

Later in 1974, Veeck attempted once again to buy the Baltimore Orioles. Though his offer was initially accepted, negotiations fell apart in June 1975 for reasons that were never made clear. Veeck said that Jerold Hoffberger had given no explanation other than the fact that his problems had nothing to do with Veeck.

“The most bitterly disappointed man on the Eastern Seaboard today is Bill Veeck of Easton, Md.,” wrote Red Smith in his column on June 11. “After investing more than a year of his life in an effort to buy the Baltimore Orioles, he was told yesterday that the deal was off—seven months to the day after one offer was accepted.” Veeck lamented: “This means the loss of a friend, the loss of a ball club, the loss of a year and a lot of dollars—and for me at the age of 61, the loss of innocence.”
⁴⁵

Veeck seriously considered a lawsuit and never spoke to Hoffberger again, nor did he ever again consume a can of Hoffberger's beer. He had desperately wanted to get back into baseball and had seen Baltimore, a city he had a genuine affection for, as the place where he would make his final mark on the game, but it was not to be. “I can't hear, can't see, can't walk, and yet I want to get involved in the last hurrah,” Veeck, commenting on his deteriorating condition, told Bob Maisel of the
Baltimore Sun.
⁴⁶

A week after the Baltimore deal soured, word reached Veeck that John Allyn, who had bought the White Sox from him with his brother and had subsequently bought his brother out, was having trouble making payroll and that the team would soon be on the block. The other owners wanted to move it to Seattle, which was suing baseball for allowing the expansion Pilots to leave at the end of the 1969 season to become the Milwaukee Brewers the following April.

On July 31, 1975, a Chicago businessman and good friend of Veeck's, Andy McKenna, arrived in Easton to ask him to come back to Chicago and lead a group, including McKenna, that wanted to purchase the team from Allyn.
¹
Throughout the summer and into the fall, Veeck, McKenna, and Allyn continued to talk and negotiate. Then on October 1, Dave Condon of the
Chicago Tribune
published a report saying that Veeck was about to spend $10 million to buy the White Sox. Veeck coyly insisted that he had made no offer and wasn't even certain he was interested. But three days later he announced a complicated financial transaction by which he would purchase control of the Artnell Company, of which the White Sox were a division, with Allyn remaining a minority stockholder.
²

Veeck got some of the best press of his life in the next week. He accepted invitations to speak at prayer breakfasts and other charity events and waxed rhapsodic about the pending deal.
³
“My acquiring the White Sox can be summed up in the titles of two books:
The Return of the Native
and
The Last Hurrah
,” he said on one of those occasions.
⁴
The deal to buy the team was
tentative, however, because it would ultimately depend on the approval of the other American League owners. In fact, on the day it was announced, the
Chicago Sun-Times
reported that it was doubtful the American League would approve a sale to Veeck. One unnamed owner was quoted as saying that there was “no chance” the sale would go through.
⁵

The owners were to have an answer by November 15, 1975. “I don't expect any problems,” Veeck said optimistically, “but I've been wandering too long to know a sure bet is not always a sure bet.” Early comments by other owners were generally favorable, but with some genuine reservations. Calvin Griffith of the Minnesota Twins told the
Chicago Tribune
, “He did give us a couple of black eyes when he called baseball owners generally ‘stupid,' but my mind is always flexible.” Brewers owner Bud Selig was among the most positive, pointing out that he had been weaned on Veeck's Brewers at the old Borchert Field and that he had a lot of respect and admiration for him.
⁶

Sportswriters were adamantly in favor of giving Veeck his last hurrah. “When a man is in his 60s, has one wooden leg, has had major surgery on his so-called good leg, with the implanting of a metal-knee hinge next on the schedule, and he still wants to get back into baseball as much as Bill Veeck, he gets my vote,” wrote Bob Maisel in the
Baltimore Sun
.
⁷

November 15 came and went without a decision. The league had not had enough time to review the paperwork for the deal, which now involved thirty investors, of whom at least twenty-five were from Chicago, and of those, one was an unnamed African American. The ownership group included such baseball notables as former Reds owner William O. DeWitt, Hank Greenberg, and former Orioles manager Paul Richards. The American League owners agreed to meet on December 3 in Cleveland.

The day of the meeting, the
Washington Post
revealed that the black individual in the ownership group was none other than John Harold Johnson, the owner of
Ebony
,
Jet
, and other magazines. If approved, he would be the first of his race with an ownership position in baseball. “There are those who say Johnson was a token black,” wrote William Barry Furlong, “but so was Jackie Robinson.”
⁸

The meeting was held, and after six hours behind closed doors, Veeck was turned down, 8–3, with one abstention. The stated reason was that the package contained too much debt and not enough equity, but three factors were involved, one of them Veeck himself. “He knocked the game and he
now wants to re-enter it,” said Gene Autry, owner of the California Angels. “I can't bring myself to vote for a man like that.” The Seattle lawsuit also intruded. On the day of the vote, Dave Nightingale of the
Chicago Daily News
reported that Veeck would have had the team a week earlier if it were not for “one little item”—a $20 million treble-damages lawsuit cranked up for the courts for January 12, 1976. The White Sox were, in Nightingale's view, a settlement and “payment for an impending legal fee.” Lastly, Charles O. Finley wanted the White Sox out of Chicago so that he could move his Oakland A's back to his hometown. Some believed that the owners welcomed Veeck's coming up short as an opportunity to send a team to Seattle, move Finley out of Oakland, and leave the San Francisco Bay area open for the Giants, whose owners had borrowed $500,000 from the National League and were on the verge of bankruptcy.
⁹

At the end of the meeting and by unanimous consent, Veeck was given another chance and a new deadline—a week later, on December 10, at the beginning of the Winter Meetings in Hollywood, Florida. By then the Veeck group needed to raise an additional $1.2 million in cash and convert the rest of the purchase price to preferred stock, not debentures. Reporters speculated that Veeck was being asked to jump through an impossible hoop in an impossibly short amount of time so that the league would look good in exploring his offer before moving the team to Seattle.
¹⁰

Veeck scrambled and pulled every string he could. Powerful Chicago mayor Richard Daley said he would do everything he could to help, and Veeck got a vague pledge of help from multimillionaire philanthropist and motivational speaker W. Clement Stone. To make the deal work, Veeck gave up his 15 percent commission on the sale and pledged his home in Easton as collateral.
^cw
At the last minute, Patrick O'Malley, a confidant of Mayor Daley and chairman of the Canteen Corp., came up with $250,000 that put the offer over the top.
¹¹

When the Winter Meetings convened in Florida, an odd mix of baseball people and celebrities presented their proposals. Entertainer Danny Kaye headed a group that wanted to buy the White Sox and move them to Seattle,
and comedian Milton Berle fronted for a consortium that wanted to either build a new stadium for the Atlanta Braves, suffering at the box office since moving from Milwaukee, or move the team for the third time since it had left Boston.
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The first vote was 8–3 in Veeck's favor with one abstention—one vote short of approval.
¹³
A shocked Lee MacPhail, president of the American League, then spoke up and insisted that the owners reconsider out of simple fairness, because Veeck had met all the requirements that they had set for him. The credibility of all those who opposed Veeck was now at stake. John Fetzer, owner of the Detroit Tigers and no friend of Veeck's, nonetheless made an impassioned plea that the owners make good on their promise. “We have to be men about this, I don't like the idea of letting a guy back in here who's called me a son of a bitch over and over again, but, gentlemen, we've got to take another vote.” He later explained: “I felt that the integrity of baseball was at stake in that decision. If you set up a set of conditions and ask a guy to comply, and he complies, then you are duly obligated to make good on your word.”
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This time, Veeck's offer received ten votes, with Gene Autry and one other owner holding out—almost certainly Finley, who had linked himself to the Angels' owner. (Finley had at one point put his arm around Autry and parodied the singing cowboy's signature song, “Back in the Saddle Again,” as “Back in Seattle Again.”) Traditionally, a final ceremonial vote would be taken to make the vote unanimous, but it was not to happen that night. Happiness was in short supply. Calvin Griffith of the Minnesota Twins, who had changed his vote to support Veeck, stumbled out of the meeting, saying, “I just gave eight pints of blood.” Haywood Sullivan, representing the Boston Red Sox, was presumably alluding to the Seattle situation when he commented, “We've got a mess now and we'll have a bigger one with Veeck.”
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