Bill Veeck (51 page)

On August 8, the White Sox dressed for the first game of a doubleheader against Kansas City in the Bermuda-length navy blue shorts with white pullover tops that had been modeled the previous off-season. The team won the first game so adorned and then rejected the shorts, changing into their regular uniforms before the second game, which they lost. The White Sox played two more games in shorts before the idea was forever shelved, but it had been a publicity bonanza, and Veeck with a wink predicted that the practice would be commonplace within five years.
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On the day Veeck introduced the shorts, the White Sox announced that attendance was 200,000 ahead of the previous year's.
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Despite the entertainment, the White Sox were plain bad in 1976. No batter hit more than fourteen home runs, no pitcher won more than ten games. And the team's luck was no better. “I've never seen things go as badly for a team as they have for us this year,” lamented Veeck. “In every respect—weather, schedule, injuries—we've taken it on the chin.” The team had lost Wilbur Wood, the anchor of the pitching staff, when his kneecap was shattered by a line drive in early May, and then lost its top reliever, Clay Carroll, in May when he fell down the stairs at home and broke his right hand. “Let us just say disaster has struck and we are it.”
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A small glimmer of satisfaction was achieved in September when Veeck reactivated fifty-year-old Minnie Miñoso for eight at-bats so Miñoso could say he had played in four decades. As a DH, he got one hit. The Miñoso moment was especially moving for older Americans who still harbored dreams of baseball glory. Mark Plotkin, an ardent White Sox fan, was managing the 1976 presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy, who
loved the game as both a spectator and a player, when one night in Florida it occurred to the two men to see if Veeck would activate McCarthy as he had Miñoso.

Plotkin got Veeck on the second ring.

“Is this Bill Veeck?” he asked.

“You've got him.”

Plotkin asked if there was any chance Veeck would allow McCarthy to play. Despite scheduled campaign appearances, McCarthy was ready to fly to Chicago on a moment's notice.

“Can he hit?” Veeck asked

McCarthy nodded, and Plotkin said that he could.

There was a long pause, and then Veeck said, “Naaah. Daley would kill me,” referring to Chicago mayor Richard Daley.
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As the team declined, Veeck was hard-pressed to lure fans to Comiskey Park, and he attempted an array of giveaways—comic books, bats, batting helmets, decals, and more swatches of artificial turf. One night Veeck gave away all sorts of junk and at least one live animal. “I know Bill had an old piano, an old car and a donkey. They were door prizes,” organist Nancy Faust recalled. “When nobody claimed the donkey, a few days later I asked Rudie Schaffer if I could take it home. He gave me the OK.” Faust brought the 400-pound Rosita to her home in Des Plaines. “I quickly realized how smart they are,” she said at the time of her retirement in 2010, after forty-one consecutive years with the team.
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Not buying Veeck's efforts, Robert Marcus wryly observed in the
Chicago Tribune
, in a line Veeck would have appreciated, “Marie Antoinette lost her head over only suggesting what Veeck has done. The people are starved for baseball, and he sent them cakes and a circus.”
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The baseball was, in fact, dull and disappointing, and Paul Richards turned out to be a lackluster leader. “His heart just wasn't in it, concluded Joe Goddard of the
Chicago Sun-Times
.” Converting Goose Gossage from a reliever to a starter had been a mistake on several levels, as he had saved 26 games the season before. But the frequent between-innings activity was also a distraction. “It was a three-ring circus, and we were the third act,” said Gossage.
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The final home game of the season, on September 26, was scheduled to be Bill Veeck Appreciation Night, when the season's attendance was expected to reach 1 million. Anyone who sent in his or her name would be listed in the program as a cosponsor of the honorific game. Bob Feller, Max Patkin,
and many others would be on hand for the event, and there would be prizes galore, including a car to be given away by lottery.

Fittingly, it rained on Veeck's big night, and attendance was half what had been hoped for, driving home a point that had become evident a few days earlier—that the million mark in attendance would not be met. “I'd never suggested,” Veeck told Roger Kahn after the season, “that promotion by itself attracts fans. Winning draws fans. Winning plus promotion sets attendance records. Promoting with a last-place team, which is what we had to do last year, is only slightly more difficult than running a benefit for Mr. Nixon among people whose names appeared on the enemies list.”
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To top it all off, the White Sox lost 7–4 that night to the Oakland A's, ending the season at 64–97. The last-place Sox had been shut out on twenty-one occasions—not a modern record (the 1963 Mets held that record, thirty) but still indicative of their offensive futility. In all of baseball, only Montreal lost more games in 1976. Pitcher Ken Brett summed it up: “Our season was so bad that by the fifth inning, Bill Veeck was selling hot dogs to go.”

Following the game, Veeck apologized to the city of Chicago: “I feel like a thief in the night. I stole their plaudits and gave them nothing in return.”
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But Veeck had, in fact, given himself to the city. He was still the only owner who answered his own phone and listened with real interest to anybody who called. Among the prominent figures in baseball, he alone still made almost daily unpaid speeches to any organization that asked, and he was usually the last person to leave the meeting hall. He didn't watch his team play from a fancy owner's box—which, as he said, put his back to the fans—but ambled around the stadium chatting with fans and asking for their suggestions. Veeck was a reporter's dream, and his craggy face was ideally suited for the television camera.

Now all he needed was a team. In a matter of days after the end of the World Series, he decided he would advertise for one in
The Sporting News
:

Veeck accepted more than 700 collect calls. “Yes, I heard from Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers. They called me collect—I should say the ALLEGED Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers called me collect from saloons all across the country.” He added that almost all the calls from Rollie Fingers came at 2:00 a.m.
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A story then leaked that he was arranging through an Albany, New York, travel agent to go to Cuba to scout players. Veeck had hoped to keep this move secret. Surprisingly, the commissioner had no initial objection. “Ping-pong opened China,” Veeck pointed out, predicting that “baseball will open Cuba.” Days later, however, Kuhn nixed the plan.
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Yet Veeck's off-season would be dominated again by his health. In mid-November 1976, he entered Illinois Masonic Hospital to deal with longstanding spinal problems that had become aggravated and would finally require surgery to remove pressure on his spinal nerves and stabilize his deteriorating neck. Three days before the operation on November 15, Veeck invited an old friend to sneak past the No Visitors signs for a “riotous evening” of watching him take pills. The next morning, Veeck announced from his hospital bed that Paul Richards was stepping aside as manager and would serve the team as a consultant, working with pitchers in the Sox farm system. His new manager was to be his night visitor, trusted friend Bob Lemon, who had been his ace in Cleveland and whose 207 wins had led to his induction into the Hall of Fame earlier in the year. Miñoso would remain on the team as part of the coaching squad, and Larry Doby would join the White Sox as their new hitting coach, further reuniting the miracle Cleveland team of 1948.
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Unable to attend the Winter Meetings, Veeck considered a new strategy that could give him an edge in a market increasingly hostile to owners operating on a shoestring. Because of his long-term opposition to the reserve clause, Veeck had become the poster child for the concept of “be careful what you wish for.” But one element of the new rules worked in his favor, if only for a season. Veeck invoked the renewal clause with several players who refused to sign, automatically extending their contracts for one more season at a 20 percent reduction in salary, which saved nearly half a million dollars that year.

Veeck conceived a scheme he dubbed “rent-a-player,” by which he traded for other clubs' stars in their option years. This allowed him to get Oscar Gamble plus two pitchers, from the Yankees for the 1977 season in a trade for Bucky Dent, and earlier he sent Gossage and pitcher Terry Forster to the Pittsburgh Pirates for slugger Richie Zisk and a minor-league pitcher. Veeck
knew he would have them at bargain prices only until the end of the 1977 season, when they would enter the free agent market, but in a flash he had overcome the team's lack of power.

Interested in the future as well as the present, Veeck was asked what he thought about a eighteen-year-old kid named Harold Baines.

“Greatest rookie I've ever seen,” was his response, recalling the first time he had seen Baines play, four years earlier. “I really mean it,” he said, adding that he was just a kid and that he may not be ready yet. “But remember the name Baines. Harold Baines.”
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At the home Opening Day in 1977, all four of Mayor Daley's sons were invited to throw out a first ball. “Not only do we have four first balls,” Veeck said with a broad grin, “we have 20,000 more. Everybody wants to throw out a first ball, so I've bought all these harmless Styrofoam baseballs. You can throw one out yourself, if you'd like.” After a Styrofoam blizzard, the Sox jumped ahead of the Boston Red Sox, Ken Brett pitched strongly, and Veeck's patchwork heroes won 5–2 before a noisy crowd of almost 34,612.

Veeck was more determined than ever to make his fans happy. His new program contained an unusual personal touch: “If your beer is flat, call Millie Johnson. If the washrooms aren't up to par, call David Schaffer. If you'd like a tryout, give C. V. Davis a call. We don't have a complaint department, but we do have people.”

“Attendance remains uncertain,” began Roger Kahn's assessment of the 1977 Sox. “Seventeen seasons without a pennant have eroded the old South Side enthusiasm. Compared to what baseball men hold in Los Angeles and New York, Veeck's bank accounts are light. Destructive—possibly planted—rumors are abroad that he may not have the cash to finish this season.” Robert Creamer's judgment was no less grim; he felt Veeck had been “blind-sided” by the astonishing surge in salaries brought on by the free agent draft. “The White Sox were not at all competitive in going after free agents, and they had trouble signing their own players.”
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But the gloomy assessments proved to be unfounded. The club got off to a good start and was at 29–21 on June 7, when Veeck and Roland Hemond picked and signed Harold Baines in the amateur draft. It was a good omen, if for no other reason than it was the first time in the thirteen-year history of the draft that the White Sox had been able to sign their first draft pick. Mike Veeck remembered great internal dissension over the selection of Baines, with Paul Richards and others arguing strongly for Robin Yount
and other players with higher rankings. “My dad loved Baines and refused to back off. He said he knew Baines would make it because he had ‘great wrists—great roaring wrists.'”
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When Baines and his parents met with Veeck, he insisted that Baines be represented by a lawyer.
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Veeck also arranged for Baines to have a financial counselor.
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As summer came, it was obvious that Veeck had transformed the hapless 1976 ball club into a pennant contender, and they had earned a nickname: “the South Side Hit Men.” It was an apt allusion to the newly acquired trio of power hitters, Oscar Gamble, Richie Zisk, and Eric Soderholm, who led the team to a franchise-record 192 home runs. Offense overtook pitching and defense, and the team was described as “more like homer-happy 16-inch softball players than a typical White Sox team.”
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A July 31 doubleheader against the Kansas City Royals drew 50,412 in paid attendance, which was more than 10 percent of the Sox' total attendance for the decade-low season of 1970. Late in the second game, a fight broke out among some fans just outside the press box. A White Sox administrative assistant went outside to break it up, but the brawler began hitting him, which inspired Veeck to charge into the melee. A blow to the face caused his glasses to go flying. Suddenly, the writers were covering the fight while keeping half an eye on the ballgame. One of the brawlers caught Veeck's glasses before they hit the cement, causing one reporter to note that such good reflexes might win him a tryout for the White Sox infield.

The
Milwaukee Journal
noted, “By the time things had broken up Chicago had split a doubleheader and Veeck had split a lip.” But, like his team, Veeck didn't go away without some glory: “ ‘I got one in too,' he said.”
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Besides an appropriate nickname, the team also got an anthem, which—for better or worse—spread to other stadiums and other sports. “It was in 1977, the ‘South Side Hit Men,' and we were vying for first place with Kansas City, so the fans were really charged and they were responding to everything,” recalled organist Nancy Faust. When she played ‘Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye,' they all sang. I'd never heard anything like that, and neither did the writers, evidently, and it just made such an impact that it
was written about. I remember going to the Bards Room and someone asking, ‘What song was that?' I said, ‘I think it's called “Sha Na Na.”' Well, it isn't. I just knew it was a good song.”
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