Bill Veeck (60 page)

Today, there are those who think that this is all a lie, a falsehood concocted by Veeck almost twenty years after the fact. This belief stems from a single article, “A Baseball Myth Exploded: Bill Veeck and the 1943 Sale of the Phillies,” one of the most influential stories ever published in a Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) publication. This story in the 1998 issue of
The National Pastime
was written by David M. Jordan, Larry R. Gerlach, and John P. Rossi, and it attempts to debunk Veeck's tale about trying to buy the Phillies and stock the club with Negro league players.
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The article featured a doctored cover picture of Veeck in a purple and yellow open-collar sports shirt, a clear attempt to make him look clownish and mendacious.

The cover also carried a most unscholarly and intemperate teaser: “The major difficulty with this oft-told story is that it is not true. Veeck did not have a deal to buy the Phillies. He did not work to stock any team with Negro leagues stars. No such deal was quashed by Landis or Frick.”
¹

The article was introduced by the magazine's editor, Mark Alvarez, who opined, “The wonder and lesson to researchers is less why Veeck did it than how this story became common baseball currency without ever having been verified.”

One of the main arguments advanced by the authors was that Veeck largely invented the story for his 1962 autobiography,
Veeck—as in Wreck.
They could find no reports in the mainstream or Negro press of this story prior to that time (other than an article by Wendell Smith written a few months earlier and based on an interview with Veeck). They note specifically that Doc Young, sports editor of a black paper in Cleveland in the 1940s, never mentioned this incident, and they say, “Young's silence is significant.”

The authors made a number of largely speculative points to support their argument and ask why Veeck had not integrated the Milwaukee Brewers. They concluded: “We must face the fact that Bill Veeck falsified the historical record.”
²

Almost immediately members of SABR privately questioned both the tone and accuracy of the article. They especially questioned the assertion that because these researchers could not find confirmation, it did not happen, noting that it is impossible to prove a negative. “I wondered about the piece from the very beginning,” said Mark Armour, who is the founder of SABR's Bio-Project, a drive to create short biographies of all major-league ballplayers, and the author of
Joe Cronin: A Life in Baseball.
“Not finding a source is not the same thing as there not being a source.”
³

At least one member wrote a letter of rebuttal. Several days after the magazine was mailed, Mike Gimbel, an avid baseball fan who had held front-office jobs doing statistical analysis for the Expos and Red Sox, wrote to SABR to resign from the group, based on what he called a cover story that was a shameless piece of trash. Gimbel said that when he first got the article with the provocative cover, he was saddened to learn that one of his childhood heroes had not been truthful. But when he actually began reading the piece, he became angry: “I wasn't past the first page before I realized that something was terribly wrong—not with Veeck's ‘story'—but with Gerlach's (et al.) research and with the very tone of this shameful article.”

Gimbel's points of contention were many, but they centered on the authors'
citing evidence that tended to support rather than deny Veeck's original story. For example, they say that the one mention of the attempted purchase before 1961 was Red Smith's writing in the June 25, 1946,
New York Herald Tribune
, “Hardly anyone knows how close Veeck came to buying the Phillies when the National League was forcing Gerry Nugent to sell. He had the backing and the inside track.”

The authors said Smith had evidently gotten the tale from “Sportshirt Bill.” Gimbel responded: “I guess that makes Red Smith, possibly the most renowned baseball newspaperman of the 20th century, a liar also! I guess that if you‘re going to tear down one of the great figures in baseball history (Veeck), you might as well throw in the greatest baseball newsman as well!” Gimbel noted in a later communication that Red Smith was a reporter for the
Philadelphia Record
at the time of Veeck's meeting with Nugent in 1942.

Gimbel concluded by lambasting the SABR article with some of the same intemperance that had fueled the original piece: “Shame on SABR for printing this scurrilous article. Shame on SABR for putting it on the cover so that you can get some ‘quick response' in terms of sales. Your article belittles Veeck as a hustler, but you are the real, cheap hustlers in this matter. I don't ever remember Veeck taking the low road that SABR has taken. Yes, Veeck was a hustler. He was a damn good hustler, but a hustler with a heart and with the courage to stand up and fight for what he believed in.”

Although Gimbel wanted his letter published, it never was.

Gimbel later rejoined SABR, and in 2011 he was profiled on the organization's Web site as one of the group's exemplary members. Yet, twelve years after the fact, he still called the article on Veeck and the Phillies “a vicious, yellow piece of journalism … which if you read their own research disproves their case.”
⁴

An anonymous person sent a copy of the SABR magazine to Marya Veeck, who was upset with the way her father had been portrayed on the cover as well as in the text. She called Ed Linn, who had collaborated with Veeck on
Veeck—as in Wreck
. He assured her that every word of the Philadelphia story was true and not to let it bother her—which, as she pointed out many years later, was easier said than done. Linn told Marya he had not been contacted by the SABR researchers.
⁵

The issue lay dormant with the public until March 12, 2005, when an item appeared on the SABR listserve from Jules Tygiel, a professor of history at San Francisco State University and the author of
Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy
(1983). Tygiel had spotted an error in
the magazine's Veeck story. While browsing through A. S. “Doc” Young's book
Great Negro Baseball Stars
, published in 1953, he said: “I came across the following passage about Veeck when he bought the Indians in 1946: ‘Negro writers soon recognized Veeck as a person likely at least to give an ear to the proposition of Negroes playing in the American League. Perhaps they had heard the unsubstantiated story that Veeck once shocked baseball's late commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, with a proposal to buy a major league club and transform it into an all-colored aggregation.' One of the main points made by the debunkers was that Young's silence was significant, and here was Young discussing it in print under his own byline.”
⁶

Tygiel, who had interviewed Veeck on the subject in 1980 and had never had any reason to doubt Veeck's word, argued that while Jordan, Gerlach, and Rossi offered many other reasons to be skeptical about Veeck's tale, the Young quote was at least one written reference to it nine years prior to the publication of
Veeck—as in Wreck.
Tygiel concluded, “The story may still be untrue and the source may still ultimately be Veeck himself, but this was not something he created or imagined, as Jordan et al. imply, at the time of the writing of his book.”
⁷

A SABR member named Chris Hauser then chimed in, “I came across a similar reference that also predates Veeck's autobiography in a story issued by the Associated Negro Press and printed in the August 14, 1954
Philadelphia Independent
: ‘Abe Saperstein of the fabulous Harlem Globetrotters stated this week in a press interview that baseball magnate Bill Veeck had intended to use a baseball trick back in 1942 which would have upset the thinking in the major league, had it materialized. “I'll tell you one thing about Veeck,” said Saperstein, “something that few people know. In 1942 the Phillies were for sale and Veeck attempted to buy them. But Bill Cox raised more money and got the club. Do you know what Veeck planned to do? He was going to take the Phils to spring training in Florida and then—on the day the season opened—dispose of the entire team. Meanwhile, with a team composed entirely of Negroes, who would have trained separately, he could have opened the National League season. I don't think there was a team in either league, back in 1943 that could have stopped the team he was going to assemble.” '”

On March 14, 2005, Tygiel commented on this and other findings that were spurred by his original posting: “It would appear that the case against Bill Veeck's plan to purchase the Phillies, which was largely based on an absence of supporting evidence, is unraveling and that Veeck's telling of this story was ‘remarkably consistent' with the evidence.”

Then nine years after the original article by Jordan, Gerlach, and Rossi, Tygiel published a full response in the 2007
Baseball Research Journal
, entitled “Revisiting Bill Veeck and the 1943 Phillies,” in which he amassed all the evidence at hand to conclude that the three authors' “blanket dismissal of Veeck's assertions and confident branding of Veeck as a liar no longer stand uncontested. In their
National Pastime
article, they had correctly chastised earlier historians for accepting Veeck's narrative at face value and injected a dose of skepticism, replacing unwarranted certainty with healthy debate. Their own rush to judgment, however, offers yet another cautionary tale of relying on an absence of evidence and overreaching one's resources in drawing conclusions.”
⁸

Rob Neyer, who discussed the matter in
Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Legends: The Truth, the Lies, and Everything Else
(2008), noted that Tygiel's rebuttal was shunted to the back of the
Baseball Research Journal
. Neyer hoped that it had not been missed, because if Jordan, Gerlach, and Rossi had “spectacularly debunked Veeck's story, Tygiel spectacularly debunked the debunkers.”

Neyer himself sifted through the evidence and concluded that Veeck made preliminary gestures toward buying the Phillies and considered stocking the team with players from the Negro leagues. He then summarized the central point of Tygiel's paper, which he concurred with: “While we don't have a great deal of evidence on what was on Veeck's mind in 1942, we don't have nearly enough evidence to know what was
not
on Veeck's mind.”
⁹

A problem the original article created was to give many—most notably the SABR faithful—the impression that Veeck lied not only about the 1942 incident but also about other matters. On several occasions I have been told with great confidence that Veeck was a liar and that, as one SABR member put it, there's probably not a single word in
Veeck—as in Wreck
that can be believed. At one informal gathering, I heard a SABR member stand up and suggest that Veeck's claim that he was dealing in players for the Milwaukee Brewers in a combat zone was another example of Veeck making something up out of whole cloth. This led me back to the Pacific edition of
Stars and Stripes
, the newspaper for the Armed Forces during the war, in which it is reported by Marine Corps reporters that Veeck was indeed trading players within a combat zone.

During the three years that I researched this biography, I came to the conclusion that Bill Veeck was telling the truth—not only on the Phillies story but also on other matters of substance. In dozens of interviews conducted for
this book, I asked again and again if those who knew him had ever heard Veeck tell a lie or suspected that he was untruthful.

In not one interview I conducted with many who knew him did anyone say that he lied about anything. Again and again I pressed the point because of the SABR allegations, and got virtually the same response—Veeck was a storyteller who could exaggerate, especially in stories of self-deprecation, but never about anything of significance. In fact, Veeck's frankness and truthfulness often got him into hot water. Greg Veeck said that his father was “not capable of a lie” and that while he is not familiar with the details of the debate, he believed that “his rendition of it was accurate.”
¹⁰

A few points about Veeck's 1942 attempt to buy the Phillies:

1. There is no question that it was widely rumored and widely repeated that Veeck was involved in some kind of attempt to buy the Phillies. His name is repeated again and again in the context of taking over the team. It shows up as early as the October 22, 1942, issue of
The Sporting News
(where he was quoted as saying that if the deal had gone through, he would have stayed in Milwaukee and sent Charlie Grimm to Philadelphia to run the team). The rumors and references to Veeck as the failed buyer of the Phils continued into 1943 and beyond. On March 8, “the Old Scout,” the pseudonym of Herb Goren of the
New York Sun
, wrote in a profile of Veeck: “He was mentioned as one of the prospective buyers of the Phils, but it is doubtful if his sense of humor could have stood the strain.” An article in the September 7, 1947, issue of
Look
by Ray Grody of the
Milwaukee Sentinel
states that Veeck turned down an offer to head the Phillies the previous year because he was “having too much fun in Milwaukee.”
¹¹

2. At the time of Bill Veeck's death in 1986, Jerome Holtzman of the
Chicago Tribune
interviewed John Carmichael, the former sports columnist for the
Chicago Daily News
, about Veeck. Carmichael, then eighty-three, was an old friend of the elder Veeck and then of his son. He told Holtzman that he had run into Veeck in Chicago trying to raise money to buy the Phils and that Veeck intended to staff the club with Negro leaguers. Both Carmichael and Holtzman were reporters with strong credentials—both received the J. G. Taylor Spink Award for meritorious contributions to baseball writing from the Baseball Hall of Fame, and Holtzman served as official
historian to Major League Baseball from 1999 until his death in 2008.
¹²