Bill Veeck (61 page)

3. As Tygiel and others showed, Veeck had discussed the purchase of the Phillies many years before
Veeck—as in Wreck
was published with writers whose reputations were unassailable. As reported earlier, the first mention of the deal by Veeck that appeared in print was in the “Heard in the Press Box” section of the September 1948 issue of
Baseball Digest
, where he is quoted as saying he had not thought about buying the Phillies until he read in the papers that he was rumored to be interested in the ailing franchise and that he was one of the likely buyers. He explained that he had a leading promoter of Negro baseball compile a list of Negro All-Stars, who he had planned to recruit, train, and spring on the world on Opening Day 1943. “What could they have done,” Veeck asked. “They would have had to play my team or forfeit the game.” The column on the purchase of the Phillies was written by the magazine's editor, Herbert F. Simons, an old Chicago newspaperman who, prior to creating
Baseball Digest
in 1942, had worked for the
Chicago Journal
,
Chicago Tribune
, and
Chicago Times
, for which he had covered baseball. He had been a close associate of the elder Veeck as a reporter and then reported on him as Cubs president. For the SABR researchers, who were so dependent on the written record to make their point, to miss a prominent item in
Baseball Digest
suggests a lack of thoroughness.
¹³

4. One of the major points made by the three researchers was that the story had not appeared in print before Veeck's autobiography. Besides the 1948
Baseball Digest
piece, a search of newspaper databases revealed the following evidence to the contrary:

• The first time the story appeared in print was on July 25, 1947, in the
St. Petersburg Times
in a column by Vernon Gibson, the paper's regular sports columnist: “Bill Veeck, Cleveland Indians owner now in the Cleveland Clinic for another operation … revealed recently that he tried to buy the Philadelphia Phillies during the war with an eye to making them an all-Negro club … turned down flat.”

• In February 1949, at the thirty-third annual meeting of the Urban League of Chicago, Veeck made a startling revelation when he pointed to Young and said that “the gentleman, now sitting at
my right out there, and I talked for several hours about integrating Negroes in major league baseball. At that time I was planning to buy the Philadelphia Nationals”—Nationals being the old-school way that Veeck referred to the Phillies.
¹⁴

• Shirley Povich discussed the plan in detail in the
Washington Post
on May 10, 1953, quoting Veeck: “‘landis stopped me, I think. It was after Gerry Nugent had tossed in the towel with the Philadelphia Phillies and the franchise was back in the lap of the league. Abe Saperstein, an owner in the Negro National League, and I had plans. I don't blame the other club owners. ‘We'd have walked away with the pennant.'” The article was part of a ground-breaking thirteen-part series on integration called “No More Shutouts.” This article appeared while Ford Frick was baseball commissioner, and again, there was no apparent challenge from Frick or any of the other living individuals mentioned in the context of the article, including Saperstein. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the
Post
, the Povich series was widely read and discussed.
¹⁵

• In August 1954, Abe Saperstein gave an interview to the Associated Negro Press that ran in the Chicago
Defender
and other African American newspapers that discussed the plan in some detail. “I don't think there was a team in the league back in 1943 that could have stopped the team he was going to assemble.”
¹⁶

• In April 1956, Jack Mabley of the
Chicago Daily News
published a small paperback as part of a series on economic and social issues from the Public Affairs Committee of New York City. Entitled
Who's on First?
, it was a discussion of baseball and minorities, with an introduction by Lou Boudreau, who was at the time the manager of the Kansas City Athletics. The Philadelphia story was reported in book form six years before
Veeck—as in Wreck
.
¹⁷

5. From 1961 through Veeck's death in 1986 and up to the time of the SABR article, dozens of articles were written that mentioned the attempt to purchase the Phillies, including those by David Israel, David Kindred, Red Smith, Jim Murray, Tracy Ringolsby, and another by Shirley Povich. (Povich again wrote of the incident in 1962 with new details that still depicted Commissioner Landis in an unflattering light.) All these writers knew Veeck—some, like Red
Smith, had known him for decades—and none ever had reason to doubt or question him on this matter. In July 1974, Red Smith ran a column in the
New York Times,
which had large syndication to newspapers around the country, in which Veeck talked about his two greatest regrets—that he did not get to purchase the Phillies in late 1942 and that he was unable to bring Elston Howard aboard as his manager for the Washington Senators.
¹⁸

6. Veeck appeared in public on various occasions during which the incident was reported and never challenged. For instance, he was a participant in a conference on sports and government at the Brookings Institution in 1971, at which time Gerald W. Scully of Southern Illinois University—later of Southern Methodist University—in a scholarly paper on race discussed the 1942 attempt to purchase the Phillies. The story was repeated and accepted as true. Attorney Phil Hochberg, who attended the conference and who had lunch with Veeck that day, attested to the fact that the participants did not dispute the matter.

7. The authors of the SABR piece made no attempt to contact Bill Veeck's family. Mary Frances Veeck said that it was common knowledge in the family. Bill's sister, Peg, got a call from him when he returned to Chicago from Philadelphia, during which the matter was spelled out in some detail. As Mary Frances Veeck expressed it, “Margaret Ann Veeck Krehbiel would never have agreed to saying that it had not happened if it had not. She would never forget how excited she was when he called. We talked about it all the time.” Mary Frances also pointed out that the reason that Veeck's name does not appear on Landis's schedule for the day is because Veeck had easy and open access to the commissioner's office. Also, an article in which she discussed the issue was cited by the SABR authors but dismissed in a footnote because her source was “Sportshirt Bill.” Bill's son Mike has expressed himself many times on the SABR allegations. “Baseball researchers are constantly screaming that there is no paper trail to prove this,” he said to a reporter from the
Baltimore Sun.
“But I never knew my old man to deal in falsehoods. That wasn't his style.”
¹⁹

8. Many people who conducted extensive interviews with Veeck attest to the story's veracity. Joseph Thomas Moore, who interviewed Veeck at some length for his biography of Larry Doby, had read the SABR article and said that there is no doubt in his mind that
what Veeck said about the proposed deal actually happened. “Personally, I have in fact no doubt that this actually happened. When I talked with Veeck I had no sense that he was making this up.” Stephen Banker, a journalist, conducted a series of interviews, including one with Veeck, for his 1979 audio compilation
Black Diamonds.
Banker was firm in his belief that Veeck had been truthful in the very detailed account of the attempt in the interview. The last time Banker and I discussed it was at a lunch in late 2009, a few months before his death. Banker was a man who suffered neither fools nor liars, and his status as a journalist was unassailable—a point made at the time of his death in a public eulogy written for the
Atlantic
by his friend James Fallows.
²⁰

9. Those involved in Veeck's account either confirmed (Saperstein) or never denied (Frick) their role in the story, and both were alive when
Veeck—as in Wreck
was published (Saperstein died in 1966, Frick in 1978).

10. The event has always been looked at in isolation, neglecting the general push to put a black team on the field, which had first been proposed to Veeck's father. It is exactly the kind of impetuous move that characterized Veeck's entire life. “For Veeck, it would have been a typical move—rushed, radical, and revolutionary,” wrote Jonathan Eig in his book
Opening Day
(2007). “Turning to Negro leaguers to restock the Phillies seemed like just the sort of thing he would do, although no one has ever been able to confirm that version of events.”
²¹

Since the SABR article appeared, it has taken on an even deeper dimension as part of the grand story of the racial integration of baseball. It has been converted into the what-if premise of several novels, including Peter Schilling Jr.'s masterly 2008 work
The End of Baseball
, in which Veeck obtains the Phillies and staffs them with the likes of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson for the 1944 season.

Veeck's whirlwind attempt to buy and restaff the Phillies has sparked the imagination of both fans and scholars, and engendered no end of conjecture, including that by former commissioner Fay Vincent, who has expressed the opinion that if Veeck had succeeded, he could have delayed the integration of baseball teams, as all-black and all-white teams played one another.

There is a wealth of material available on Veeck. He is one of the most-interviewed and most-quoted figures in baseball history, wrote three books with Ed Linn and hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, had a syndicated newspaper column, and did hundreds of radio and television broadcasts.

Able, Allen. “Baseball Now Game for Unbridled Egos: Veeck One of Dying Breed.”
Globe and Mail
, March 17, 1979.

Adelson, Bruce.
Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the South.
Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Alexander, Charles.
Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era
. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

Allen, Frederick Lewis.
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s
. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997.

Allen, Lee.
The Hot Stove League
. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1948.

Ashe, Arthur R., Jr.
A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete Since 1946
. New York: Warner/Amistad, 1988.

Baldoni, John.
Great Communications Secrets of Great Leaders
. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Banks, Ernie, and Jim Enright.
Mr. Cub
. Chicago: Follett, 1971.

Banks, Leo W. “An Oasis for Some Pioneers: Lucille and Chester Willis Put Up Black Ballplayers When Tucson's Hotels Wouldn't.”
Sports Illustrated
, May 8, 1989: 116–17.

Baraka, Amiri.
The Autobiography of Leroi Jones
. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997.

Barber, Red.
1947: When All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball.
New York: Da Capo, 1982.

Barrow, Edward G., with J. M. Kahn.
My Fifty Years in Baseball.
New York: Coward-McCann, 1951.

Barthel, Thomas.
Baseball Brainstorming and Exhibition Games, 1901–1962: A History of Off-Season Major League Play
. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007.

“Baseball: Another Business Facing Change—Interview with Bill Veeck, Former Club Owner.”
U.S. News and World Report
, August 12, 1963.

Beck, Peggy. “Working in the Shadows of Rickey and Robinson: Bill Veeck, Larry Doby and the Advancement of Black Players in Baseball.” In
The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture
, 1997. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000.

Berkow, Ira.
The Corporal Was a Pitcher
. Chicago: Triumph Books, 2009.

———. “He Crossed Color Barrier, but in Another's Shadow.”
New York Times
, February 23, 1997.

———. “Sports of the Times: The Pied Piper.”
New York Times
, January 4, 1986.

———. “When Baseball's Circus Came to Town.”
New York Times
, October 20, 2005.

Bess, Philip. “Bill Veeck Park: A Modest Proposal.”
National Pastime
, Winter 1987.

Boudreau, Lou, with Ed Fitzgerald.
Player-Manager.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1949.

Boynton, Bob. “Ballparks I Have Known.” In
Growing Up with Baseball: How We Loved and Played the Game
, ed. Gary Land. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Brashler, William. “An April Memory: Facing Opening Day Without Bill Veeck.”
Chicago
, April 1986.

———.
Josh Gibson: A Life in the Negro Leagues
. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000.

———.
The Story of Negro League Baseball
. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1994.

Bready, James.
Baseball in Baltimore: The First 100 years
. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Breslin, Jimmy.
Branch Rickey.
Penguin Lives. New York: Viking, 2011.

Brewster, Mike. “Bill Veeck: A Baseball Mastermind.”
Business Week
, October 27, 2004.

Broeg, Bob.
Superstars of Baseball
. South Bend, IN: Diamond, 1994.

Brown, Warren. “Bill Veeck: Baseball's Dynamo.”
Sportfolio
, April 1949.

Bryant, Howard.
Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston
. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Bullock, Steven R.
Playing for Their Nation: Baseball and the American Military During World War II.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Burk, Robert F.
Much More than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball Since 1921.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.