Bill Veeck (75 page)

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Writing in the
Baltimore
Afro-American
a year earlier, Richard R. Dier alleged that Jim Crow in the nation's capital was worse than in Dixie: “Washington's baseball fans are more predominantly colored than New York's. Needless to say, Griffith Stadium pursues a jim crow policy in seating customers.”

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The restaurant was, among other things, the subject of one of the great Yogi Berraisms: “Toots Shor's restaurant is so crowded nobody goes there anymore.”

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The final postscript to the season was the fate of Veeck's two clowns. Banishing Price and Patkin to the minors, which had started out as a penalty, turned out well because it was the beginning of careers for both men as pre-game performers. The act that became Price's crowd pleaser was to fire a baseball 700-800 feet into the air from a bazooka which put it out of sight. He was able to field a remarkably high percentage of these balls—catching the ball over his head and then falling down to absorb some of the shock. Price kept performing until he retired in 1959 and lived until 1967 when he took his own life. Patkin, who died in 1999, kept clowning until his retirement in 1995, having given more than 4,000 performances. His crowning achievement came when he played himself in the in the 1988 romantic-comedy classic
Bull Durham
.

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The Pacific Coast League (PCL) had just signed a Negro player, John Ritchey, who was actually not the first in minor league history. In 1916, an African American named Jimmy Claxton pitched for the Oakland Oaks in the PCL. His time with the team was brief and his departure apparently hastened when it was discovered that he was not an American Indian, as he had claimed, but black.

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“Doby and Dad would go and listen to music together,” Mike Veeck remembered. “Doby liked Miles Davis: it was confrontational, it was in your face. My dad loved Satchmo, who loved everybody. They never did resolve that.”

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For reasons that are unclear, it was widely reported that Greenberg was an Indians owner when Veeck owned the club, and this error was perpetuated as late as 2011 in Greenberg's Wikipedia biography, among other places. Greenberg did become a 20 percent owner in the club in 1956 under a new ownership group.

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Veeck later remarked that at least 25,000 of the 72,434 who paid for admission to the game were attracted by the announcement that Paige would start.

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Feller, however, claimed to Bill Gilbert in 1990 that it was actually Veeck who had pulled the plug on the All-Star Game. He claimed Veeck wanted to win the pennant and did not want two of his pitchers in the game. He begged Feller to fake an injury. Feller refused and then, without his knowledge, Veeck told the press that Feller had “withdrawn from the game because of unknown reasons.” Feller “blew a gasket” and sought Veeck through a series of phone calls and finally found him in a bar at two in the morning. He demanded a correction, which Veeck issued the next morning. The record supports Feller to the extent that Veeck did take responsibility, stating that he wanted to protect the team and further suggesting that a new rule be adopted that limited All-Star rosters to one pitcher from each team.

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The “average fan” had received his night, and the effect was one that many fans would never forget. “My father was one of the 60,405 fans at the Stadium that day,” Terry Pluto wrote in
Our Tribe: A Baseball Memoir
. “He didn't receive a gift, but he understood what it was like to be Joe Earley. In 1948 Bill Veeck and the Indians made him feel special.”

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At this time the minimum salary for Major League Baseball was $5,500.

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But Ed McAuley of the
News
later revealed that the announcement was bogus and intended for the ears of Frank Lane, GM of the White Sox, who was in the stadium that day. Veeck planned to needle the Tigers brass at the Winter Meetings about how he was stealing their customers and would call on Lane to testify that he had heard the announcement.

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Not all players went along with the plan. Al Rosen, then a rookie, denounced it as “unsportsmanlike,” and some chose not to take the purloined signs because they felt it threw their timing off.

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Veeck was in fact turned away from the Copacabana in early 1947 because he would not put on a necktie provided by the club.

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It garnered mention in the
Washington Post
(“Bill Veeck, the Cleveland Chief, Remains Unbeaten and Tieless in Brush with Fussy Formality”), the
Plain Dealer
(“Bill Veeck Sticks His Neck Out—and Changes Restaurants in Washington”), and perhaps elsewhere.

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The leg was both a source of amusement and frustration for Veeck. One day when he was convinced that the leg was making too much noise, he pulled a can of sardines from his Marine fatigues, opened the tin, and slathered the fishy oil on the squeaky joint. The artificial leg then smelled so bad that the Smiths made him keep it outside for a week.

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In a 1991 feature on Veeck in the
Arizona Daily Star
on the eve of his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame it was estimated that the cost of the pool in 1991 dollars was $161,700.

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Gaedel performed an encore with Veeck in 1961 when Veeck, by then owner of the Chicago White Sox, responded to complaints about vendors blocking the view by hiring Gaedel and seven other midgets to service the Comiskey Park boxes on Opening Day.

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Bill James in his book
The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers
noted on page 170: “What strikes me about this is that the fans were obviously smarter than Taylor was, at least in this respect. The Browns had acquired Lollar three years earlier, for nothing, and he had played about half the time, although he was one of the better hitters on the team. After the season the Browns traded him to Chicago, where he played for Paul Richards. Richards made Lollar the regular catcher, and he was the second best catcher in the American League during the 1950s.”

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In 1969, when Porter managed the West Palm Beach Expos of the Florida State League, his hitting instructor was Larry Doby and the two men became, as far as they could determine, the first interracial roommates in baseball history. Some nights they would lie in bed and talk about Bill Veeck. As Porter said of Doby: “That man really loved Bill Veeck.”

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D'Alesandro passed along his political bent to his son, Thomas D'Alesandro III, who went on to become mayor of Baltimore, and his sister, Nancy D'Alesandro, who married attorney Paul Pelosi in 1963 and became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2007.

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The league later vetoed the name, and it became Busch Stadium.

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Holloman won two more games in the majors, beating the Indians and Red Sox, but he was again relegated to the bullpen in July, and he made his final major-league appearance on July 19, after which Veeck sold his services to Toronto of the International League. According to Bill James, Bobo Holloman's no-hitter was the second-least-likely in history. The most unlikely was tossed by Charles “Bumpus” Jones in 1892, also in his first start.

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Ed Mickelson was one of the few beneficiaries of the game, becoming, as he explained in his 2007 memoir, the answer to one of baseball's toughest trivia questions: “Who drove in the last run for the St. Louis Browns?”

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Griffith's vision became a reality three years later when the National League Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moved to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, after the 1957 season.

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Of all the franchise relocations of the 1950s, only the shift from St. Louis to Baltimore resulted in a new name for the team. As soon as the move was approved, Clarence Miles confirmed that the team would be called the Orioles. The other team names are still with us today: Dodgers, Giants, Braves (from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta), and Athletics (from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland).

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If Spike Briggs was accepted and tolerated by the baseball establishment, he was disliked by many of those who donned the Tigers uniform. Boots Poffenberger, one of the most notorious beer consumers in baseball history, could barely tolerate this man, who, in his words, “wasn't too sharp: He wouldn't know a Pabst Blue Ribbon from a Budweiser.” Poffenberger felt that Briggs liked to throw his weight around, and Briggs would yell at him when he would toss balls to kids in the stadium. (
Baseball Digest
, December 1992)

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Two years later, in 1958, the Tigers became the next-to-last club to integrate (the Red Sox would be the last) when they signed Ozzie Virgil Sr., who has the distinction of being the first Dominican to play in major-league baseball. By then the new owners had finally lost patience with Spike Briggs and—as Veeck had predicted—fired him.

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Being a football stadium, the Orange Bowl could not offer a normal baseball configuration.

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During his three seasons with the Marlins, Paige would compile a record of 31–22 and an ERA of 2.73, two numbers that Paige's biographer Larry Tye would later write were “impressive for a pitcher of any age.”

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This would have given each woman something on the order of 10,000 green stamps. The system is still in operation and in current stamps (now known as points) 7,000 would buy a $5 Starbucks gift card.

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Miñoso was actually younger than listed officially, as he had lied about his age to qualify for service in the Cuban Army. This fact was not revealed until he published his autobiography in 1994 when the world thought he was seventy-one but he was actually sixty-eight.

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Though it's impossible to prove absolutely, it is almost certain that Veeck, a man with the eye of a newspaper copyeditor, was behind the misspelled jersey as a way of getting extra publicity for the practice of labeling players. The UPI photo of Kluszewski's back appeared in the
New York Times
and many other newspapers.

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For the 1982 season, the original exploding scoreboard was torn down to make room for a second version that included a giant Diamond Vision screen. It still shot off fireworks after a home run, but most of the zany touches of the original were lost. That version was torn down when Comiskey Park was demolished to make way for U.S. Cellular Field across the street. The new scoreboard still fires off fireworks after a home run, although now from only one side because of safety concerns. The original exploding scoreboard lives on in various incarnations, including its own Facebook page, which includes great photographs of the scoreboard in operation.

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It would become one of Veeck's favorite charities, and he would live to see thirteen children educated.

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One battle that Veeck had been unable to win was integrated housing during spring training. The first question that Wendell Smith of the
Defender
asked Arthur Allyn was what was he going to do about this problem. Allyn told him that if he couldn't integrate Sarasota, he would move the White Sox to a new site. When Allyn was told by the Sarasota Terrace that it would not allow black players for 1962, he bought the hotel, which housed
all
of the White Sox for 1962 as well as the Cardinals, Mets, Yankees, and Pirates. Charles Fountain,
Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training
(New York: Oxford, University Press, 2009).

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Cain would honor Gaedel until his own death in 1997. Each year Cain mailed out hundreds of personalized Christmas cards to family and friends. Each one bore the famous photo of Gaedel watching a Cain pitch sail over his head. Printed inside was his special message: “Hope your target in the future is better than mine was in 1951.”

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One of Veeck's friends from Cleveland asked Greg, then about ten, what he wanted for a pet, and he said he wanted an armadillo. The first one arrived, and he drove with his father to the Baltimore-Washington International airport and put the wooden crate containing the animal in a greyhound cage. It was dead when they got home, but it was insured. When the second one arrived it clawed its way through the package and the greyhound cage.

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Up to and including senior vice president of the National Basketball Association's Orlando Magic, a position Williams held as this was written in 2011.

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The term is a misnomer, as most baseball historians agree that the era ended in 1920 with rule changes (banning the spitball and other trick pitches and freak deliveries, replacing discolored and scuffed balls with shiny new ones) and use of better-quality materials, not with the change in the ball. The era was characterized by the use of the hit-and-run, the stolen base, the sacrifice, and the bunt; batters choked up on the bat and were loath to take hard swings; runs were at a premium; and ballparks had huge dimensions. The era ended when Babe Ruth began swinging for the fences.

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Packard is mainly known today for his value in baseball trivia contests. On August 3, 1918, while with the Cardinals, he gave up 12 earned runs in a game and did not take the loss. That feat was never matched.

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Eckert inherited a legal mess in that the same causes that had brought the Braves to Milwaukee from Boston in 1953 took the team away again. In the early 1960s, the team's performance tailed off, as did their remarkable attendance. Eyeing greener pastures in the South, new owners jilted Milwaukee and moved the team to Atlanta after the 1965 season.