Sometime, somewhere, there will be a club nobody really wants. And then Ole Will will come wandering along to laugh some more. Look for me under the arc lights, boys. I’ll be back.
—BILL VEECK, 1962
It had been a long time between ball clubs, and Bill Veeck was right. The Chicago White Sox were a club that defied you to want them. The pitching was uncertain. The catcher was embarrassing. The outfielders shared one weakness to a man. They were not very good at catching fly balls.
In mid-September, a raucous convention of machinery salesmen crowded Chicago hotels with burly men from Wyoming, Indiana, Washington State. Perhaps fifty of them stood in the lobby of the Lake Shore Holiday Inn, waiting for rooms and showers at seven o’clock on a warm and humid night. Some grumbled. Others raised their voices. A wispish, patient, frightened room clerk said over and over, “We’re going to straighten things out. The computer has broken down. Sorry. It’s not my fault. I can’t help it. The computer.”
The grumbling men were cramped hip to hip in the narrow lobby. I thought some might wander off toward Bill Veeck’s ball park for his twilight double-header. I hoped so. The season was winding down and the White Sox clutched last place as though it were a 24-carat ring.
Drunks spilled from the hotel bar, clapping each other on the back.
“Hey, you old bastard. I saw ya pat the dolly’s ass.”
“That was warm-up time. Let’s start the game.”
“Damn right, Chuck. Where’re the broads?”
There were not enough women, either amateur or professional, to go round. Overcrowded Chicago was short of everything but noise.
My taxi inched through traffic toward the Dan Ryan Expressway, which leads south toward Thirty-fifth Street and Comiskey Park, a pleasant double-decked stadium that was opened on July 1, 1910. During the 1950s, when Veeck first ran the White Sox, he installed high-intensity lights in adjoining streets. South Chicago was beginning to spawn muggers. He preserved the old trees that rise on Shields Avenue. He had whitewash applied to the outside concrete walls. He repainted the seats. The ball park was at once venerable and contemporary. It was a clean, well-lighted place to see a game.
This night the White Sox were playing the Kansas City Royals. By now the mighty Reds had outdistanced the Dodgers. The Phillies had ground a winning edge; they would beat Pittsburgh. Smart trades and syndicate cash had vitalized the Yankees; they would bring a pennant flag to the South Bronx. The race between first-place Kansas City and Oakland in the Western Division of the American League seemed the only one truly in doubt. Veeck’s double-header bore on that race. It was an interesting attraction.
Comiskey Park was still the clean, well-lighted place that I remembered. Concessions beckoned with awnings of bright stripes. The walls were loud with baseball posters, painted by schoolchildren, for a competition Veeck underwrote with a $1,000 prize. I rode an elevator to the roof and then proceeded on a wooden catwalk toward an old iron door into the press box. Before me, real grass stretched toward the center-field fence, 415 feet away from home plate. There a scoreboard rose above the stands. Inside, a fireworks specialist stood beside his wares. At the first White Sox home run, he would light the sky with rockets.
It was a typical Bill Veeck ball park, combining comfort, tradition and sideshows, except for the crowd. There wasn’t any. About 5,000 customers sat scattered among 45,000 seats. Put differently, 40,000 empty seats spread wide between clumps of fans. The machinery salesmen, like most of America, were ignoring the return of William Veeck.
He sat in the press box, wearing old slacks and a sports shirt, studying journeymen named Bannister, Johnson and Orta. He sees things quickly, like a good field manager. He smokes constantly. The more serious he is, the more softly he speaks. While a young pitcher named Chris Knapp threw hard, protecting Chicago’s one-run lead, I asked about the banks of unsold seats.
“People misinterpret,” Veeck said, very quietly. “I’ve never suggested that promotions do much if you aren’t winning. That isn’t the psychology of the fan. The fans identify with the home team. When the home team wins, they feel that they win, too. They get away from the galling losses of life. When the home team gets beat, the way we’ve been getting beaten this season, you get negative identification. The White Sox lose and the White Sox fans feel they lose with us. At the ball park, they get the same rich fulfilling experience they get when they’re three months late in payments to the Friendly Finance Company.” Veeck coughed and lit a cigarette. “What I do say is promotions plus a winning team will break attendance. That’s what happened when we had winners in here and in Cleveland and in Milwaukee a long time ago.”
He puffed. “Did I ever tell you I wanted to sign a black in Milwaukee about 1940, six years before they signed Jackie Robinson?”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because the Commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, said if I tried it, I’d be thrown out of baseball for life.”
In 1943, far from his customary playgrounds, Veeck served as a Marine private on a small Pacific island called Bougainville. He was thirty years old, and already renowned. He could have been an officer, but braid and Bill Veeck are inimical.
Someone prematurely fired an artillery piece toward unseen battalions of Japanese infantrymen. The cannon recoiled into Veeck’s right foot, and cut a ragged gash to the bone. The wound was patched and Veeck rejoined his platoon. A few months later the foot was badly swollen. What he describes as “jungle rot” was attacking the bone that had been bared.
Surgery by Marine physicians proved inadequate. The jungle rot moved slowly toward his shin. In 1946, civilian doctors amputated the lower portion of the leg, but like the Marine doctors, they miscalculated. They cut too low. Soon Veeck needed a second amputation. Such maiming surgery continued for a decade. Something always went wrong. Full of good intentions, some doctor always made a mistake. At length, Veeck had to undergo thirty-one surgical procedures. Finally, nothing was left but a stump, barely long enough to support a prosthetic device. He has born his mutilation with less complaint than you hear from people who have had a tooth extracted under anesthesia.
“Does this team and these empty seats bother you?” I said in the press box.
“We’ll be all right. We can be all right. But I want to have a winner in three years. That’s an unchanging formula of baseball. Give them a winner in three years, or else you’ll turn your fans off for a decade.” Another cigarette. “We’re reasonably capitalized, but we aren’t here to spend a decade of defeat.”
“Your health?”
“Well, of course, I can’t see as well as I could and I have to wear glasses. Watching this team, nonvision eases the pain. My hearing was dulled permanently when that artillery piece went off in Bougainville, but I’m used to that by now. What does bother me is my left leg, my only leg. There’s some kind of arthritis that’s developed in the knee. I don’t believe in owners’ boxes. I sit with the fans or with the writers. I was sitting out in center with some customers one day this summer and I started back toward the press box and I got stuck. With the arthritis and the artificial leg, I simply couldn’t get any farther. I was marooned in my own ball park. That was embarrassing.
“I’ve lost good knee action in my leg. American technicians have developed an artificial joint that’s fine for going slowly. The Russians have developed one that lets you move. But Health, Education and Welfare has gotten very careful about the work of foreign doctors. They remember Thalidomide. I don’t want an old man’s knee, so I have to wait for the government to approve the Russian device before I’ll let them do an implant. Meanwhile, I’ve had to give up tennis.”
I looked at him. Bespectacled, grizzled, running a last-place team that couldn’t even draw bored traveling salesmen with expense accounts. Poor by contrast to the men who own the Dodgers, Reds and Yankees. Somewhat deaf, missing one leg and suffering from arthritis in the other. At sixty-three, his one complaint was that he missed his tennis. I can think of no better definition of indomitable.
I caught his style in 1959, when Early Wynn pitched an elderly White Sox ball club to a pennant. That was the season in which Wally Moon’s home runs won the pennant for the patchwork L.A. Dodgers. The World Series did not exalt baseball as an art form. But Comiskey Park sold out quickly, and the Dodgers, playing in the Coliseum, sold ninety thousand tickets for each of the three middle games.
Amid all this cash flow, Walter O’Malley decided to close the Dodger hospitality room at 10 P.M. A World Series hospitality room offers baseball writers, managers, coaches, pretty much everyone of consequence except the competing athletes, a chance to eat and drink without charge. The room is both a source of news, particularly as liquor loosens tongues, and a way that underpaid newspapermen can bill their papers for meals and drinks they have never bought. In 1959, the phrase “underpaid newspaperman” was a tautology. Accepting rotten wages was a condition of employment. Knowing this, O’Malley closed his drinking room at ten. Ah, penury is made of most stern stuff.
Responding, Veeck announced, “When we get back to Chicago, gentlemen, our hospitality room will be open twenty-four hours a day. You are welcome to have Scotch with breakfast or for breakfast if you want.”
The Dodgers won the Series on the playing field, four games to two. Veeck won with ease on style and grace and warmth.
“O’Malley,” he later remarked, “has the kind of face that even Dale Carnegie would want to punch.”
Like all lusty smokers Veeck coughed, but presently his coughing spells grew longer and more violent. They built and built and built until he fainted. He developed persistent headaches and physicians suspected lung cancer which had metastasized. Veeck read volumes on cancer and suspected the same thing. He and Mary Frances were raising six children, none older than twelve. With neither complaint nor panic, he sold the White Sox in 1961, to put his finances in proper order for his heirs.
He was not suffering from lung cancer. Specialists at the Mayo Clinic discovered that a blood vessel near his brain had weakened. Bursts of coughing made the artery balloon. The effect was similar to what happens when a man takes a ferocious blow to the head. Concussion and unconsciousness. The treatment was simple. Lead a quiet life. Then the weakened blood vessel would have a chance to strengthen itself, as, indeed, it did.
On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Veeck found a rolling spread of houses, shingled barns and great rooted trees beside a dirt road called Tranquillity Lane. His front lawn sloped toward a quiet estuary called Peachblossom Creek. There he set about gardening and fathering and, when his health returned, bidding for major league franchises.
I visited him as often as I could. He is a proud man, but you could tell that he felt exiled. He had made important enemies, with his ebullient style and his dogged irreverence toward all the lords of baseball, including William Veeck. He was not a magnate, he said, but a hustler, same as everybody else who owned a ball club. Baseball was a lovely game, but without it the country would survive. Ultimately, it was entertainment, just like the circus. Most other owners were pompous anachronisms. If they ran Congress, Kansas and Nebraska would still be trying to get into the Union. “With all the enemies he keeps making,” someone remarked in 1965, “baseball will let Veeck back in the day the Klan decides to welcome Jackie Robinson.”
Curiously, as Veeck himself put it, whenever he tried to buy a team, his offer came up short. Even extravagant offers were rejected. The only evidence of a blacklist was existential. Bill Veeck, who broke attendance records in Milwaukee and Cleveland and Chicago, could not buy his way back into baseball with a check drawn on the Federal Reserve.
“Have you tried your American Express Card?” I asked.
His smile was bittersweet. “I’ve even offered to pawn the kids,” he said.
Visiting him in Maryland, one was at first put off. The large living room, decorated with Navaho rugs and casual open furniture, rang to the sound of television. Old movies. Game shows. The Galloping Gourmet. Frances, a gracious, attractive, organized brunette, would steward my wife and children to the guest house. Veeck’s older boys, Mike and Gregory, helped with the luggage.
The major-domo sat on the couch in shorts, reading. He was always reading. Sometimes as he read, two or three books lay open at the same time. War histories, novels, spy stories, political essays, even baseball books, and he read so rapidly that sometimes his speed surpassed his pronunciation. To this day, he calls the tranquilizer that deformed babies “Tamilodide.”
His greeting was offhand. It took five hours to drive from New York to Easton, Maryland, which with the children seemed like a week, and Veeck’s hello suggested that you had dropped by from next door.
He sipped a beer. He always sips beer, but drinks no whiskey. Then, reading two books, keeping a casual glance on the television, where Humphrey Bogart was making a sidelong move toward Mary Astor, he’d utter a startling statement—Franklin Roosevelt was a thief. As you answered, he’d turn more deeply to his books.
Partly this was style. Veeck likes to make you work to hold his attention. It was not rudeness. The chroniclers of Imperial Rome boasted that Julius Caesar was capable of doing seven things simultaneously. In the days of his idleness, Veeck was overcharged with adrenaline. He did three things at once because he had to.
“Roosevelt didn’t steal. He had family money from boyhood,” I announced.
Veeck looked up. On the television set, Bogart was telling Mary Astor that he had found her out. She was a killer. “What Roosevelt stole was Norman Thomas’ platform,” Veeck said. “He ran on a few old socialist ideas and called it the New Deal. Roosevelt became President with thoughts he took from Norman Thomas, and Thomas had to go and be a professor.” On the big screen Mary Astor burst into tears.
I had been writing articles for the Saturday Evening Post, a magazine that several editors were dragging toward the twentieth century. “It may be working,” Veeck said. “The stuff is getting pretty good. For the first time in years, people are stealing the Post out of my mailbox.”
Some of our best friends were lawyers and doctors, but we agreed that if physicians did not end up with all the money in the United States, attorneys certainly would. “I’m thinking of dealing with that from within,” Veeck said. “I’m starting to read for the law. That’s what Lincoln did. You read and then if you can pass a bar examination you are licensed. There are only a few states where you can do that. Maryland is one.”
“If you don’t get back into baseball,” I said.
“I made a splendid offer for the Washington Senators. There’s a team that hasn’t been promoted. You have Washington and all northern Virginia to draw from, and despite the politicians, there is a kind of glamour to the capital. I made a good offer. Keep a team in Washington. Why, it is even possible that you could keep Congressmen off your neck by giving free tickets to important committee chairmen. Not a bribe, of course. Congressmen do not accept bribes. Rather a gesture of good feeling from Ole Will, on behalf of the national pastime. I made my offer and the word from baseball was ‘Close, but no.’ Not ‘No, thanks.’Just ‘No.’ They moved the Senators to Minneapolis, and now, when antitrust legislation has them scared to death, there’s no ball club in Washington, no free tickets for important committee chairmen, no bribery. Beg pardon. No gestures of good feeling.”
He sipped beer out of a can. “If this exile is permanent, I might even buy a bookstore. Then books would be my substitute for ball players.”
Sitting opposite Veeck when he wore shorts, you noticed the artificial leg. For walking, the device was rigid, locked at the knee. When he sat, the leg extended like a plastic shillelagh. He turned a screw and the device bent 90 degrees and assumed the outlines of a normal leg when one is sitting.
Once he invited me to play tennis. He has imposing hairy forearms and he hits a tennis ball hard. You could beat him by running him, of course. But then you were running a one-legged opponent. There was no middle ground. Hit the ball to Veeck and have him slam a rocket past you. Hit the ball away from him and live with your conscience. We rallied for a long time. I resisted his invitation to play a set.
Peachblossom Creek was wide and calm, a Maryland Moon River, lapping with the tides. Until jellyfish moved in each summer, the waters were irresistible, and we used to swim amid a shriek of children. Veeck unharnessed his artificial leg and moved through the water with a sturdy crawl. He likes children, his own and other people’s. “Be ready,” he warned one of my boys, who was four. “I’m coming after you and I’m a sea monster.”
“I’m ready,” the boy cried. “Come get me, sea monster. Come get me, you one-legged sea monster.”
I blanched. Veeck didn’t even blink. Then I remembered something he had written with Ed Linn, in Veeck, as in Wreck. “It has become customary in our euphemistic world to describe us cripples as handicapped. I’m not handicapped. I’m crippled. Webster defines handicapped as ‘to be placed at a disadvantage.’ I don’t believe I’m there. I can do anything anybody else can do that doesn’t involve sprints. So, far more important, though I am crippled, I am not handicapped.”
Evenings, the talk grew more intense and turned toward baseball. He was devising new promotional plans, putting them into his files. No, he would not say what they were. Did he ask me to tell him my plots?
“When you get close to a team, Bill, can I throw $10,000 or $15,000 into your syndicate?”
“No help,” Veeck said. “There are Federal rules governing the way I operate. I can’t work with units that small.” He sighed. “It probably doesn’t matter anyway. These new syndicate-type fellers won’t let me back in. I’m an individualist. In baseball today, that makes me as obsolete as Barnum.”
To come back in December, 1975, he had to sprint through minefields. The syndicate-type fellers objected to his method of financing. They gave him a week to raise another $1.2 million in cash. When he succeeded, he won the oldest ball park in the majors and a burnt-out franchise. The White Sox he sold were profitable winners. The White Sox he bought fifteen years later had been losing for so long that the American League wanted to uproot the team to Seattle. (In a new setting, the first flash of major league baseball blinds locals to ineptitude. By emphasizing civic pride, by telling reporters that the city itself is on trial, by equating baseball attendance with respect for the National Anthem, you can draw with Snow White, eight clowns and one designated hitter.)
Veeck acquired the Sox on the Wednesday before a Friday trading deadline. Negotiations were completed in a suite at the Diplomat Hotel, a resort in Hollywood, Florida.
Veeck moved to the lobby, set up a chair and desk, under a sign that read, “WHITE SOX TRADING POST” and began making deals as rapidly as he could. The team he bought could hardly be worsened. Besides, trade headlines seldom hurt ticket sales. One owner snapped that Veeck was impairing the dignity of the game. Smiling in a dignified way, Veeck made six deals, involving twenty-two players, within forty-eight hours.
He almost filled Comiskey Park for a game with Kansas City opening day in the Bicentennial year. He drafted Rudie Schaffer, his business manager, to wear a three-cornered hat and play a snare drum. Paul Richards, his field manager, donned a white wig and carried a flag. Flanking them, in knee britches, his artificial shin naked to the winds of spring, Veeck limped along, playing a fife. The Spirit of ’76 lasted long enough for the White Sox to defeat Kansas City, 4 to 0, before 40,318 spectators.
That weekend cold weather struck. Then snow sprinkled Chicago. Opening-day momentum froze into inertia. It was two weeks before the Sox played another home game. On May 9, a line drive cracked the left knee cap of Wilbur Wood, the Sox’s most durable pitcher. Newspapers across the country ran photographs of Wood screaming in agony. The season ahead was symbolized.
The new players Veeck acquired matched those he had traded. Ralph Garr, an outfielder, who won a batting championship in 1974, could not go back on a fly ball. A variety of left fielders could not throw home. To paraphrase, or blaspheme, Leo Tolstoy, all winning baseball teams play defense in the same way. Well. Losers make different kinds of mistakes. Eventually, in May, June, July and August, the White Sox were going to make the single, unique mistake that cost them the game.
That left Veeck’s style and his promotions. He ripped out his office doors and worked in public. He wanted the White Sox to be a quasi-public team. He answered his own phone and bantered with fans, growing sharp only when the fans tried to hustle a hustler. No, he was not interested in Cuba sugar investments or debentures guaranteed to pay 45 percent interest, or shares in a molybdenum mine that had not yet been dug in the Northwest Territories.
He sponsored scores of novelties, including music night. Anyone who brought an instrument and could play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was admitted for half-price. Two people arrived with pianos. Others brought tubas. Some thirteen thousand amateur musicians bought half-price tickets and they rose in the seventh inning and played their song, guided by the baton of an assistant conductor from the Chicago Symphony. The headless skeleton of Franz Joseph Haydn stirred in its Austrian grave. “But we invited no music critics,” Veeck says, “and the next morning I got twenty calls from people who told me they’d never had more fun at a ball park. That’s what you’re supposed to have at a ball park. Fun.”
In September he activated Saturnino Orestes Arrieta Armas Minoso, called Minnie and O. Restless Minoso by sportswriters when he starred for the White Sox twenty years before. Minoso, now fifty-three and one pound over his best playing weight, became the oldest man ever to bat in the major leagues.
“My reasoning was that it was a good promotion all by itself,” Veeck says. “Besides, it is interesting to see this fifty-three-year-old man hustling down to first base on a pop fly. For some of our younger men, who are less enthusiastic, it made for an object lesson. One player objected to Minnie taking batting practice. That’s understandable. You take Minnie at fifty-three hitting the ball into the left-field stands, and here’s a guy of twenty-three who can’t get the ball to the warning track. I’d want to bar him, too. Beyond all that, on the other hand I wanted Minnie to get a hit.”
Minoso paused for an ovation on his first time at bat. He tipped his cap and waved. The cheers continued. Then he made out.
“Me no see ball,” he explained to Veeck. “Tears.”
In his sixth game as designated hitter, Minoso belted a major league fast ball on a low line to left field. He was now the oldest man ever to make a major league hit.
On this warm September evening two days later, the young pitcher Chris Knapp was throwing hard and holding his lead. Someone hit a drive toward right field, and Ralph Garr backed up a step and watched the ball bounce. It went for two bases.
“A hundred-dollar fine,” I told Veeck.
“For what?”
“For a major league outfielder playing a fly like that.”
“You’re out of your time,” Veeck said, impatiently. “A thousand-dollar fine wouldn’t work with players today.” He brightened when the Sox scored in the last of the eighth and won the first game, 4 to 3.
Charles O. Finley, the dapper, blunt Chicagoan who is the Emperor of the Oakland Athletics, arrived in the press box between games. Finley’s white hair glistened in the kind of mane directors demand from central casting when they need an actor to portray a judge.
“Veeck,” Finley said, “since you’ve activated Minoso and made a joke of the game, it’s time for all us old men to activate ourselves. I’ll activate me and you activate you.”
Veeck nodded, but did not smile.
“You know the rules,” Finley said. “No artificial aids. That means you gotta hit without your wooden leg.”
“And you,” Veeck said, “will have to bat without your hairpiece.”
For the rest of the night Finley kept his distance.
The White Sox fell two runs behind in the second game, and a second baseman named Stein made two errors. “Are you caught in the salary boom?” I asked. “Do you have to pay these gentlemen much money?”
“You don’t mind paying the good ones. The worrisome thing is the high cost of mediocrity. I’ll give you an example, better in basketball because it’s simpler. The Milwaukee Bucks started in the NBA with a lot of enthusiasm. They managed to lose $480,000, starting five guys named Joe. The next year they win the flip and they have Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. They pay him $200,000. They make $500,000. That’s a turnaround of a million dollars. Obviously, Jabbar is worth what he gets. Now they double the salaries of the other four men who played with him. Next year they get Oscar Robertson for big money and they make a million and a quarter. The three original guys playing with Jabbar and Robertson get their salaries doubled again. They’re playing just as lousy as they did in the beginning and now their salary has been quadrupled. They simply rode up on Jabbar’s and Robertson’s shirt-tails.
“There’s where your danger is. As the numbers for legitimate stars go up, they drag up players whose only claim to fame is that they can put on a uniform. You hit that all the time in baseball.”
Back of center field, above the freshly painted empty seats, the scoreboard was silent. Going into the bottom of the eighth, Veeck’s White Sox were losing, 4 to 2. Two men reached base. A beefy first baseman named Jim Spencer came to bat. Steve Mingori of Kansas City threw a slider and Spencer stroked it to right, not hard, nor even very high, but just hard enough and high enough to clear the railing in front of empty boxes. Three runs scored. The White Sox would win.
The scoreboard awoke. Explosions rang. Fireworks lit the South Side night. Mingori looked at his shoes and drew his spikes across the mound. Suddenly every loudspeaker at Comiskey Park erupted into the “Hallelujah Chorus” from the Messiah.
Mingori shifted his weight. The music rose. “Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hal-le-lu-jah.”
You are not supposed to root in a press box. You are supposed to be an emotionless observer and clinical. Unclinically, I clenched my right fist, lifted it shoulder-high and looked at Veeck. His last-place team was about to win a double-header.
“Hallelujah,” I said.
Veeck winked. “It’s supposed to be fun.”
He left soon after the double victory, limping slowly down the twisting catwalk on the roof of amiable ancient Comiskey Park. He saw me behind him, stopped, turned sideways and surveyed the cityscape to the south.
Nothing was there but street lamps. Even as I passed, I knew what he was doing. If we walked together, I would have to slow my pace to match his one-legged gait. Baseball’s ebullient, hustling, wildest child is a sensitive man who does not like to impose.
He was going to finish last. In a world of syndicates for owners, among players tuned to the whims of business agents, it is possible he will not win another pennant. Even Branch Rickey finished his active days directing a last-place club.
But by September 25, hundreds of White Sox fans had organized a promotion of their own. Veeck might create a winner in two years. He had saved the White Sox from moving to Seattle. A game against Oakland was designated “Bill Veeck Appreciation Night.”
In the season of his return, Veeck’s luck held constant. It poured in Chicago on September 25. Bill Veeck Appreciation Night had to be canceled on account of rain.