Lefty Among the Righties

Stalwarts have hunted the charging lion, deep in the jungle veldt.

Brave men have stood to the tiger's rush seeking his costly pelt.

Hunters have tackled the elephant, never a job for clowns.

This world is packed with its daring deeds--but Veeck has purchased the Browns.

So wrote Grantland Rice in 1951, when Promoter Bill Veeck bought the hapless St. Louis Browns, a team that had crept out of the American League's second division only eleven times in 47 years. "Many critics were surprised to know the Browns could be bought," added John Lardner, "because they didn't know that the Browns were owned." That quickly changed: everybody always knew what Bill Veeck was doing, even if they rarely knew why. For 15 years, as owner of first the Cleveland Indians, then the Browns and finally the Chicago White Sox, William Louis Veeck Jr. gave big league baseball its dizziest merry-go-round ride. Now he chronicles his turbulent career in Veeck--as in Wreck (G. P. Putnam's Sons; $4.95), a brash, blunt autobiography that is certain--like everything else he has done--to tickle fans and raise his fellow owners' hackles.

Bubble Ink & Beer. As he tells it, he had only $11 to his name when he bought his first ball club--the minor league Milwaukee Brewers--and he blew $10 of that celebrating the event. In later years, he was playing with millions, and his fortunes zigzagged up and down just as fast. His teams won pennants and finished dead last. He set attendance records (his 1948 season total of 2,620,627 in Cleveland is still a major league mark) and flirted with bankruptcy. A confessed "publicity hound" who for years stumped around on a wooden peg (he lost his right leg as the result of a World War II inju ry), he spent money like a drunken sailor on sparkling Burgundy (he calls it "bubble ink") for himself, fireworks, exploding scoreboards, blaring bands and tightrope walkers for his wide-eyed fans.

"Baseball should be fun," Veeck insists, and he was good for a gag a minute. He staged a mock invasion from outer space.

He gave away live squabs, ducks, chickens, pigs and lobsters as door prizes--or, perhaps, 10,000 cupcakes or 1,000 cans of beer. "To give one can of beer to 1,000 people is not nearly as much fun as giving 1,000 cans of beer to one guy," writes Veeck. "You give 1,000 people a can of beer and each of them will drink it, smack his lips and go back to watching the game. You give 1,000 cans to one guy, and there is always the outside possibility that 50,000 people will talk about it." In St. Louis, Veeck enraged baseball purists by sending Midget (3 ft. 7 in.) Eddie Gaedel up to bat against the Detroit Tigers. League President Will Harridge instantly wrote midgets out of baseball--and that was all Veeck needed. At 5 ft. 6 in., he insisted, should Yankee Shortstop Phil Rizzuto be classed as "a short ballplayer or a tall midget"? And "are we to assume that giants are also barred?"

Harridge could consider himself ticked off--but lightly. In his book, Veeck has his rich, full say on some other baseball figures with whom he clashed. The man who could be so tender to his players that he once gave a sore-armed pitcher $40,000 as a parting gift has bitter memories of his 1960 clash with Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick over the draft-choice plan for stocking the new American League clubs in Washington and Los Angeles. Veeck argued that the plan unfairly forced the old clubs to choose between keeping their veteran stars or their prize minor leaguers. But to no avail. "Let us be fair," writes Veeck. "Ford Frick does not try to do the wrong thing. Given the choice between doing something right or something wrong Frick will usually begin by doing as little as possible. It is only when he is pushed to the wall for a decision that he will almost always, with sure instinct and unerring aim, make an unholy mess of things."

Damn Yankees. Considering himself "a left-hander in a righthanders' world," Veeck's relations with his fellow club owners were a succession of explosions. "If baseball owners ran Congress," he says, "Kansas and Nebraska would still be trying to get into the Union." More than anyone else, Veeck fought with the New York Yankees. "Hating the Yankees isn't part of my act," he says. "It is one of those exquisite times when life and art are in perfect conjunction."

In 1953 Yankee Co-Owners Dan Topping and Del Webb mustered votes to block Veeck's attempts to move his foundering St. Louis franchise to Baltimore--a town the Browns eventually wound up in after Veeck had been forced to sell out. "Topping was nothing if not frank," relates Veeck. "He said. 'We're going to keep you in St. Louis and bankrupt you. Then we'll decide where the franchise is going to go.'" As for Webb: "In Del's behalf, let me say that he does have a saintlike forbearance and a forgiving heart. Every year he brightens up my dreary holiday season with a warm and sentimental Christmas greeting. In order to savor the real Del Webb that lies beneath the deceptively cold exterior, it helps to know that his greetings come on the letterhead of his construction company, the Del E. Webb Corp., and are typed on one of those machines that are supposed to make a form letter look personal."

In the end, though, it was not the Yankees or Frick or financial problems that drove Bill Veeck out of baseball in June 1961. He was stricken with a vascular ailment, treated at the Mayo Clinic, ordered to take a long rest. Will he be back? Says Veeck: "Sometime, somewhere, there will be a club that no one really wants. And then Ole Will will come wandering back to laugh some more."

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