What I knew of the eccentric baseball owner Bill Veeck, I knew only from stray web searches at White Sox games. What was a shower stall doing on the concourse? What are those pinwheel things above the scoreboard? While the trainer came out to check on Yoan Moncada or the pitching coach asked Michael Kopech to throw strikes, the answers to these questions were easy to find, read, and forget. Usually the research never went much further; my curiosity is no match for bad ballpark WiFi and dwindling phone battery. And usually, Michael Kopech continued to not throw strikes.
Last summer, Veeck popped up on my phone again for a different reason. On a slow news day in Chicago, he was the subject of a heated sports talk radio rant: The just-hired White Sox play-by-play guy had mispronounced his name.
One thing you come to admire about Bill Veeck when you read his autobiography, Veeck As In Wreck, is his nose for impending problems. The man thought of everything, had a fix for anything, and “the old fossils of baseball” didn’t like him much for it. He’s best known for the ballpark gimmicks and promotions he ran as the operator of teams in Milwaukee, Cleveland, St. Louis and Chicago between 1940 and 1980—Disco Demolition Night being the most infamous. But Veeck also features in baseball’s nobler moments. He planted ivy on the walls of Wrigley Field. In Cleveland, he signed Larry Doby, integrating the American League. Veeck As In Wreck would later be used to cross-examine its author: He was the only Major League owner to testify in support of Curt Flood.
Some of Veeck’s thinking seems quaint today—his belief that baseball teams owe something to their fans, and not the other way around, for one. But a few of his habits wouldn’t feel out of place in the modern game. Veeck’s appetite for trades was Preller-esque, as was his hit rate; there are shades of Dick Monfort in his letter replies to angry fans. So many Veeck innovations we now find unremarkable, or so vital as to be obvious: names on the backs of uniforms, cheesy giveaways at the gate, flashy scoreboard displays. They’re not the base, the bat, or the ball, but without them, what’s the game? For all the sporting-event staples Veeck engineered—the little things I never think twice about—he also had several bizarre ideas I have thought about like 50 times since reading his 1962 book. Here are the best gags, pranks, habits, loophole exploitations, suggestions, solutions, and promotions described in Veeck As In Wreck:
Seizing literally any opportunity to set off fireworks: Never was a man so pyrotechnically inclined as Bill Veeck. In his book there are dozens of mentions of fireworks, firework display strategies, firework pranks, firework companies, firework crews, and firework permits. “Entertainment, beyond its more obvious purpose, softens the blow of losing,” and so postgame fireworks go off after wins, but also after losses. The answer to any question is fireworks.
Staging a storm and manufacturing a rain delay: Veeck’s Milwaukee team is half a game behind Kansas City on the last day of the 1942 season, and the teams are scheduled to play a doubleheader in Milwaukee. He games out that it would be better for them not to play the second game at all: Either they lose the first game and Kansas City clinches, or they win the first game but give Kansas City another opportunity to retake first place. Hmm. A rare problem that cannot be solved with fireworks. The morning of the doubleheader, he and his sidekick Rudie take hoses to the infield and pretend it rained. He then tells the grounds crew to very slowly fix the field, so the 1:30 p.m. game does not start until 5 p.m. and the umpires have to call off the second game because of darkness and the other team is super mad. Milwaukee actually ends up losing the first game.
Giving away livestock: This is mentioned only in passing.
Covering bats, balls, and gloves in phosphorescent paint and playing in the dark: Ooh.
Opening a ballpark nursery: I don’t imagine many parents want to leave their children in the care of the Chicago White Sox now, but it’s a nice idea. In Cleveland, Veeck’s ballpark nursery is exploited by area mothers who coordinate to have one mother bring everyone’s kids to the game and dump them at the nursery so all the other moms can go shopping. All Veeck can do is tip his cap: “I have always had a boundless admiration for opportunists of either sex.”
Doing waiver-wire arbitrage: The book sometimes loses its zip and slips into opaque accounts of transactions, but this one was more gripping. Learning that Philadelphia’s catcher broke a finger, Veeck quickly signs the only good minor league catcher available and then gets the desperate Philly owner to buy the catcher for more than he paid. Today, signing relievers and backup catchers to flip at the deadline is the sole function of several Major League teams.
Trying to get more women to go to baseball games: Unlike the bag-policy dunces who run baseball today, Veeck goes to extreme lengths to make ballparks more hospitable to women. Renovating the ladies’ restroom is his first order of business in any park. He hands out orchids and nylons. He hires “special ushers” to look for “women who seemed bewildered” and help them find their seat. Observing that the woman fan tends to focus on individual players, he adds everyone’s first name to the lineup on the scoreboard. His bag policy is actually to give people bags, “cosmetic kits as presents to everybody who entered” the fancy bathroom. Must be nice! Must! Be! Nice!
Futzing with the infield: With the help of “the Michelangelo of grounds keepers,” Veeck arranges for segments of the infield to be tailored to their nearest fielder’s needs. The grass in front of Cleveland’s weak-ankled shortstop, for example, is kept high to slow the ball down. His first roster in Milwaukee is full of slow guys who will never manage to steal a base. It’s important to Veeck that the other team doesn’t steal bases either. A steal-sabotaging “loose, sandy mixture” is used on the basepath dirt, which left me with the charming image of Elly De La Cruz and Bobby Witt Jr. slowly sinking on their way to second base.
Futzing with the outfield: He also builds movable fences he can shift in and out or from right field to left field, depending on the opponent.
Running a sign-stealing operation through the center field scoreboard: Cleveland’s players buy a telescope for a man in the scoreboard who covers one of the scoreboard openings “with either a white or dark card depending on whether the pitch was going to be a fast ball or curve.”
Putting the national broadcasters in a press box where they can’t see anything so his team’s local broadcasters can call World Series games at home: Offended on behalf of “the guys who helped us draw our crowds all year” but won’t get to call the important games, Veeck scours the national radio broadcast contract and learns that the broadcasters are to use a booth “designated by the management.” He assigns them to the football press box, where they cannot see home plate, and the hometown radio guys are able to call the game.
Interesting idea…
Very interesting idea…
Having a special room for sportswriters’ wives to “relax and have a drink while they were waiting for their husbands”: Oh, to be a journalist in 1946.
Letting fans make managerial decisions for a whole game: Before “Grandstand Managers Day” in St. Louis, a newspaper ad invites fans to vote on an opening lineup and mail the ballot in for a ticket to the game. The Grandstand Managers sit in a special section behind the dugout. They are given giant YES and NO signs as they enter the ballpark. A guy holds up choose-your-own-adventure–style question cards to the Grandstand Managers and the votes are tallied and relayed to the dugout by walkie-talkie. I was extremely into this idea until I saw the questions, which included whether the infield should play double-play depth and if the runner should take off with the pitch. That’s too many decisions. I’ll just watch the game.
Putting player names on the backs of uniforms because “fans might want to know who they were”: He cooked with this one. Fans do want to know that.
Making a bad team seem historically and famously bad: In his first year running the St. Louis Browns, a team 20-plus games back in the standings, Veeck goes around town telling everyone what a joke the team is and how much they suck, a strategy that he (correctly) predicts will boost attendance. Everyone wants to see what’s up with these jokers! His aim is to paint them as the worst team that ever existed, a milestone in which everyone will want to take part. “If your town is destroyed by a hurricane, there’s no sense having almost the worst hurricane in history,” he writes. “There’s a certain satisfaction in being with a record-breaker.” When I read this, I felt a sting of recognition. Bill Veeck was incredibly right. Last fall, Kalyn Kahler and I wondered whether she would get to see the White Sox suffer their historic 121st loss in Chicago, or whether I would get to see it the next series in Detroit.
Speeding up the game: Veeck had not yet thought up his “pitchometer,” an early precursor to the pitch clock, but he has other remedies for baseball’s pace of play. “There would be nothing wrong with the now standard three-hour game if we were presenting two and a half hours of action. We aren’t,” he writes. One of his solutions has been adopted: Teams can intentionally walk someone without throwing the pitches. I’m less optimistic about his other ideas: widening the plate to stop pitchers from nibbling, changing the walk and strikeout thresholds so that a full count is now 2-1, putting an end to “around the horn” throws after outs, and only letting pitchers throw one warmup pitch before each inning.
Banning umpire ejections: Veeck dislikes umpires so much that immediately after the pace-of-play suggestions, he carves out an exception for time-consuming battles with umpires: “I would encourage bigger and better arguments by limiting the umpires’ powers to throw players out of the game.”
Showing fans “instant” “replays”: To keep umpires in line, Veeck tells them the whole park is rigged up with cameras that will catch them if they’re out of position. (He doesn’t actually have money to set up these cameras in Milwaukee, so he just spray-paints some wooden boxes on the top of the roof.) But in Chicago, he’s able to install a real camera behind first base. He dreams of hanging up pictures of close plays “so that the paying customers could gaze upon every miscall in sadness and disbelief.”
Playing an interleague schedule: Fans should be able to see some of the other league’s cool guys, he thinks.
Putting a picture of a player on the back of every ticket and rewarding fans who collected them all with free tickets: I would love this! Bring back physical tickets!
Designing an exploding scoreboard: “Why should a scoreboard just stand there doing nothing when it can contribute to the day’s enjoyment?” To make home runs exciting again, Veeck builds a scoreboard that celebrates White Sox dingers with flashing strobe lights, loud music … and fireworks.
Being a proud hater: Veeck hates the New York Yankees on several grounds, one being their weak promotions, which have nothing on his extremely cool promotions. The Yankees could never even imagine delivering 10,000 cupcakes to the home of one lucky fan! As Roger Maris chases Babe Ruth’s home run record, the Yankees have “their own record to preserve—their record for doing the worst promotional job, year in and year out, of any major-league team in the country.” And while he concedes the event is popular, he thinks little of their precious annual Old-Timers’ Day: “I could never understand how it either entertained the fans or benefited baseball to show the great old names as wheezing, balding, arthritic old men.”
Firebombing Yankee Stadium: Who among us? During a game, the Yankees mock Veeck by celebrating their home runs with sparklers in the visiting dugout. A line has been crossed; leave fireworks out of this! To retaliate, Veeck decides to smuggle a fire bomb to New York when the White Sox play an away game. The Yankees, tipped off by the presence of Veeck’s “firework man,” search all the luggage and confiscate the bomb.
Renting a hundred homing pigeons that will fly to New York and alert Yankees fans that a home run has been hit against their team: Sadly, he never makes this one happen.