The Hot Stove in Valhalla

* * *     Actually, the idea of using a midget had been kicking around in my head all my life. I have frequently been accused of stealing the idea from a James Thurber short story, “You Could Look It Up.” Sheer libel. I didn’t steal the idea from Thurber, I stole it from John J. McGraw.

         McGraw had been a great friend of my father’s in the days when McGraw was managing the New York Giants and my daddy was president of the Chicago Cubs. Once or twice every season he would come to the house, and one of my greatest thrills would be to sit quietly at the table after dinner and listen to them tell their lies. McGraw had a little hunchback he kept around the club as a sort of good-luck charm. His name, if I remember, was Eddie Morrow. Morrow wasn’t a midget, you understand, he was a sort of gnome. By the time McGraw got to the stub of his last cigar, he would always swear to my father that one day before he retired he was going to send his gnome up to bat.

         All kids are tickled by the incongruous. The picture of McGraw’s gnome coming to bat had made such a vivid impression on me that it was there, ready for the plucking, when I needed it.

         I put in a call to Marty Caine, the booking agent from whom I had hired all my acts when I was operating in Cleveland, and asked him to find me a midget who was somewhat athletic and game for anything. “And Marty,” I said, “I want this to be a secret.”

         I never told Marty what I wanted him for. Only five other people knew. Mary Frances, my wife; Rudie Schaffer; Bob Fishel, our publicity man; Bill Durney, our traveling secretary; and, of course, Zack Taylor, our manager.

         Marty Caine found Eddie Gaedel in Chicago and sent him down to be looked over. He was a nice little guy, in his mid-twenties. Like all midgets, he had sad little eyes, and like all midgets, he had a squeaky little voice that sounded as if it were on the wrong speed of a record player.

         ”Eddie,” I said, “how would you like to be a big-league ballplayer?”

         When he first heard what I wanted him to do, he was a little dubious. I had to give him a sales pitch. I said, “Eddie, you’ll be the only midget in the history of the game. You’ll be appearing before thousands of people. Your name will go into the record books for all time. You’ll be famous, Eddie,” I said. “Eddie,” I said, “you’ll be immortal.”

         Well, Eddie Gaedel had more than a little ham in him. The more I talked, the braver he became. By the time I was finished, little Eddie was ready to charge through a machine-gun nest to get to the plate.

         I asked him how much he knew about baseball. “Well,” he said, “I know you’re supposed to hit the white ball with the bat. And then you run somewhere.”

         Obviously, he was well schooled in the fundamentals.

[...]

         For as we came up for our half of the first inning, Eddie Gaedel emerged from the dugout waving three little bats. “For the Browns,” said Bernie Ebert over the loudspeaker system, “number one-eighth, Eddie Gaedel, batting for Saucier.”

         Suddenly, the whole park came alive. Suddenly, my honored guests sat upright in their seats. Suddenly, the sun was shining. Eddie Hurley, the umpire behind the plate, took one look at Gaedel and started toward our bench. “Hey,” he shouted out to Taylor, “what’s going on here?”

         Zack came out with a sheaf of papers. He showed Hurley Gaedel’s contract. He showed him the telegram to headquarters, duly promulgated with a time stamp. He even showed him a copy of our active list to prove that we did have room to add another player.

         Hurley returned to home plate, shooed away the photographers who had rushed out to take Eddie’s picture and motioned the midget into the batter’s box. The place went wild. Bobby Cain, the Detroit pitcher, and Bob Swift, their catcher, had been standing by peacefully for about 15 minutes, thinking unsolemn thoughts about that jerk Veeck and his gags. I will never forget the look of utter disbelief that came over Cain’s face as he finally realized that this was for real.

         Bob Swift rose to the occasion like a real trouper. If I had set out to use the opposing catcher to help build up the tension, I could not have improved one whit upon his performance. Bob, bless his heart, did just what I was hoping he would do. He went out to the mound to discuss the intricacies of pitching to a midget with Cain. And when he came back, he did something I had never even dreamed of. To complete the sheer incongruity of the scene -- and make the newspaper pictures of the event more memorable -- he got down on both knees to offer his pitcher a target.

         By now, the whole park was rocking, and nowhere were there seven more delirious people than my guests in the rooftop box. Veeck the jerk had become Willie the wizard. The only unhappy person in that box was me, good old Willie the wizard. Gaedel, little ham that he was, had not gone into the crouch I had spent so many hours teaching him. He was standing straight up, his little bat held high, his feet spraddled wide in a fair approximation of Joe DiMaggio’s classic style. While the Falstaff people were whacking me on the back and letting their joy flow unrestrained, I was thinking: I should have brought that gun up here. I’ll kill him if he swings. I’ll kill him, I’ll kill him.

         Fortunately, Cain started out by really trying to pitch to him. The first two deliveries came whizzing past Eddie’s head before he had time to swing. By the third pitch, Cain was laughing so hard that he could barely throw. Ball three and ball four came floating up about three feet over Eddie’s head.

         Eddie trotted down to first base to the happy tune of snapping cameras. He waited for the runner, one foot holding to the bag like a pro, and he patted Delsing on the butt in good professional exhortation before he surrendered the base. He shook hands with our first-base coach and he waved to the cheering throng.

[...]

         The press, for the most part, took the sane attitude that Gaedel had provided a bright moment in what could easily have been a deadly dull doubleheader between a 7th and an 8th place ball club. Vincent X. Flaherty of Los Angeles pretty much summed up the general reaction when he wrote, “I do not advocate baseball burlesque. Such practices do not redound to the better interests of the game -- but I claim it was the funniest thing that has happened to baseball in years.”

         It’s fine to be appreciated for a day; I recommend it highly for the soul. It’s better for the box office, though, to be attacked for a full week. I was counting on the deacons to turn Gaedel into a full week's story by attacking me for spitting in their Cathedral. They didn’t let me down, although I did feel the words “cheap and tawdry” and “travesty” and “mockery” were badly overworked. The spirit was willing, but I’m afraid the rhetoric was weak.

         Dan Daniel, a well-known high priest from New York, wondered what “Ban Johnson and John J. McGraw are saying about it up there in Baseball’s Valhalla,” a good example of Dan’s lean and graceful style. Non-baseball fans should understand that baseball men do not go to heaven or hell when they die; they go to Valhalla where they sit around a hot stove and talk over the good old days with Odin, Thor and the rest of that crowd. (I am assuming that the baseball people haven’t driven the old Norse gods out to the suburbs. You know what guys like Johnson and McGraw do to real-estate values.)

         To Joe Williams, Daniel’s colleague on the New York World-Telegram, I was “that fellow Veeck out in St. Louis.”

         ”It didn’t matter that this made a mockery of the sport or that it exploited a freak of biology in a shameful, disgraceful way,” Williams wrote. “. . . What he calls showmanship can more often be accurately identified as vulgarity.”

         I have never objected to being called vulgar. The word, as I never tire of pointing out to my tireless critics, comes from the Latin vulgaris, which means -- students? -- “the common people.” (If you don’t believe it, Joe, you could look it up.) I am so darn vulgar that I will probably never get into Valhalla, which is a shame because I would love to be able to let McGraw know how he helped that little boy who used to listen to him, enraptured, over the dinner table. From what I can remember of McGraw, he would roar with delight.”

-- Bill Veeck with help from Ed Linn in chapter 1 of Veeck, as in Wreck, published in 1962.

* * *

I was thinking about this incident when Selig made Houston open the roof at Minute Maid Park. I’m not sure whether I agree with Selig’s decision. On the one hand, when I was there for the final Cubs game of the season, I was quite annoyed that the roof was closed on a perfect afternoon. On the other hand, it’s their park, and they should, I suppose, be able to do what they want with it inside the boundaries of the rules.

More germane, though, was how much the game had changed from the time when someone like Bill Veeck could do something like sending Eddie Gaedel to bat.

Then, after my moment of despondency the other day, I did what I always do in these off-season moments, which is go back to some text or movie or something of the like that reminds me why I like baseball so much. I thought immediately of Veeck once again.

Let’s not go too far in deification of bygone eras. The league tried to stop Veeck from pulling his stunt, and afterward instituted a policy that all player contracts be filed with and approved by the league president. And it’s not like baseball was ever a free-wheeling vaudeville show as it might seem from this incident. I'm not longing for some golden age that has passed, never to return.

It’s just that I cannot even imagine an attempt at something like that nowadays. Whatever happened to these other kind of great stories? Not the epic triumph of long-suffering teams, but the fun occasionally had by everyone else in an otherwise inconspicuous doubleheader? Where is the glimmer of a character like Eddie Gaedel? (Gaedel, it might be worth mentioning, got a front-page obituary in the New York Times, which usually only happens for significant figures like statesmen and Nobel Prize winners.)

I’m not going to try an answer, actually. For one, I’m tired from typing all that out and you’re probably running out of time to read it. For two, though, I don’t want to think about the answer. Right now, the question is enough to remind me about why I’m asking, why I love this game, and why I always will. Those who came before me provided not only a wealth of legendary feats, but also some great stories.

I don’t know whether Veeck would ultimately favor the Cubs or the Sox, obviously having ties to both. (Veeck owned the ’59 White Sox, their last pennant-winning team.) But, I hope that Ozzie Guillen isn’t the only Chicago manager to trade stories with him in Valhalla. Veeck was working at Wrigley Field when he was 15, that lucky sonofabitch, so I have to think he’s going to want to see a pennant flag flying atop not only Wrigley Field but also its counterpart above the Norse hall of the gods once again. We all do.