Master Of The Joyful Illusion

UNSHEATHED CANDOR

All this mental activity takes place on a sort of subterranean level, the generative but not always visible level of Veeck's nature. On the surface, he remains invincibly The Clown and The Irritant. His volcanic relations with the other owners in baseball stem not so much from his picaresque approach to the game as to his unsheathed candor. His feud with the New York Yankees started years ago as a professional matter and quickly became a personal one. " George Weiss is a sensitive man and I am an outspoken one," he says. "I'm sure that when I say George is a fugitive from the human race he does not think it is funny." Many owners profess to find his Midas touch distasteful. "He is nothing but a capital-gains gypsy," says one whose own disaffection for money is not pronounced.

That Veeck has a gypsy nature is indisputable. "I've had seven children and no two of them have been born in the same state," he says. That his ball clubs make money is also indisputable. In Cleveland, by Veeck's own testimony, his backers got back $20 for every $1 they put into the club. At St. Louis, Veeck bought stock at $7 a share and sold it 2� years later for $12 a share; even when the huge operating losses are included, the transaction netted Veeck and his backers a 38% profit. In Chicago the appraised value of the White Sox rose from $195 a share to $450 a share in the first year of Veeck's management. (Veeck paid $828 a share for the 54% of the stock he controls.) But that he shuffles franchises for profit motive alone is disputable. Veeck sold the Milwaukee Brewers in 1945 because he thought he might restore health to his ailing legs and ailing marriage by dropping out of baseball. He sold the Cleveland Indians in 1949 to raise enough cash to provide trust funds for his three older children and for a final settlement on his divorce. He sold the St. Louis Browns in 1953 at the insistence of an American League cabal led, he claims, by the Yankees.

None of this negates the alienation of Veeck from the community of owners or the real reasons for that alienation: that Veeck is a person of greater dimensions and grander vision than his contemporaries. All this would be tolerable if Veeck fitted the baseball men's image of such an individual—i.e., a failure. But his success offers a suggestion of their own inadequacy and threatens some of the longtime institutions of baseball, such as the domination of the American League by the Yankees. For if other clubs in the league continue to find Veeck's club a better draw than the Yankees, they may undergo a polar shift from domination by the Yankees—who, through the years, have offered them so much money that they couldn't defy Yankee wishes in league councils—to domination by Veeck.

The hostility of the owners is not shared by their players. Veeck is probably the most popular "players' owner" in history. He speaks the players' language without condescension and tends their needs without personal or financial reserve. Once in Milwaukee, Harry (Peanuts) Lowrey, an outfielder demoted to the Brewers by the Chicago Cubs, explained that his poor performance in Milwaukee was due to the fact that he and his family couldn't find a home there. "Move into my place," said Veeck—and promptly moved his own family out so Lowrey's could move in. At Cleveland in 1947 he promised Ken Keltner a bonus of $5,000 if Keltner hit more than .285. Keltner had a miserable year; he batted only .257. Veeck gave him the bonus anyway—and the next year Keltner batted .297 and helped spur Cleveland to the world championship. "It was the cheapest $5,000 I ever spent," says Veeck. Another time, Veeck spent $10,000 arranging for the birth and adoption of illegitimate children sired by three of his ballplayers—"I'd handled about 15 cases like this before but never three in one season!" he says—and then spent $100,000 of his own money fighting various legal actions just to keep the players' names secret. "We were trying to keep their families from breaking up," he says, "and we did."

MOST NOTABLE MUTATION

Historically, Veeck is perhaps the most notable mutation in baseball. He developed his bizarre techniques out of a sturdy tradition of conservative training and heritage. The only employer he ever knew was Philip K. Wrigley, the correct, conservative owner of the Chicago Cubs. Of him Veeck says: "A very bright man, more about things than about people, but very bright nevertheless." Veeck's father, for 15 years president of the Cubs, was a dignified person who, says Veeck, "was basically in favor of many of the same things I stand for—a clean ball park, a happy atmosphere. The kidding part I do—well, you must remember we operate in different eras. When my daddy started with the Cubs [as a vice-president in 1917] baseball was just about the only mass sport there was. This meant that your competition was a lot less and of an entirely different nature from today. You didn't have much golfing. You didn't have the huge race tracks and legalized betting of today. You didn't have hunting and fishing in reach of everybody, or sailing and boating. You didn't have radios that you can carry around on a golf course so you can listen to the games but never have to go to one. You didn't have television. It's true, certain things I do would be completely foreign to my father's nature. But he was indoctrinated in a different era and he reacted to it in a different way."

The elder Veeck was a sportswriter working under the name Bill Bailey on the Chicago American when Bill was born on February 9, 1914. Bill had an older brother, Maurice, who was killed in a childhood shooting accident playing cops and robbers. He still has an older sister, Peggy Krehbiel, who lives in Downers Grove, a suburb near Chicago. In his sportswriting days, the senior Veeck was a trenchant critic of the Cubs. "My infant son can throw his bottle farther than this team can hit," he said of one Cub team. Thus needled, the Cubs took Veeck into the organization as a vice-president and, after the 1918 season, raised him to president.

It was in these years that young Bill became attuned to the hidden tempos and secret life that make a ball park pulse with personality. When he was 11, he was helping mail out tickets for ladies' day, a novelty brought to Chicago by his father. In his teens he worked in the stockroom, in the concession stands, in the grandstand hawking popcorn and programs, with the ground crew, any place where his exceptional energies could be harnessed. (In 1929 he lost $10,000 worth of tickets to the World Series and didn't find them until two months after the season was over.) After hours he went rollicking with many of the players, a raucous, hard-drinking crew. From them he learned all the facts of life and the childlike enthusiasm with which ballplayers explore them. "One thing I tell our sons," says Veeck's wife, Mary Frances, "is that there is nothing they need to keep from their father. There isn't any kind of trouble they can get into that he hasn't seen."

His own father did not approve of all this. When Mr. Veeck took his wife and daughter partying, Peggy would have to rush into the speakeasy and flush the teen-age Bill and his friends out the back way before the elder Veeck walked in. "Bill could never understand why, if it was illegal for his father to be there, it was more illegal for him to be there," says Peggy.