Sports Biblio Digest, 4.26.20: A Contemporary Reckoning of Bill Veeck
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Comiskey Park Returns To Life; Pandemic Baseball Book Club; Quarantine Reads; Finding Faith At A Hockey Rink; An Equestrienne Who Defied The Nazis; The Penn Relays; John McDonnell; Alex Belth; Why We Swim; The Legend of Steve Dalkowski; Remembering Mike Curtis
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What the sports world—and not just the baseball establishment—could dearly use these days is the strong whiff of playful imagination.
While live sports remain in repose because of the Coronavirus, all kinds of scenarios—grand, hare-brained and otherwise—are being conjured up for the time when the veil may be lifted.
Not many sound realistic or wise, and impatient schemes calling for games with an absence of fans would be a fatalistic blow in the mind of Bill Veeck.
That’s my conclusion, anyway, from reading his acclaimed memoir “Veeck As In Wreck” as the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.
For Veeck, owner of three major league teams between the late 1940s and late 1970s, several in the minors and spurned buyer of still more, baseball wasn’t the mystical pastime upon which cynical owners built a monopoly business model. Instead, he regarded it as one of many nodes of entertainment that had plenty of competition.
“To me, there is nothing more beautiful than a stadium or an amusement park filled with people,” Veeck wrote. “Anything filled with people. I have spent most of my life in a ball park.”
The son of a former sportswriter and Chicago Cubs general manager and president, Veeck was to the baseball manor born, but at heart, he operated like a bleacher bum. The dour mid-century baseball establishment club that barely tolerated his presence stuffed his attempts to remain among them more than once.
In his memoir, Veeck lashed out at them with special glee, including his nemesis George Weiss of the New York Yankees. While they were hard-boiled businessmen in the backrooms, they disguised their machinations with almost religious fervor to the public.
It was enough to make Veeck cringe. “Baseball has sold itself as a civic monument for so long that it has come to believe its own propaganda,” he wrote.
By appealing mainly to purists, poets and pastoral souls, Veeck said, the game was being more than short-sighted. “If you depend solely on people who know and love the game, you’ll be out of business by Mother’s Day."
Veeck fretted that he’d be forever known as the man who signed a midget, Eddie Gaedel, who had one major-league at-bat for the St. Louis Browns. But he begins his book with exactly that story.
“At the heart of Veeck’s story is the conflict between a stubborn, iconoclastic individual and the entrenched status quo,” wrote Paul Dickson, author of a Veeck biography published in 2012.
The carnival-barker novelties that Veeck invited—he calls them “gags” with particular relish—belie the sharp business sense that he brought to baseball during an increasingly complacent time.
Veeck constantly skewered commissioner Ford Frick—”baseball’s version of Bull Run”—for having done “almost nothing without prodding himself to address the problems of baseball or the structure of the game.”
Those words were written in the early 1960s, when Veeck was in the first of two ownership stints with the Chicago White Sox.
The age of televised sports was dawning, and the National Football League was eagerly jumping on that vehicle. Baseball dawdled, with California migration its only significant move in recent years, and that largely the handiwork of Walter O'Malley.
Veeck insisted baseball not only had to be dynamic and creative, but proactive. He called for expansion, interleague play and free agency.
Those calls were essentially howling into an abyss.
Instead, stodgy ownership birds clung to promotions like Old-Timer’s Day, which Veeck despised:
“I can’t stand such cheap and tawdry box office gimmicks. I mean what are they trying to do, make a mockery of the game?”
The other bookend to Veeck’s caravan of stunts—the disastrous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in 1979—came a year before he exited the role of owner for good, done in by the costs of the very player free agency he advocated.
“Today the game reflects much of what he fought for, and his influence is still much in evidence,” Dickson wrote. “Today he is seen as a man decades ahead of his time.”
When he was inducted posthumously into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991, those very off-the-rails instincts were hailed by the Cooperstown cognoscenti.
By then, the business of baseball had catapulted far beyond the level of imagination even of Bill Veeck.
On the other end of a season-ending strike in 1994, the business model evolved rapidly, and it figures to be profoundly changed once again following the current public health lockdown.
How much of this season may be salvaged remains to be seen, but like my national government, I worry about the leadership at the top.
Commissioner Rob Manfred’s reins to me have been unsteady all along, and his ham-handed (and cheapskate) approach to gutting the minor-league heart of the game will do tremendous damage.
It’s unlikely to expect a figure to emerge from the shadows, like a Shoeless Joe from the cornfields in “Field of Dreams,” who can combine Veeck’s spirit of play and bottom-line business acumen.
The enterprise of Major League Baseball these days—as was the case during Veeck's time—has a very low tolerance for someone who has “always found humor in the incongruous.
“I have always liked to entertain,” Veeck wrote. “And I have always found a stuffed-shirt the most irresistible of all targets.”
A Few Good Reads
A Chicago architect has been working on a very cool digital model of the original Comiskey Park—not the present version which goes by a corporate name—that was revealed recently in the Chicago Sun-Times. I’m not sure what’s coming over me but I’m really turning into a sports architecture geek—this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen in a long while, and not just because live sports are on a hiatus;
While you’re still locked down, here’s a nifty sports-and-culture quarantine reading list from Paul Flannery at SB Nation, including a special category for Elmore Leonard;
For the first time in its 125-year history, the Penn Relays have been cancelled due to the Coronavirus, and Sports Illustrated made that fact, and the meet’s venerable history, its cover feature this week;
You’ve been warned by Ray Ratto that the sports desert we’re living through is bound to get hotter and lonelier and not just because summer will be here soon in the Northern Hemisphere;
Meet Brendan O’Donoghue, from the Irish town of Tipperary, where a local snooker club nurtured him into becoming one of the top amateur stars in his country;
Brazil’s heartbreaking loss to Italy in the 1982 World Cup finals has become something of a touchstone for a soccer-crazed nation that has won more of those titles than anyone else—five in all—but not since 2002;
Sports journalism’s role in recent weeks has been to revive games as best they can during a global shutdown of large gatherings. But as the recovery from the Coronavirus crisis unfolds, the profession will have a massive obligation to public service as well;
I came across this 2013 piece in the Catholic World Report about Alyssa Bormes, author of “The Catechism of Hockey,” a meditation on the sport and evangelizing and how she fused the two subjects while working through a loss of faith as a young woman after a divorce.
Curator Extraordinaire
Here’s a very enjoyable and informative Q & A between two friends of this newsletter: Japan-based sportswriter Ed Odeven talks to Alex Belth, creator of the Bronx Banter blog and a marvelous curator of classic sportswriting and American culture. Belth’s repository for all that these days is The Stacks Reader, and in the interview he explains his zen for research, how he tracks down pieces from long-gone publications and his own interviews with legendary authors:
“It gives me a tremendous sense of satisfaction that I am doing something that is bigger than me. Labor of love is a good term because it’s not financially lucrative, but creatively and emotionally, it’s incredibly enriching. Changed my life. Twenty years ago I would never have imagined this is the course my life would have taken, although as I mentioned, there are hints in my past that led me here. But so many of the writers we’ve discussed have actually become friends, good friends, and I can’t imagine my life without them. And I keep meeting more folks.”
Alex reveals his favorite “five-tool” writers, but I won’t spoil it by naming them here. Read the whole thing. You’ll be glad you did.
Picture Perfect
John McDonnell had his first sports photograph published 50 years ago in his high school newspaper, and has since gone on to a distinguished professional career with The Washington Post. This week he pulled out some of his favorite shots since the 1970s, explaining how he took them. There aren’t many doing what he does any longer, so it’s a real treat to enjoy a master still in action.
Sports Retro Files
Steve Dalkowski, who died this week at the age of 80, never reached the major leagues despite having one of the fastest fastballs ever recorded. Ted Williams marveled at the lefthander’s speed, which was once clocked even faster than that of Bob Feller. As a Baltimore Orioles prospect in 1963, Dalkowski mowed down Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle in a spring training game.
But Dalkowski’s lack of control was as legendary as his blazing arm, and after being released by the Orioles in 1966, he plunged into alcoholism and was a migrant farm worker in California before returning home to Connecticut. He later was the real-life inspiration for the Nuke LaLoosh character played by Tim Robbins in "Bull Durham."
In 1970, Pat Jordan wrote about Dalkowski in “The Wildest Fastball Ever” for Sports Illustrated:
“In nine years of minor league pitching he walked 1,354 batters in 995 innings. He struck out 1,396. In his last year of high school Dalkowski pitched a no-hitter in which he walked 18 batters and fanned the same number.”
“Dalkowski struck out more batters and walked more batters per nine-inning game than any professional pitcher in baseball history.”
Dalkowski also was featured in author Tim Wendel’s 2010 book, “High Heat.”
Here’s a brief excerpt, and Wendel wrote for Huffington Post about another fireballer whose big-league career began as the book came out. Stephen Strasburg of the Washington Nationals almost flamed out due to arm injuries, but in the last baseball we saw last fall, he was named the 2019 World Series MVP;
The first two installments of the Michael Jordan documentary “The Last Dance” aired by ESPN last weekend drew audiences of 15 million or so, and two more episodes are airing this weekend. The Los Angeles Times is dusting off some classics from its archive and this week published Jim Murray’s “All the NBA World Was a Stage for Michael Jordan,” his column from Feb. 4, 1996, in the aftermath of a Bulls-Lakers game:
“Michael Jordan vs. Magic Johnson was supposed to have all the dramatic impact of the Red Baron vs. Eddie Rickenbacker, or any of the other great matchups of history. But the matchup it resembled at the end was the Titanic against the iceberg. It was as one-sided as a heart attack.”
Sports Book News
This batch of spring baseball books reviewed by David Shribman for The Wall Street Journal might be enough to tide over even the most diamond-starved fan, at least for a while;
The Pandemic Baseball Book Club has been created by baseball book authors searching for sales in a time of lockdowns, and also benefits independent local bookstores that are taking a very big hit these days;
Many of those titles have been published by the University of Nebraska Press, which in July will publish “Sports Journalism: A History of Glory, Fame and Technology.” The authors are journalism professors Patrick Washburn (Ohio U.) and Chris Lamb (IUPUI), who’s had two other books, about sportswriters, race and baseball, published by UNP.
Now Hear This
A recent episode of the Reading the Game baseball podcast features Josh Chetwynd, author of “Baseball in Europe,” and is the second part of that extended conversation;
At NPR’s Weekend Edition, an interview with Bonnie Tsui, author of the newly published “Why We Swim,” which covers the nature of competitive stroking and on a broader level what compels humans to seek open waters;
Last year, British journalist Richard Askwith published “Unbreakable,” about Czech countess Lata Brandisková, who defeated crack SS cavalry officers in a 1937 steeplechase after German occupation of her homeland. At Only a Game, the author describes Lata’s story in more detail, and the book is reviewed here at The Wall Street Journal. Askwith—whose previous book is a biography of Emil Zátopek—is hopeful the delayed Tokyo Olympics might reignite the spirit of the Games if and when they’re contested next year.
Passings
Mike Curtis, 77, was a hard-nosed middle linebacker for the Baltimore Colts during a golden age for hard-nosed middle linebackers in the National Football League. Drafted as a fullback out of Duke, Curtis quickly morphed into “Mad Dog,” the Colts’ defensive linchpin during the latter Don Shula years and who wasn’t averse to laying out a drunken fan rambling on the field at the Orange Bowl. It was Curtis’ late interception in the Super Bowl IV that helped set up the Colts’ upset victory over the Cowboys.
Said Bill Curry, Colts center and Curtis’ practice sparring partner and roommate during those years: “I knew Sunday was going to be my easiest day of the week.”
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives. This is Digest issue No. 202, published April 26, 2020.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.