[Eugene Church]

MY LIFE IN 2023
EC's Life Is Nothing But Glee in '23
Still enjoying Bill Veeck's book "Veeck As In Wreck"... Veeck was vilified by some major sportswriters for his use of midget Eddie Gaedel in a MLB game... they used terms like "cheap and tawdry", "travesty" and "mockery" to describe the promotion... that was one side of the story, Bill had his side, too... you be the judge.

"Wit, Quips and Quotes from the Diamond Minds"

Excerpts from "Veeck As In Wreck" by Bill Veeck and Ed Linn:

"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 die and go to heaven or hell when they die; they go to Valhalla where they sit around a hot stove and talk over the good days with Odin, Thor and the rest of that crowd.

To Joe Williams, Daniel's colleague on the New York World-Telegraph, 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 (Veeck) 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 can look it up. I am so darn vulgar that I will probably never get into Valhalla, which is shameful because I would love to know what John McGraw would have thought about the promotion. He spent many an evening at my father's house in Chicago telling stories over the dinner table. From what I can remember of McGraw, he would roar with delight about the promotion.

What that fellow Williams in New York didn't seem to realize -- or did he? was that it was he who was gratuitously and publicly calling Eddie Gaedel a freak. Eddie was a professional midget. He made his living by displaying himself, the only way we permit a midget to earn a living by displaying himself, the only way we permit a midget to earn a living in our enlightened society. In more barbaric times, they were able to achieve a certain stature as court jesters. My use of him -- vulgaris as I am -- was the biggest thing that ever happened to him. In the week that followed, I got him bookings that earned him something between $5,000 and $10,000. I kept getting him bookings here and there for the rest of his life.

The next day after the game, Will Harridge, American League President, issued and executive order barring Gaedel from baseball.

Naturally, I was bewildered and alarmed and shocked. "I'm puzzled, baffled and greived by Mr. Harridge's ruling, " I announced. "Why, we're paying a lot of guys on the Browns' roster good money to get on base and even though they don't do it, nobody sympathizes with us. But when this little guy goes up to the plate and draws a walk on his only time at bat, they it "conduct detrimental to baseball".

If baseball wanted to discriminate against the little people, I said, why didn't we have the courage to be honest about it, write a minimum height into the rules and submit ourselves to the wrath of all right-thinking Americans. "I think", I said, "that further clarification is called for. Should the height of a player be 3 feet 6 inches, 4 feet 6 inches, 6 feet 6 inches, or 9 feet 6 inches?" Now that midgets had been so arbitrarily barred, I asked, were we to assume that giants were also barred? I made dark references to the stature of Phil Rizzuto, who is not much over 5 feet tall, and I implied very strongly that I was going to demand an official ruling on whether he was a short ballplayer or a tall midget."

Yep, EC is enjoying Bill Veeck's book.
Yep, Bill Veech looks for loopholes in the league rules... yep, he could be a pest... yep, Bill would sometimes go too far... but he knew baseball as good as anyone... he won pennants and a World Series... and he entertained the fans with good food and good times... people came to see his teams play.