Bill Veeck Read Free

backers for the 1942 attempt to buy the Phillies.
    Today, there are those who think that this is all a lie, a falsehood concocted by Veeck almost twenty years after the fact. This belief stems from a single article, “A Baseball Myth Exploded: Bill Veeck and the 1943 Sale of the Phillies,” one of the most influential stories ever published in a Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) publication. This story in the 1998 issue of
The National Pastime
was written by David M. Jordan, Larry R. Gerlach, and John P. Rossi, and it attempts to debunk Veeck’s tale about trying to buy the Phillies and stock the club with Negro league players. dn The article featured a doctored cover picture of Veeck in a purple and yellow open-collar sports shirt, a clear attempt to make him look clownish and mendacious.
    The cover also carried a most unscholarly and intemperate teaser: “The major difficulty with this oft-told story is that it is not true. Veeck did not have a deal to buy the Phillies. He did not work to stock any team with Negro leagues stars. No such deal was quashed by Landis or Frick.” 1
    The article was introduced by the magazine’s editor, Mark Alvarez, who opined, “The wonder and lesson to researchers is less why Veeck did it than how this story became common baseball currency without ever having been verified.”
    One of the main arguments advanced by the authors was that Veeck largely invented the story for his 1962 autobiography,
Veeck—as in Wreck.
They could find no reports in the mainstream or Negro press of this story prior to that time (other than an article by Wendell Smith written a few months earlier and based on an interview with Veeck). They note specifically that Doc Young, sports editor of a black paper in Cleveland in the 1940s, never mentioned this incident, and they say, “Young’s silence is significant.”
    The authors made a number of largely speculative points to support their argument and ask why Veeck had not integrated the Milwaukee Brewers. They concluded: “We must face the fact that Bill Veeck falsified the historical record.” 2
    Almost immediately members of SABR privately questioned both the tone and accuracy of the article. They especially questioned the assertion that because these researchers could not find confirmation, it did not happen, noting that it is impossible to prove a negative. “I wondered about the piece from the very beginning,” said Mark Armour, who is the founder of SABR’s Bio-Project, a drive to create short biographies of all major-league ballplayers, and the author of
Joe Cronin: A Life in Baseball.
“Not finding a source is not the same thing as there not being a source.” 3
    At least one member wrote a letter of rebuttal. Several days after the magazine was mailed, Mike Gimbel, an avid baseball fan who had held front-office jobs doing statistical analysis for the Expos and Red Sox, wrote to SABR to resign from the group, based on what he called a cover story that was a shameless piece of trash. Gimbel said that when he first got the article with the provocative cover, he was saddened to learn that one of his childhood heroes had not been truthful. But when he actually began reading the piece, he became angry: “I wasn’t past the first page before I realized that something was terribly wrong—not with Veeck’s ‘story’—but with Gerlach’s (et al.) research and with the very tone of this shameful article.”
    Gimbel’s points of contention were many, but they centered on the authors’citing evidence that tended to support rather than deny Veeck’s original story. For example, they say that the one mention of the attempted purchase before 1961 was Red Smith’s writing in the June 25, 1946,
New York Herald Tribune
, “Hardly anyone knows how close Veeck came to buying the Phillies when the National League was forcing Gerry Nugent to sell.