Bill Veeck Read Free Page A

He had the backing and the inside track.”
    The authors said Smith had evidently gotten the tale from “Sportshirt Bill.” Gimbel responded: “I guess that makes Red Smith, possibly the most renowned baseball newspaperman of the 20th century, a liar also! I guess that if you‘re going to tear down one of the great figures in baseball history (Veeck), you might as well throw in the greatest baseball newsman as well!” Gimbel noted in a later communication that Red Smith was a reporter for the
Philadelphia Record
at the time of Veeck’s meeting with Nugent in 1942.
    Gimbel concluded by lambasting the SABR article with some of the same intemperance that had fueled the original piece: “Shame on SABR for printing this scurrilous article. Shame on SABR for putting it on the cover so that you can get some ‘quick response’ in terms of sales. Your article belittles Veeck as a hustler, but you are the real, cheap hustlers in this matter. I don’t ever remember Veeck taking the low road that SABR has taken. Yes, Veeck was a hustler. He was a damn good hustler, but a hustler with a heart and with the courage to stand up and fight for what he believed in.”
    Although Gimbel wanted his letter published, it never was.
    Gimbel later rejoined SABR, and in 2011 he was profiled on the organization’s Web site as one of the group’s exemplary members. Yet, twelve years after the fact, he still called the article on Veeck and the Phillies “a vicious, yellow piece of journalism … which if you read their own research disproves their case.” 4
    An anonymous person sent a copy of the SABR magazine to Marya Veeck, who was upset with the way her father had been portrayed on the cover as well as in the text. She called Ed Linn, who had collaborated with Veeck on
Veeck—as in Wreck
. He assured her that every word of the Philadelphia story was true and not to let it bother her—which, as she pointed out many years later, was easier said than done. Linn told Marya he had not been contacted by the SABR researchers. 5
    The issue lay dormant with the public until March 12, 2005, when an item appeared on the SABR listserve from Jules Tygiel, a professor of history at San Francisco State University and the author of
Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy
(1983). Tygiel had spotted an error inthe magazine’s Veeck story. While browsing through A. S. “Doc” Young’s book
Great Negro Baseball Stars
, published in 1953, he said: “I came across the following passage about Veeck when he bought the Indians in 1946: ‘Negro writers soon recognized Veeck as a person likely at least to give an ear to the proposition of Negroes playing in the American League. Perhaps they had heard the unsubstantiated story that Veeck once shocked baseball’s late commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, with a proposal to buy a major league club and transform it into an all-colored aggregation.’ One of the main points made by the debunkers was that Young’s silence was significant, and here was Young discussing it in print under his own byline.” 6
    Tygiel, who had interviewed Veeck on the subject in 1980 and had never had any reason to doubt Veeck’s word, argued that while Jordan, Gerlach, and Rossi offered many other reasons to be skeptical about Veeck’s tale, the Young quote was at least one written reference to it nine years prior to the publication of
Veeck—as in Wreck.
Tygiel concluded, “The story may still be untrue and the source may still ultimately be Veeck himself, but this was not something he created or imagined, as Jordan et al. imply, at the time of the writing of his book.” 7
    A SABR member named Chris Hauser then chimed in, “I came across a similar reference that also predates Veeck’s autobiography in a story issued by the Associated Negro Press and printed in the August 14,