Bill Veeck: Baseball’s Greatest Maverick by Paul Dickson (review)

For Bill Veeck, the legendary Hall-of-Fame club owner, “the epitome of pleasure was hoisting a beer and singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’” (334), and in his excellent and accessible biography of Veeck, Paul Dickson reveals the story behind what made Veeck such a standout character and, as noted on his plaque in Cooperstown, “a champion of the little guy.”

Employing a plethora of diverse primary and secondary sources, including interviews with Veeck family members and close associates, Dickson renders an engaging portrait of a man who was more than just the facilitator of Eddie Gaedel, Larry Doby, and Comiskey Park’s exploding scoreboard. An unapologetic liberal who was blind to the color of his fellow man’s skin, Veeck learned at an early age that catering to all fans who ultimately provided a baseball team’s revenue was a key component to any franchise’s success. Creative marketing conflated with entertainment value became Veeck’s mantra, and when the players on the field delivered by padding the win column with more and more victories, the resulting symbiosis of success benefited fans, players, and the front office.

Dickson covers the full scope of Veeck’s life, but the details and minutiae the author draws into the text are what make the book both enjoyable and informative. Salient among the book’s highlights are Dickson’s probing of what Jesse Butler of the Cleveland Call and Post cited as Veeck’s “attack on racial discrimination and segregation in this country” by “giving Negroes a chance to show their real ability as major leaguers” (173). To this end, Dickson not only chronicles Veeck’s integrating of the American League in 1947 with the addition of Larry Doby to the Cleveland Indians roster but defends Veeck by noting the Doby signing as a seminal moment not just for baseball but as part of the broader but still inchoate civil rights movement.

Veeck endeavored to purchase the Philadelphia Phillies four years earlier with designs on revamping the roster with mostly black players, a plot disputed by a group of Society for American Baseball Research authors in the late 1990s. But Dickson goes to great lengths (in a ten-page appendix) to side with Veeck, who, at the time of the Philadelphia intrigue, was the owner of the American Association’s Milwaukee Brewers and in partnership with Harlem Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein. The success of the basketball team provided Veeck with a glimpse of what might have been achievable by an all-black baseball team on a major-league diamond.

Serving on the front lines in Bougainville during World War II, Veeck endured many maladies, the worst of which was a foot injury that eventually resulted in the amputation of his right leg. Here, Dickson’s work shines with the information he has culled from many sources, including the National Archives, to explain the “significant discrepancy” in the government’s report of Veeck’s discharge (103). The military claimed a preexisting condition was the genesis of Veeck’s woes, but Dickson marshals his findings to show that Veeck, a man whose physical limitations prior to enlistment were few in spite of his proclivity for liquor and cigarettes, had truly become yet another casualty of combat.

Crowning glory on the diamond came for Veeck in 1948 when his Indians won the American League pennant and World Series, although other al team owners were rankled by Veeck’s signing of Satchel Paige that season. Thought to be an old retread from the Negro leagues, Paige evolved into an integral member of the championship club, while the flamboyant Veeck, whose wardrobe excluded neck ties, reveled in the publicity generated by his team’s feats.

Veeck sold the Indians in 1949, and Dickson makes a strong case that Veeck’s absence (until he resurfaced as owner of the St. Louis Browns in 1951 unwittingly enabled National League clubs to sign more—and higher quality—black players, as no...