Bill Veeck (1914–1986)

While some of the stories should be taken with a grain of salt, there's no question that this is a marvelously entertaining book. A fair amount of it is score-settling, especially against Bill Weiss, Ford Frick, Del Webb and others that ran baseball in the 1950s and 1960s. However, Veeck also tells stories against himself, and is not immune to self-criticism for some of his failures.

An entertaining autobiography by the man who brought us two of the great American innovations, the exploding scoreboard and a midget ballplayer with a 1.5" strike zone.

This excerpt from Bill Veeck's autobiography Veeck--As In Wreck is the February free e-book from the University of Chicago Press, which consists of two chapters from that book. Veeck (1914-1986) was a famous baseball innovator and owner of three professional ball clubs, who was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1991. He is best known for planting the ivy at Wrigley Field, the longtime home of the Chicago Cubs; signing Larry Doby, the first African American to play for an American show more League team (the Cleveland Indians) in July 1947, several months after Jackie Robinson integrated the National League in May of that year (with the Brooklyn Dodgers); using the midget Eddie Gaedel as a pinch hitter for the woeful St. Louis Browns in 1951; and his disastrous 1979 promotion "Disco Demolition Night" while he owned the Chicago White Sox, which led to a riot in the stands and a forfeiture of the game.

Veeck was a colorful and controversial figure, and I thought that this excerpt would be an entertaining short read. It consists of two chapters, "The Battle of Wrigley Field", which describes his early career spent working for Chicago Cubs owner Phil Wrigley, his successful idea to cover the outfield wall with ivy, and his failure in getting Wrigley to install lights for night games, which was mildly interesting, and "Chuck Comiskey and the National Debt", a dreadfully boring financially based discussion of his acquisition of the Chicago White Sox in the late 1950s. These chapters were poorly written and massively disappointing, and I'd only recommend this excerpt to the diehard fan of either Chicago baseball club. show less

Bill Veeck was an original thinker about American business. His business happened to be baseball and this is topnotch memoir. I can see why Veeck was a thorn in the side of his more staid colleagues, but he sure must have been interesting to have around.