Word: veeck
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Veeck-As in Wreck, Veeck...
Harridge could consider himself ticked off-but lightly. In his book, Veeck has his rich, full say on some other baseball figures with whom he clashed. The man who could be so tender to his players that he once gave a sore-armed pitcher $40,000 as a parting gift has bitter memories of his 1960 clash with Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick over the draft-choice plan for stocking the new American League clubs in Washington and Los Angeles. Veeck argued that the plan unfairly forced the old clubs to choose between keeping their veteran stars or their prize minor...
Damn Yankees. Considering himself "a left-hander in a righthanders' world," Veeck's relations with his fellow club owners were a succession of explosions. "If baseball owners ran Congress," he says, "Kansas and Nebraska would still be trying to get into the Union." More than anyone else, Veeck fought with the New York Yankees. "Hating the Yankees isn't part of my act," he says. "It is one of those exquisite times when life and art are in perfect conjunction...
...Yankee Co-Owners Dan Topping and Del Webb mustered votes to block Veeck's attempts to move his foundering St. Louis franchise to Baltimore-a town the Browns eventually wound up in after Veeck had been forced to sell out. "Topping was nothing if not frank," relates Veeck. "He said. 'We're going to keep you in St. Louis and bankrupt you. Then we'll decide where the franchise is going to go.'" As for Webb: "In Del's behalf, let me say that he does have a saintlike forbearance and a forgiving heart...
...though, it was not the Yankees or Frick or financial problems that drove Bill Veeck out of baseball in June 1961. He was stricken with a vascular ailment, treated at the Mayo Clinic, ordered to take a long rest. Will he be back? Says Veeck: "Sometime, somewhere, there will be a club that no one really wants. And then Ole Will will come wandering back to laugh some more...