Word: veeck
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...later years, Bill Veeck had second thoughts about his most famous stunt, sending a midget up to the plate in a major league game. "Were it in my power to turn back the clock, I'd never send a midget to bat," he declared two decades after the fact. "No, I'd use nine of the little fellows, including the designated hitter...
...them was enough to startle the staid world of baseball and set Veeck's fellow owners fuming. As owner of the St. Louis Browns, Veeck (as in wreck) hired 3-ft. 7-in. Eddie Gaedel and trained him to crouch low so his strike zone was approximately 1 ½ in. Wearing uniform No. 1/8, Gaedel emerged from a giant birthday cake between games of a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers on Aug. 19, 1951, and stepped up to lead off for the Browns in the second game. As expected, Gaedel walked on four pitches and retired from baseball. Next...
...Tigers' sole nod to their lameness was hiring Mike Veeck, the son of Bill Veeck, the Hall of Fame owner who organized the disco-album bonfire at Comiskey Park in the '70s, to do their promotions. So they did have Duct Tape Night, Magic Night with illusionist Aaron Radatz, a Christian concert after an Angels game and Baseball Card Blitz, where kids under 15 got to trample one another on a field littered with 50,000 packs of baseball cards. But Veeck didn't go far enough. First of all, he should have removed the Tigers from those baseball-card...
...real problem is that Veeck's attitude didn't trickle down to the young, boring, serious team with its radio-face manager, Alan Trammell. Unlike the 1962 Mets, who had "Choo Choo" Coleman and "Don" Zimmer, the Tigers don't have one player with a decent nickname. Trammell refuses to talk about the Mets' record 120 losses, telling a TIME reporter much gutsier than I am, "I'm not going to answer that question." Not that the reporter was brave for asking Trammell but for sitting through the entire game...
...real problem is that Veeck's attitude didn't trickle down to the young, boring, serious team with its radio-face manager, Alan Trammell. Unlike the 1962 Mets, who had "Choo Choo" Coleman and "Don" Zimmer, the Tigers don't have one player with a decent nickname. Trammell refuses to talk about the Mets' record 120 losses, telling a TIME reporter much gutsier than I am, "I'm not going to answer that question." Not that the reporter was brave for asking Trammell but for sitting through the entire game...