Game 147: Guardians at Twins

Time: 7:10 Central

Weather: High chance of sprinkles, 72°

Opponent’s SB site: Covering the Corner

TV: Twins TV. Radio: Alan Freed was born 105 years ago

25-year-old Guardians LHP Parker Messick made his MLB debut last August, and so far the results have been pretty spectacular. Even if they’re helped a little by a lucky batting average on balls in play (he’s at .264 for the season, the MLB average is .289). That’s not a crazy outlier though, I don’t think. Messick relies heavily on a 94-ish fastball and slightly slower sinker; that combo has been dynamite for him this season. He’ll frequently mix in a change, less frequently some breaking stuff.

75 years ago, Bill Veeck pulled one of his signature wacky baseball stunts. He signed 3’7” Eddie Gaedel to the Browns’ roster and had him pinch-hit in a game. Gaedel drew a walk — obviously his strike zone was small — and Veeck replaced him with a pinch-runner. The pinch-runner didn’t score

Now, Veeck owned the St. Louis Browns at that time, not the team in Cleveland. (So this is kinda the wrong week for this post. I thought this happened in Cleveland, until I started writing it.)

But Veeck had owned the Indians for four years, selling them in 1950 when he needed money for a divorce settlement. And had done some notable things with the team, like signing the first Negro League player to join the American League, Larry Doby. (When manager Lou Boudreau introduced Doby to the team, three players refused to shake his hand — and Veeck got rid of all three.) In 1949, Veeck signed Satchel Paige, the oldest rookie to ever play in MLB at the age of 41; he’d pitch 155.2 innings over two seasons for the team (and then became a two-time All-Star with the Browns).

Veeck claimed the idea of using a small person as a pinch-hitter was his own notion… however, there’d been a 1941 story in The Saturday Evening Post called “You Could Look it Up” by James Thurber, author of “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” You can read the Thurber story here, if you like. It has paintings by Norman Rockwell which are very detailed and striking, as usual:

(By the way, if you think Rockwell’s paintings were all light-hearted Americana… that is not so.)

After buying the Browns, Veeck came up with the idea for a 50th-anniversary celebration of the American League. One concept for the promotion was kind of a “circus day,” which took place in between two games of a doubleheader on August 19th, 1951. There were acrobats, baseball clown Max Patkin, a band featuring Satchel Paige on drums, and finally, a birthday cake with Eddie Gaedel inside. (Veeck’s PR man had found Gaedel through his membership in the American Guild of Variety Artists, a performer’s union, and they’d smuggled Gaedel into the hotel room wrapped in blankets.) Apparently, sponsor Falstaff Beer was unimpressed by how blah “midget jumps out of birthday cake” was. They didn’t know what was coming next. (Neither did the Browns players.)

As leadoff hitter Frank Saucier approached the plate in the home half of the 1st inning, manager Zack Taylor signaled for a pinch-hitter, instead; it was Gaedel, in a uniform with the number “1/8.” Umpire Ed Hurley thought it was a joke, until Taylor showed him Gaedel’s contract. (For $15,400, which amounted to $100 per game, which was all Gaedel would get, and he knew it — but he liked the idea of the publicity.) Veeck had carefully instructed Gaedel before the game to NOT swing at anything (and he’d taken a $100,000 life insurance policy out on Gaedel in case anything bad happened.) Gaedel played the moment up; he even gave Saucier the customary butt slap as he headed to the dugout.

Of course, Gaedel took the four-pitch walk. When he got to first base, “he stopped two or three times and took his hat off, and bowed to the crowd,” Saucier remembered years later (per this story by The Guardian’s Frederic Frommer. “‘When he came back to the dugout, I said, “Eddie, you really kind of clowned that up a bit, going to first, didn’t you?” “And he said, “Man, I felt like Babe Ruth.’”

Eddie Gaedel was born June 8, 1925 in Chicago. Both his parents and his sibling were regular-sized. Per this SABR article by Brian McKenna and this one by Eric Robinson, while Gaedel did graduate from high school, he wasn’t comfortable traveling far from home, and instead worked various jobs in the region. Like riveting, since he was able to crawl into tight spaces. He’d also perform in traveling rodeos, circuses, do store openings, that sort of thing. In 1945 the music label Mercury Records opened in Chicago, and hired Gaedel for some publicity stuff as the “Mercury Man.” Here’s a picture of the old Mercury logo, along with the only known signed photo of Gaedel. It was sent by Gaedel to a fan for free, and later sold at auction for $6,960.

Gaedel did pretty well off the attention from the game, making $17,000 over the next few weeks for various appearances and promotions, including a minor-league at-bat in Syracuse, Illinois. Hollywood was interested and Mercury Records liked the idea of Gaedel touring California, but he didn’t want to go that far for that long. He would do other promotional appearances for Bill Veeck later, after Veeck bought the White Sox. One involved appearing via helicopter with several other little people dressed as Martians; they then used “ray guns” to capture the Sox’s shortest fielders, Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox.

Gaedel died on June 18, 1961, after going to a bowling alley. At home, his mother discovered him unconscious and covered in horrific bruises; he’d been badly beaten. He wouldn’t regain consciousness. One of the SABR writers suggests that Gaedel was a aggressive sort (he was known to drink quite a bit), but it’s impossible to know if he was just cranky overall or cranky towards bullies and insulters; one incident arose when some policemen called him “a little boy.” Chicago police never found whoever killed him.

At Gaedel’s funeral, Bob Cain showed up — the pitcher for the Tigers who’d walked Gaedel that day. Asked later why he’d flown in for the funeral (Cain never met Gaedel), he said, “because, I’ve been a goodwill man and speaker for all these years and the midget was my best story. I owed him that one.”

Sometimes the HOF has a Gaedel jersey on display, sometimes it’s a life-size cutout, like here. Guess who the other jersey belonged to? That’s right, Nick Punto. (It was not Nick Punto.)