Sport: Dust-Up in St. Louis

When bustling Bill Veeck (rhymes with deck) barged into Cleveland in 1946 he smilingly confessed: “I’m a publicity hound.” He lured the crowds to Municipal Stadium with boogie-woogie bands, fireworks, clowns, orchids for the ladies and baby sitters for the children. Before he sold out at a reputed profit of $600,000 in 1949, his Cleveland Indians had broken attendance records and won their second pennant in 48 years. Last week Veeck popped back into the major-league picture again: he took over the doddering, anemic St. Louis Browns.

The day before he started work, ex-Marine Veeck hustled through the stands, shaking hands, signing autographs, listening to suggestions. Next night Veeck gave the crowd fireworks (“because I like to watch them”) and a round of free beers or Cokes, so that the fans could drink to the new management’s success.

But Bill Veeck knows that free beer is no substitute for good baseball. He plans to shake up the club, “from manager to batboy,” talks of building up his pitching staff (he has only one first-string pitcher, Ned Garver) by dusting off famed old (fiftyish) Relief Pitcher Satchel Paige (“Satch plays better now that he’s had all his teeth pulled”) and buying a Japanese pitcher now playing in Honolulu (“If a ballplayer can help this club I’ll take him if he’s blue with pink spots”). He will sift the minor leagues for power hitters (“This club couldn’t punch its way out of a paper bag with a crowbar”). And last week he went after Rogers Hornsby (now managing at Seattle) as manager.

Branch Rickey, a man who knows mon about baseball than Veeck does, once occupied Veeck’s present office. He left a sign on the wall: “Get the ballplayers and the rest will take care of itself.” Though the motto worked well for Rickey, Veeck does not agree with it. Says he: “You’ve always got to be thinking about fans who wish they had gone to the circus. Baseball fans are like anyone else. If you buy breakfast food and it tastes like sawdust, you don’t buy any more. That’s what’s been going on here.”