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[h=1]The tragic spectacle of Eddie Gaedel, baseball’s only 3-foot-7 pinch-hitter
By Jayson Jenks[/h] Maybe you’ve heard of Eddie Gaedel.
Maybe you know that Gaedel stood 3 feet, 7 inches tall and weighed between 50 and 65 pounds; that Bill Veeck, the zany owner of the St. Louis Browns, signed Gaedel to a secret contract; and, most of all, that Veeck sent Gaedel to the plate in the first inning of a major-league baseball game.
He walked on four pitches, all high.
The story of Eddie Gaedel is one of the most infamous and outrageous stories in the vast history of baseball. But do you know that Gaedel was terrified that day? That he didn’t want to go through with the gag? That the American League immediately banned “midgets,” and three weeks later Gaedel was arrested for one of the saddest reasons I’ve ever heard?
Maybe you’ve smiled at the Eddie Gaedel story before. I know I have.
I won’t anymore. [HR][/HR]
Veeck wanted a spectacle, and so in between games of a doubleheader Aug. 19, 1951, he created one.
There were jugglers at third and a trampoline at second. There was a hand-balancing act and a parade of old cars, Satchel Paige playing the drums on the pitcher’s mound and a famous comedian doing the jitterbug at home plate.
Technically, Veeck was throwing the American League a 50th “birthday party,” but in reality, he was just desperate. He had bought the Browns two months earlier. The team stunk, and so did attendance. But on that day the biggest crowd of the season, more than 18,000 people in all, laughed and cheered.
Eddie Gaedel could not see what was going on, but he could hear the reaction. He stood underneath the bleachers in a Browns uniform that previously belonged to the 7-year-old son of the team’s vice president. Someone had taken the little boy’s jersey and hastily added a number on the back: 1/8.
Veeck found Gaedel through a talent agent in Chicago, where Gaedel lived and worked: a wartime riveter at an airplane plant, a peacetime bartender at a South Side tavern called The Midget Club.
“Like all midgets, he had sad little eyes,” Veeck later wrote, “and like all midgets, he had a squeaky little voice that sounded as if it were on the wrong speed of a record player.”
Veeck brought Gaedel to St. Louis a few days before the doubleheader and stashed him in a hotel.
Surprise was everything.
Gaedel would climb inside a 7-foot papier-mache birthday cake, wait until the cake was wheeled onto the field, then pop out from the top. But that was just a sleight of hand to throw people off the real headline-grabber. In the first inning of the second game, Gaedel would walk to the plate and bat against the Detroit Tigers.
For all that, Veeck agreed to pay him $100.
While he waited underneath the stadium, Gaedel second-guessed the deal. The Browns manager, Zack Taylor, said Gaedel was so scared that he had to help him tie his shoes. Not only had Gaedel never faced professional pitching, he had never even played baseball. Underneath old Sportsman’s Park, he turned to the Browns’ traveling secretary, a man named “Big” Bill Durney.
“I don’t feel so good,” Gaedel said. “I don’t think I’m going to do it.”
“Listen, Eddie,” Durney told him. “There are 18,000 people in this park and there’s one I know I can lick. You. Dead or alive, you’re going in there.”
According to Veeck, Durney then picked up Gaedel and stuffed him headfirst into the cake.
Several minutes later, after Gaedel popped out of the cake and the game started, the Browns’ public address announcer leaned into his microphone: “For the Browns, No. 1/8, Eddie Gaedel.” At first, the crowd was stunned. Who? But as Gaedel walked to the plate with a 17-inch bat that weighed 23 ounces, the fans “came alive with laughter,” a reporter at the game observed.
The home plate umpire took off his mask, got down on his knees and looked at Gaedel. “This can’t be,” he mumbled. Taylor, the Browns manager, ran onto the field and whipped out a contract from his pocket (Veeck, knowing that the league office hardly paid attention to weekend transactions, had signed Gaedel the day before, a Saturday).
Tigers catcher Bob Swift tried squatting, then sitting and acknowledged that he even considered lying down with one hand under his chin. He laughed the entire at-bat.
“Get outta that hole!” Tigers players yelled at Gaedel from the dugout.
Gaedel stepped into the batter’s box with severe instructions from Veeck: “Eddie,” Veeck remembered saying, “I’m going to be up on the roof with a high-powered rifle watching every move you make. If you so much as look as if you’re going to swing, I’m going to shoot you dead.”
After four pitches, Gaedel stood on first with one foot on the bag. When a pinch-runner replaced him, Gaedel patted the guy’s butt, shook hands with the first base coach and jogged to the Browns’ dugout. Along the way, he stopped, doffed his hat, bowed and waved to the crowd.
Inside the dugout, he sat next to outfielder Frank Saucier, who never forgot what Gaedel said that day: “Man, I felt like Babe Ruth.” [HR][/HR]
American League president Will Harridge was furious and immediately “banned midgets.” He wanted to wipe Gaedel’s appearance — and any mention of him — from baseball’s record book.
Two weeks later, Gaedel was in Cincinnati with the “Cisco Kid” Rodeo and Big Top Circus. An advertisement in the Cincinnati Enquirer called him the “baseball midget.” One night in Cincy, Gaedel stayed out late. At 3:30 a.m., two police officers noticed him walking downtown, alone.
“Hey, little boy, you’re out kinda late,” the officers said.
Gaedel “let loose with the biggest line of profanity we ever heard from one person,” the officers reported after they had arrested Gaedel for disorderly conduct and thrown him in jail.
He was 26 years old.
In 1959, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune found Gaedel at a Chicago home show, dressed in a beaver costume.
“Twenty-five thousand people,” Gaedel told the man, the number conjured from who knows where. “All looking at me as I walked up to the plate, bat in hand. Twenty-five thousand. It was a thrill.”
“What did you think about?” the reporter asked.
“Well, I knew that Bob Cain was kind of a reckless pitcher. And I kept thinking, what if this man hits me in the head?”
Gaedel lit up, thinking back to that day.
“Biggest cheer I ever got. Did I tell you? Twenty-five thousand people there.”
The reporter watched him shake his head and walk away, his beaver tail swishing behind him. [HR][/HR]
Gaedel died in 1961.
Ten years later, a reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal visited his mother, living alone in Chicago, for a story about that afternoon in 1951.
“I don’t know how in the world that happened,” she said. “Eddie wasn’t crazy about baseball. He used to go to the neighborhood park once in a while and watch.
“Eddie always had it against me. He’d say, ‘Mom, it must be your fault I’m small.’ And I’d say, ‘No, it’s Almighty God’s will.’
“He was self-conscious. He felt bad that others were so tall and he was so small. He didn’t want to go any place. He’d say, ‘Momma, I don’t want to go out. People are looking at me.’ I told him, ‘Eddie, don’t mind that. There are a lot of tall people, but there are very few small people.’
“Eddie got picked on. The other kids used to beat him up a lot. Small kids, too, about five years old. Four or five of them would gang up on him. He couldn’t help himself. One time he socked a kid, and the boy’s mother went to the police station and had Eddie locked up overnight.
“He traveled all over. He’d wear his uniform and autograph things for the kids. They wanted him to go to California. He said, ‘Mom, I’m not going because it’s no life being locked in a room by myself.’ He was scared to go out.
“One time I was waiting up for him. It was on a Sunday. He was usually home by 9. He wasn’t one to stay out late. I wondered what had happened to him. I couldn’t sleep. All of a sudden my chimes rang. I was afraid to open the door. I asked, ‘Who is it?’ It was the police.
“Two officers brought Eddie home. They found him at 47th and Wolcott on the curb. He was all beat up. He had $11 in his wallet, and that was taken from him.
“That happened sometime in January. A few months later, he was dead.”
He was 36.
By Jayson Jenks[/h] Maybe you’ve heard of Eddie Gaedel.
Maybe you know that Gaedel stood 3 feet, 7 inches tall and weighed between 50 and 65 pounds; that Bill Veeck, the zany owner of the St. Louis Browns, signed Gaedel to a secret contract; and, most of all, that Veeck sent Gaedel to the plate in the first inning of a major-league baseball game.
He walked on four pitches, all high.
The story of Eddie Gaedel is one of the most infamous and outrageous stories in the vast history of baseball. But do you know that Gaedel was terrified that day? That he didn’t want to go through with the gag? That the American League immediately banned “midgets,” and three weeks later Gaedel was arrested for one of the saddest reasons I’ve ever heard?
Maybe you’ve smiled at the Eddie Gaedel story before. I know I have.
I won’t anymore. [HR][/HR]
Veeck wanted a spectacle, and so in between games of a doubleheader Aug. 19, 1951, he created one.
There were jugglers at third and a trampoline at second. There was a hand-balancing act and a parade of old cars, Satchel Paige playing the drums on the pitcher’s mound and a famous comedian doing the jitterbug at home plate.
Technically, Veeck was throwing the American League a 50th “birthday party,” but in reality, he was just desperate. He had bought the Browns two months earlier. The team stunk, and so did attendance. But on that day the biggest crowd of the season, more than 18,000 people in all, laughed and cheered.
Eddie Gaedel could not see what was going on, but he could hear the reaction. He stood underneath the bleachers in a Browns uniform that previously belonged to the 7-year-old son of the team’s vice president. Someone had taken the little boy’s jersey and hastily added a number on the back: 1/8.
Veeck found Gaedel through a talent agent in Chicago, where Gaedel lived and worked: a wartime riveter at an airplane plant, a peacetime bartender at a South Side tavern called The Midget Club.
“Like all midgets, he had sad little eyes,” Veeck later wrote, “and like all midgets, he had a squeaky little voice that sounded as if it were on the wrong speed of a record player.”
Veeck brought Gaedel to St. Louis a few days before the doubleheader and stashed him in a hotel.
Surprise was everything.
Gaedel would climb inside a 7-foot papier-mache birthday cake, wait until the cake was wheeled onto the field, then pop out from the top. But that was just a sleight of hand to throw people off the real headline-grabber. In the first inning of the second game, Gaedel would walk to the plate and bat against the Detroit Tigers.
For all that, Veeck agreed to pay him $100.
While he waited underneath the stadium, Gaedel second-guessed the deal. The Browns manager, Zack Taylor, said Gaedel was so scared that he had to help him tie his shoes. Not only had Gaedel never faced professional pitching, he had never even played baseball. Underneath old Sportsman’s Park, he turned to the Browns’ traveling secretary, a man named “Big” Bill Durney.
“I don’t feel so good,” Gaedel said. “I don’t think I’m going to do it.”
“Listen, Eddie,” Durney told him. “There are 18,000 people in this park and there’s one I know I can lick. You. Dead or alive, you’re going in there.”
According to Veeck, Durney then picked up Gaedel and stuffed him headfirst into the cake.
Several minutes later, after Gaedel popped out of the cake and the game started, the Browns’ public address announcer leaned into his microphone: “For the Browns, No. 1/8, Eddie Gaedel.” At first, the crowd was stunned. Who? But as Gaedel walked to the plate with a 17-inch bat that weighed 23 ounces, the fans “came alive with laughter,” a reporter at the game observed.
The home plate umpire took off his mask, got down on his knees and looked at Gaedel. “This can’t be,” he mumbled. Taylor, the Browns manager, ran onto the field and whipped out a contract from his pocket (Veeck, knowing that the league office hardly paid attention to weekend transactions, had signed Gaedel the day before, a Saturday).
Tigers catcher Bob Swift tried squatting, then sitting and acknowledged that he even considered lying down with one hand under his chin. He laughed the entire at-bat.
“Get outta that hole!” Tigers players yelled at Gaedel from the dugout.
Gaedel stepped into the batter’s box with severe instructions from Veeck: “Eddie,” Veeck remembered saying, “I’m going to be up on the roof with a high-powered rifle watching every move you make. If you so much as look as if you’re going to swing, I’m going to shoot you dead.”
After four pitches, Gaedel stood on first with one foot on the bag. When a pinch-runner replaced him, Gaedel patted the guy’s butt, shook hands with the first base coach and jogged to the Browns’ dugout. Along the way, he stopped, doffed his hat, bowed and waved to the crowd.
Inside the dugout, he sat next to outfielder Frank Saucier, who never forgot what Gaedel said that day: “Man, I felt like Babe Ruth.” [HR][/HR]
American League president Will Harridge was furious and immediately “banned midgets.” He wanted to wipe Gaedel’s appearance — and any mention of him — from baseball’s record book.
Two weeks later, Gaedel was in Cincinnati with the “Cisco Kid” Rodeo and Big Top Circus. An advertisement in the Cincinnati Enquirer called him the “baseball midget.” One night in Cincy, Gaedel stayed out late. At 3:30 a.m., two police officers noticed him walking downtown, alone.
“Hey, little boy, you’re out kinda late,” the officers said.
Gaedel “let loose with the biggest line of profanity we ever heard from one person,” the officers reported after they had arrested Gaedel for disorderly conduct and thrown him in jail.
He was 26 years old.
In 1959, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune found Gaedel at a Chicago home show, dressed in a beaver costume.
“Twenty-five thousand people,” Gaedel told the man, the number conjured from who knows where. “All looking at me as I walked up to the plate, bat in hand. Twenty-five thousand. It was a thrill.”
“What did you think about?” the reporter asked.
“Well, I knew that Bob Cain was kind of a reckless pitcher. And I kept thinking, what if this man hits me in the head?”
Gaedel lit up, thinking back to that day.
“Biggest cheer I ever got. Did I tell you? Twenty-five thousand people there.”
The reporter watched him shake his head and walk away, his beaver tail swishing behind him. [HR][/HR]
Gaedel died in 1961.
Ten years later, a reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal visited his mother, living alone in Chicago, for a story about that afternoon in 1951.
“I don’t know how in the world that happened,” she said. “Eddie wasn’t crazy about baseball. He used to go to the neighborhood park once in a while and watch.
“Eddie always had it against me. He’d say, ‘Mom, it must be your fault I’m small.’ And I’d say, ‘No, it’s Almighty God’s will.’
“He was self-conscious. He felt bad that others were so tall and he was so small. He didn’t want to go any place. He’d say, ‘Momma, I don’t want to go out. People are looking at me.’ I told him, ‘Eddie, don’t mind that. There are a lot of tall people, but there are very few small people.’
“Eddie got picked on. The other kids used to beat him up a lot. Small kids, too, about five years old. Four or five of them would gang up on him. He couldn’t help himself. One time he socked a kid, and the boy’s mother went to the police station and had Eddie locked up overnight.
“He traveled all over. He’d wear his uniform and autograph things for the kids. They wanted him to go to California. He said, ‘Mom, I’m not going because it’s no life being locked in a room by myself.’ He was scared to go out.
“One time I was waiting up for him. It was on a Sunday. He was usually home by 9. He wasn’t one to stay out late. I wondered what had happened to him. I couldn’t sleep. All of a sudden my chimes rang. I was afraid to open the door. I asked, ‘Who is it?’ It was the police.
“Two officers brought Eddie home. They found him at 47th and Wolcott on the curb. He was all beat up. He had $11 in his wallet, and that was taken from him.
“That happened sometime in January. A few months later, he was dead.”
He was 36.
