8.18.2026 – still be remembered

still be remembered
in the end as man who sent
midget up to bat

Bill Veeck had a track record for designing some of the most elaborate marketing promotions during his four stints as a Major League Baseball owner, including an exploding scoreboard in 1960. But his most outlandish publicity stunt was sending 3ft 7in inch pinch-hitter Eddie Gaedel to the plate at a game 75 years ago Wednesday.

Sporting uniform number 1/8, Gaedel was greeted with a standing ovation at Sportsman’s Park in St Louis as he came to bat in the second game of a doubleheader on 19 August 1951 for the St Louis Browns. A famous AP photo shows Detroit Tigers catcher Bob Swift sitting on his knees with a ball in his glove, towering over Gaedel and his tiny strike zone. Not surprisingly, he walked on four pitches, and was immediately lifted for a pinch-runner.

From the article, ‘I felt like Babe Ruth’: baseball’s 3ft 7in pinch-hitter, 75 years on by Frederic J Frommer, in The Guardian, (8/19/2026).

Mr. Veeck (as in wreck) tells the story here.

At one point in time, the American League voided the contract and Eddie Gaudel was removed from the record books.

At another point, the contract was recognized as valid and Eddie’s stats are part of the official canon of Major league baseball.

Here the box score. See Gaedel with the “b” for pinch batter. (As a side note, growing up in West Michigan where everyone followed the Detroit Tigers, long time Tiger TV announcer George Kell played in this game … though not once do I ever remember that in the long long career of commentaries and rain delay stories, he ever mentioned it.)

Veeck writes:

Eddie crept back into the record books and remains there today. When he died, he got a front-page obituary in The New York Times, a recognition normally accorded only to statesmen, generals and Nobel Prize winners.

I did not recognize at the time that Gaedel’s moment was my moment too. I knew it was a good gag. I knew it would delight the fans and outrage the stuffed shirts. I knew, in other words, that it would be a lot of fun. It never entered my mind, however, that it would be the single act with which I would become permanently identified. Even today, I cannot talk to anybody from St. Louis without being told that they were there the day the midget came to bat. If everybody was there who says he was there, we would have had a tidy gathering of 280,000.

But no one has to tell me that if I returned to baseball tomorrow, won ten straight pennants and left all the old attendance records moldering in the dust, I would still be remembered, in the end, as the man who sent a midget up to bat. It is not the identification I would have chosen for myself when I came into baseball. My ambitions were grander than that. And yet I cannot deny that it is an accurate one. I have always found humor in the incongruous. I have always tried to entertain. And I have always found a stuffed-shirt the most irresistible of all targets.

I’m Bill Veeck, the guy who sent a midget up to bat?

Fair enough.

That was Veeck writing in his Autobiography, Veeck as in Wreck, which I read as kid at probably too young an age and I felt a real affinity for Mr. Veeck, maybe not the best hero, (but then my Dad didn’t like me reading biographies of Thomas Edison either as it was the story of a ne’er-do-well who made good) and I started following the Chicago White Sox.

This led me to talk my friend Doug, to drive down to Chicago from Grand Rapids, Michigan to see a Tigers play the White Sox on a Thursday, stay overnight, spend the next day in Chicago and then go the game on Friday night and drive home late.

It was announced that Thursday would be a double header to make up a rained out game so we would get to see three games.

Little did we know that on Thursday, Veeck had scheduled a promotion called Disco Demolition where fans could get in for 98 cents if they brought a disco record with them.

Wikipedia states … so blandly … Disco Demolition Night was a 1979 Major League Baseball promotion at Comiskey Park in Chicago that ended in a massive riot. Fans who brought a disco record got admission for 98 cents. Between a doubleheader, a crate of records was blown up, causing thousands to rush the field and force a game forfeit.

My friend Doug and I had box seats for the Chicago Riot Police in action and it was well worth the price of admission.

As Veeck would point out later, much like the midget batter, Disco Demolition it is still talked about today so how, from the point of view of media attention, could it have been a failure?

The Guardian article ends with ….

The Browns lasted just two more seasons in St Louis, before moving to Baltimore to become the Orioles in 1954.

By then, Veeck had sold the team, but he would return with two stints as owner of the White Sox, in the late 1950s/early ‘60s, and 1970s. After selling the team a second time, he would sit in the bleachers at Wrigley Field, to watch the Chicago Cubs, where his father had been team president early in the 20th century.

Veeck would wear an old pea coat and greek fisherman’s hat and sit in the bleachers behind the rails over a bleacher entrance so he would have an unobstructed view of the games.

When he spotted him, Harry Carey, the Cubs radio announcer would tell the fans at home that Bill Veeck was in the stands.

I went to a Cubs game one day and my Dad had the game on the radio back home and they heard Caray relay the information that Veeck was in attendance.

When I got home, my brother-in-law Bill asked if I had a chance to meet Veeck?

You bet I did, I answered.

And I pulled out his autograph to prove it.