This week in Odd History, Edward Carl Gaedel became, if not the first major league baseball player to achieve a perfect 1.000 on-base percentage (OBP), at the least the shortest. At just 3’7″, Gaedel still holds the record for the shortest major league player of all time.
Eddie Gaedel had been recruited by Bill Veeck, proud owner of the St. Louis Browns–a team he described in his autobiography as “[ranking] in the annals of baseball a step or two ahead of Cro-Magnon man.” His Browns were next-to-last in the League, just ahead of the Detroit Tigers, whom they were scheduled to play in a Sunday doubleheader. Attendance that season was already so low Veeck was having trouble meeting payroll, and the upcoming games was, in Veeck’s words, “a struggle which did not threaten to set the pulses of the city beating madly.” He needed a gimmick, and he created one.
The summer of 1951 was the fiftieth anniversary of the American League. Veeck saw an opportunity to tie this important date into the corporate birthday of the Browns’ sponsor, Falstaff Brewery. Whether it was Falstaff’s birthday or not didn’t matter to Veeck. “If we couldn’t prove it fell on the day we chose,” he said, “neither could anyone prove that it didn’t.” In exchange for Falstaff’s promotion of the proposed birthday party, Veeck promised to present them with “something so original and spectacular that it will get you national publicity.” When they pressed him for details, Veeck demurred, claiming that “my idea was so explosive I could not afford to take the slightest chance of a leak.”
Falstaff agreed. “They were so anxious to find out what I was going to do,” Veeck said, “that they could hardly bear to wait out the two weeks. I was rather anxious to find out what I was going to do, too.”
What he did was to call Marty Caine, an agent he had used to book performers in Cleveland. “[I] asked him to find me a midget who was somewhat athletic and game for anything.” Veeck was going to “send a midget up to bat.”
The only signed photograph of Eddie Gaedel known to exist. Gaedel sent it to a fan with a note that read, "This is the only picture I have of myself in a uniform and I like (sic) you to have it.... Here's a picture of me not in very nice condition—destroy it if you don't want it...." It sold at auction for $6,960.
Caine found just the man. Eddie Gaedel was 26 years old, but he had stopped growing when he was a child. All his life, he’d been bullied for his height, but he’d also found work because of it. In World War II, he’d worked as a riveter, crawling inside the wings of airplanes, and afterward, he made a living as a mascot for Mercury Records and a bartender at the Midget Club in Chicago. He didn’t know much about baseball–“I know you’re supposed to hit the white ball with the bat,” he told Veeck, “[and] then you run somewhere”–but he knew enough. He wasn’t sure at first that he wanted the job, but Veeck convinced him. “You’ll be immortal,” Veeck told him, and the flattery worked. Gaedel’s niece, Gayle Esposito, said, “the more (Veeck) talked, the more (Gaedel) stuck out his chest and the prouder he became. He really wanted to be a special person and not be picked on all the time.”
Gaedel signed an annual contract that worked out to $100 per game, knowing that he would never have the chance to play more than once. Not coincidentally, $100 was the minimum day rate for midget acts, set by the American Guild of Variety Artists. Afterward, he and Veeck went to work on his stance. As Veeck explained it, “The rules of the game say that the strike zone is between the batter’s armpits and the top of his knees ‘when he assumes his natural stance.’ Since Gaedel would bat only once in his life, whatever stance he took was, by definition, his natural one.”
Bent nearly double, with his elbow resting on his knee, Gaedel’s strike zone measured an inch and a half. He was to maintain that position through four balls, unlike the clownish midget mascot of James Thurber’s “You Could Look it Up,” Pearl du Monville. Du Monville, also sent out onto the field for a joke, couldn’t resist swinging at the ball.[1] Veeck promised Gaedel that, should he be considering a similar stunt, Veeck himself would be stationed on the roof with a high-powered rifle.
Late in the afternoon on Friday, August 16, Veeck sent Gaedel’s contract to the American League’s office, knowing that American League President Will Harridge left early on Fridays. The rule, though, was only that a new player’s contract had to be filed the Friday before his first game — not that it had to be approved. In any case, there was nothing in Gaedel’s contract to say that he was only 3’7”, and even if there had been, there was (nor is there now) any minimum height requirement in baseball.
The scorecard bearing Eddie Gaedel's name. "The next day," Veeck said later, "we had a hundred or so requests from collectors, so I suppose there are quite a few of the Gaedel scorecards still in existence around the country."
Sunday morning, the Browns’ public relations assistant, Jay Edson, smuggled Gaedel out of his hotel room in a blanket and took him to the ball park. He was outfitted with a toy bat, a Browns uniform belonging to the team’s 7-year-old batboy, and shoes that curled up at the toes. On his back was the number 1/8, rendered on that day’s scorecard as 18. Only one reporter noticed the addition to the team’s roster, but no one was willing to tell him about the new player.
With Gaedel safely stowed in his office, Veeck went out to greet the fans. Thanks to Falstaff’s promotion efforts, more than 18,000 people had arrived for the game–the largest crowd the Browns had drawn in more than four years. Each of them received a can of beer, a slice of cake, a bit of ice cream, and a salt and pepper shaker set shaped like miniature bottles of Falstaff beer. “The tie-in there,” Veeck said, “was that we were giving the fans midget beer bottles as souvenirs of the day, a subtlety which managed to elude everybody completely.”
The first game, which the Browns lost, drew to a close, and the birthday celebration began. Besides Gaedel, Veeck had hired acrobats and jugglers, and arranged for a parade of old-fashioned cars and bicycles. Some of the Browns played in a band at home plate. To cap the festivities, a seven-foot birthday cake rolled out on the field, with Eddie Gaedel hidden inside. Over the loudspeaker came the announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, as a special birthday present to manager Zack Taylor, the management is presenting him with a brand-new Brownie.” An actor dressed as Sir John Falstaff tapped the cake with his sword, and Gaedel popped out the top.
The audience laughed, but Falstaff management wasn’t amused. “This is what your big thing is?” one of the executives asked. “A little midget jumps out of a cake and he’s wearing a baseball uniform and he’s a bat boy or something?” Veeck explained that no, Gaedel was a Brownie, but they weren’t buying it. “You put funny shoes on a midget and he’s a real live Brownie and that’s going to get us national coverage?” The advertising manager complained that Veeck had used “the cake gimmick” before. “You haven’t given us anything new at all,” he said. Veeck apologized, but inside, he was laughing. He knew the cake wasn’t the real show.
The second game started, and the Browns announced that “number one-eighth, Eddie Gaedel,” would bat for injured center fielder Frank Saucier. Gaedel trotted out to the plate, with three tiny bats clutched in his hand. The players and the audience started to laugh, but Ed Hurley, the umpire, was no more amused than the Falstaff executives had been by the cake gimmick. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. Browns’ manager Zack Taylor appeared with Gaedel’s contract. The players on both sides stood atop their dugouts watching until Hurley said, “Pitch.”
Eddie Gaedel at bat.
Bob Swift, the Detroit catcher, took a trip out to the mound to discuss tactics with Bob Cain, Detroit’s pitcher. When Swift returned to home plate, he sank to his knees to try and give Cain a target. Gaedel, despite all Veeck’s coaching, struck a pose like Joe DiMaggio, and Veeck thought, “I should have brought that gun up here. I’ll kill him if he swings.”
He needn’t have worried. Veeck held still through two fast balls and two high lobs, all thrown well over his head by a man who was laughing so hard he could barely stand. After the fourth, he tossed his bat down and made his way to first base, pausing several times to bow to his adoring fans. A pinch runner stepped in, and Gaedel retired from baseball.
Monday morning, American League President Will Harridge banned Gaedel from the sport anyway, and further insisted that from now on, all contracts must be both filed and approved before any player took the field. Gaedel’s name was omitted from the Major League Record Book, until Veeck’s protests about the “continuity of baseball” succeeded in having it restored. Gaedel is listed as batting right-handed and throwing left-handed, though as sportswriter Bill Christine told ESPN in 2001, “How they found out that Gaedel was a left-handed thrower, I’ll never know. I guess they asked him, because, you know, he never had a chance to throw the ball. He didn’t even have a glove.”
Gaedel made a few more appearances on the baseball field, most famously in 1959, when Veeck, then owner of the Chicago White Sox, hired him and three other little people to dress as Martians, drop onto the field from a helicopter, and dub second baseman Nellie Fox and shortstop Luis Aparacio, both of whom were 5’9”, “honorary Martians.” The gag recalled Veeck’s argument with Harridge, back in 1951, over banning Gaedel from the field for his height. Veeck had suggested then that the League should issue a ruling on whether shortstop Phil Rizzuto was “a short ballplayer or a tall midget.” Now, Gaedel and his fellow Martians offered to aid Fox and Aparicio against “the giant Earthlings,” though Gaedel informed them that “I don’t want to be taken to your leader. I’ve already met him.”
Sadly, on June 17, 1961, just a few months after Veeck had hired him as a vendor, to mock fans who’d complained that the vendors’ heads blocked their view of the game, Gaedel died, at the age of 36. He had gone out drinking, as he often did, and gotten in an argument at a bowling alley. According to his niece, “He was a little guy who had beer muscles, as they say, and he would get in fights with people.” That night, someone followed him home. His mother found him dead in bed on June 18, with blood on his clothes and bruises on his face and knees. The official cause of death was heart failure, probably brought on by the beating and complications of alcoholism.
Only one professional baseball player made it to Gaedel’s funeral — Bob Cain, who had pitched the four balls that made Gaedel a legend.
Today, Gaedel's autograph sells for more than Babe Ruth's.
Veeck insisted that his inspiration came, not from Thurber, but from the former manager of the New York Giants, John J. McGraw. McGraw “had a little hunchback he kept around the club as a sort of good-luck charm… sort of a gnome” named Eddie Morrow. According to Veeck, McGraw often said that before he retired, he wanted to send his “gnome” up to bat. BACK TO POST
In 2011, the San Diego Padres drafted Gaedel’s 6’3” grandnephew, Valparaiso University outfielder Kyle Gaedele.
Sources:
The Baseball Biography Project: Eddie Gaedel
The Only Gaedel Signed Photograph Known to Exist
Outside the Lines: At Bat–Eddie Gaedel
Short on Size, Long on History
