You could go to your local police station, sign up to become a member of the Browns Knot Hole Club, and get a card for the season that got you in free for all 77 of the games. Scorecards were a dime, and so were peanuts and sodas (except root beer that was fifteen cents). Ice cream and hot dogs were fifteen cents apiece.
The hoity-toity Cardinals shared Sportsman's Park with the Browns (actually, the Browns owned the joint), but members of their knothole club could only get into seven games free. So the kids I knew either rooted for the Browns and cried themselves to sleep, or followed the more fashionable Cardinals and budgeted allowances so they could afford a few more games.
For me, blind loyalty paid off on August 19, 1951. The Browns played a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers, and in the first inning of the second game, Bill Veeck, the Browns' ingenious owner, sent Eddie Gaedel, a three-foot-seven, 65-pound midget, to the plate with an eighteen-inch bat in his hand. Top to bottom, Gaedel's strike zone was as short as a Manx cat's tail, and he walked on four pitches. At once, Gaedel became famous and infamous without swinging, and I had witnessed one of the most bizarre sports happenings of all time.
Gaedel (pronounced guh-DELL) never stepped into a major-league batter's box again. Reportedly the victim of a mugging, he died in 1961 at age 36. He's buried in a cemetery in Evergreen Park, Illinois, not far from Brian Piccolo, the cancer-stricken Chicago Bears star whose tragic story inspired the film Brian's Song.
All but one of the principals in that surreal Gaedel tableau -- Veeck; Detroit pitcher Bobby "Sugar" Cain; Cain's catcher, Bob Swift; Jim Delsing, who pinch-ran for Gaedel after he blithely jogged to first base; Ed Hurley, the flabbergasted umpire -- are also with the dust. The only chief participant still breathing is Frank Saucier, the scheduled batter when Gaedel was sent to the plate.
Yet there remains a fascination, even a borderline obsession, with what Bill Veeck wrought. Sixty-four years after Gaedel's lone Major League Baseball at-bat, and 54 years after his death, Gaedel-a-mania has reached a zenith. The little guy is seemingly everywhere, his fifteen minutes of fame stretched to encompass decades.
Consider:
The Eddie Gaedel Society in Spokane, Washington, will hold its fifth annual meeting-cum-celebration on August 19. There are also chapters in Elburn, Illinois; Los Angeles and Dublin, Ireland.
Also on August 19, the Baseball Reliquary, an educational organization devoted to the history of the sport, is planning a Gaedel celebration in South Pasadena, California.
A bar in Elburn, near Chicago, is called the Eddie Gaedel Pub and Grill. Closer to home, a mural of Gaedel decorates the Tiny Bar, a newly opened establishment on Locust Street downtown.
Memorabilia is everywhere, if you know where to look. Gaedel's toothpick of a bat sold at auction for more than $44,000. His original uniform, which was loaned to him by Bill DeWitt Jr. when DeWitt was a nine-year-old Browns' batboy (he's now the Cardinals' principal owner) resides in Ballpark Village.
When a library in Pasadena, California, presented a Gaedel exhibit last month, one of the items was Gaedel's jockstrap. Meanwhile, the St. Louis Browns Fan Club, which has 340 members, sells a Gaedel montage for $50. And for $155.99, an online company will sell you a replica of the Gaedel uniform jersey (in another stroke of genius, Veeck put the fraction 1/8 on the midget's back).
Bill McCurdy, a Browns diehard in Houston, has written the words for "The Ballad of Eddie Gaedel," sung to the tune of "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer." In 2009, Bob Costas hosted a TV special about Gaedel for the Major League Baseball Network, and the Gaedel game is included in Jon Leonoudakis' 2012 documentary, Not Exactly Cooperstown.
Finally, a member of a national club that still plays the old Cadaco Baseball All-Star spinner game created a Gaedel disc that has only one number instead of the usual fourteen: the number nine, for a base on balls. Fittingly, any time you hit the spinner using the Gaedel disc, you get an automatic walk.
