The freeze frame below is pretty much enough for me adore and leave it at that.  That there is video to follow is close to evidence that there is a God.

I'm a massive fan of Bill Veeck who, among many things, owned the Chicago White Sox -- twice.  He also owned three different major league baseball teams and won two pennants and one World Series, and most-famously sent a midget (Eddie Gaedel) up to bat in a major league game.  He was known for his wild promotions and was hated by most of his fellow-owners for it and his maverick ways, but adored by his players and sportswriters.  However, many of his reviled promotions are now standard in baseball (let alone all sports), including putting the names of players on the backs of their uniforms, constructing an electronic "exploding" scoreboard (that sent off fireworks, pinwheels and music, including Handel's Hallelujah Chorus,  whenever a White Sox player would hit a home run), fan giveaways, free Ladies Days to interest women in the sport, and pushing to get rid of the reserve clause, which allowed players to become free agents.  He was finally elected in the Baseball Hall of Fame, although posthumously.

However, you feel about sports, stick with me here.  It's all worth it.  This is Bill Veeck, after all.

There's so much he did and was about that I hesitate to even list anything, since it will give the impression that that's all of his highlights.  But they'd only touch the surface.  He hired the second black player in baseball and first in American league (Larry Doby) and hired the second black manager (again Doby).  The next year, in 1948, he signed the legendary black pitcher Satchel Paige from the Negro League to finally pitch in the major leagues when Paige was 42 years old, the oldest rookie ever signed -- which was dismissed as just a stunt until he went 6-1 with a remarkable 2.48 Earned Run Average. And kept him signed for five years (when his ERA was still still only 3.53 at age 47).  In fact, four years before Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to be the first black player in the major leagues in 1947, Veeck had a deal in place in 1943 to buy the Philadelphia Phillies and planned to fill the team entirely with the best black ballplayers from the Negro Leagues, which would have not only upended major league baseball, especially given that many major leaguers were in the military during WWII, but also race relations in U.S. society -- but to be fair, he told the baseball commissioner of his plans, who told the National League president who got another offer set up to buy the Phillies, cutting out Veeck.

When Veeck owned the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, he took time off to volunteer for the Marines during WWII, where he served until suffering an injury that subsequently required his leg to be amputated.

Veeck famously wandered his ballparks during games to talk with fans and sit with them, rather than up in the owner's box, to find out what bothered them and what they wanted for the team and park.  (Even late in his life, he would go to Wrigley Field to watch Cubs games in the bleachers, take his shirt off in the summer sun, and buy beers for the fans around him.)  He removed the door from his office so that anyone could walk in and took all his own phone calls, whoever called.  He even listed his home phone number, so any fan could call him there.

(I have a small, personal overlap with all of this.  In the 1970s when owning the White Sox for the second time, Veeck's son Mike was put in charge of promotions, and sponsored what is considered a well-intentioned but perhaps the most disastrous stunt ever in baseball, Disco Demolition Night.  The fan-riot that ensued was so problematic that it seems to have gotten Mike Veeck blackballed from major league baseball.  However, he later bought several minor league teams with Bill Murray.  Then, a few decades later, Mike Veeck finally got hired by a major league club, the Miami Marlins.  I wrote him a long letter about how pleased I was for that and why, and how much I admired his father.  A couple weeks later, I got a phone call -- it was Mike Veeck.  He said he started writing me a thank you note several times, but was so moved by what I'd said that no letter did justice to what he felt, and so instead he called.  He said I should stay in touch, but I didn't want to intrude.  I almost did a few years later when I read that his daughter was losing her sight from a rare disease, so he was taking time off from baseball to drive her across the U.S. so that she could see some of the greatest places in the country and always have a memory of them.  Those Veecks had their perspective right.)

That perspective may have begun will Bill Veeck's father, William, who had been a sportswriter and then president of the Chicago Cubs and by all accounts was remarkably decent and extremely admired by pretty much everyone.  As a young man, Bill worked for the Cubs  and later was an executive for the team, and helped with renovations at Wrigley Field, including putting in the now-iconic ivy on the walls, helping design the legendary scoreboard, and building the bleachers.

Most friends assume I've always been a Cubs fan, and though I followed them, and my first major league game was to see the Cubs at Wrigley Field, growing up my favorite team was actually the Chicago White Sox.  My favorite players are White Sox -- Luis Aparicio (I have an autographed ball, "To Bobby, Best wishes, Lu Aparicio"), Nellie Fox (I will have my Nelson Fox-model baseball glove) and Early Wynn.  And there were two periods in the my life when I rooted for the White Sox more than the Cubs.  Years later, I realized that both time overlapped when Bill Veeck owned the White Sox.  He simply made baseball wildly fun -- for fans and his players. Every year, he sponsored a contest where kids would write in and explain why they wanted to be the bat boy for the team -- and that's how White Sox selected their bat boy.  He put an outdoor shower stall in the outfield so fans could cool off on broiling Chicago days.

(Two stories why players loved him:  one time, a player was hit with a massive personal tragedy.  Veeck had him move in with his family and kept the player involved with Veeck's own activities to make sure he was occupied with things to do.  Another time, Veeck invited players to his house for a party -- which is endearing enough.  At one point during the afternoon, Veeck -- with his one leg -- dove into the pool fully dressed, and came back up with the unconscious young son of one of the players.  When the eternally grateful father asked how Veeck had noticed that the boy hadn't resurfaced after he'd jumped in while no one else around the pool did, Veeck's answer was, "I like kids.")

Honestly, this is just the tip of who Bill Veeck was.

Veeck was a voracious reader, going through almost a book a day (though it was hard to say exactly since he tended to be reading four or five books at the same time.). He also wrote three books himself with Ed Linn.  All were wonderful, but the first, Veeck -- As in Wreck, is considered one of the great books on baseball.  Published in 1962, it's still in print, sixty years later.  And is a vibrant, total joy.  A 2012 biography on Veeck, Bill Veeck: Baseball's Greatest Maverick by Paul Dickson, overlaps on many of the same stories but delves far-deeper into his life, including about his fascinating father, and a lot of untold events from the perspective of others, and is a rich and excellent.

I bring this up because near the end of DIckson's book, he mentions that a half-hour documentary for PBS was made about Veeck late in his life, narrated by his wife Mary Frances.  The film was done in 1985 for WTTW in Chicago by Emmy-winning producer Jamie Ceaser.  Out of curiosity, I wondered -- and hoped -- if it was available online.  And happily, Ms. Ceaser posted it herself on YouTube.

(Two things worth noting in the film: there is a wonderful sequence of Veeck going to Wrigley Field, mingling with fans and employees of "Illinois Masonic." That's a Chicago hospital where Veeck had recently had his latest critical surgery, and as Dickson writes about in his book, Veeck bought them tickets as a thank you.  Also, you won't see Veeck anywhere in the film wearing a tie -- that's because he came up doing so when a young man.  With one except, when he joined the military and, as he put it, he and the Marines reached an agreement.)

So, though all I wrote above is just the surface of Bill Veeck -- and the documentary (excellent as it is) can't even touch on the totality -- the film is a wonderful introduction to Veeck and highly worth watching whether you love sports or hate them.  Because this is about Bill Veeck, who transcends it all.

On this week’s ‘Not My Job’ segment of the NPR quiz show Wait, Wait…Don’t Tell Me!, the guest is Sen. Elizabeth Warren.  In her conversation with guest host Maz Jobran, she talks about her love for the show Ballers and its star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.  And also her book Persist, as well as being on the campaign trail eating and taking selfies.  The quiz is based on a fun pun.

On this week’s episode of 3rd and Fairfax, the official podcast of the Writers Guild of America, the guest is Emmy-winning and Writers Guild Award-winning writer Tracey Wigfield (30 Rock, The Mindy Project) who talks about being the showrunner on the new version of the teen comedy series, Saved by the Bell for the Peacock service and bringing Bayside High up to date, 

We have a new one this week, and the contestant is Curtis Funk of Niskayuna, New York.  Even though the hidden song didn’t seem all that well-hiden, I didn’t have a clue what it was, and neither did the contestant – who was a music teacher.  And he couldn’t get it either.  (And I got the sense that host Fred Child may not have either.)  When pianist Bruce Adolphe finally gave the name, I only vaguely, sort of, kind of recognized the name of the song, but couldn’t have sung any of it.  So, this one will be tough for most, I think.  Though some may be able to get it, since there are things about it that are well-known.  As for the composer style, it’s an area I’m not overly familiar with but I narrowed it to two possibilities – and it was the two possibilities that the contestant guessed.  He guessed right, I guessed wrong.  So, it was an o-fer for me.
 

On this week’s Al Franken podcast, his guest is Senator Amy Klobuchar, who was a fellow-Minnesota senator with Al and is currently the Chair of the Anti-Trust Subcommittee.  She discusses her new book, Anti-Trust. It covers Facebook & Amazon & Google to Coffins & Sunglasses & even Diapers.  And she and Al discuss the Ted “Carnival” Cruz joke.