If you have had an inclusion in baseball for a even if, you surely know the fable of Eddie Gaedel. For those of you who quay’t heard of him and don’t know the report, Gaedel was a midget, all of three feet eight inches high, who played one game of Major League baseball.
Much is known of that morning in the works for August 19, 1951. The 26-year-archaic Gaedel stepped occurring to the plate for the St. Louis Browns against the Tigers as the first neglect in the second game of a doubleheader. Wearing number 1/8, he walked a propos four straight pitches from Bob Cain. He was pinch-manage for by Jim Delsing and his career finished as abruptly as it had started.
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Eddie was not of course a career baseball performer. He appeared in the game as a marketing concocted by Browns owner Bill Veeck.
Ordinarily, the credit would confront there. Stories approximately ex-major leaguers who played in single-handedly one game are not newsworthy, even the description of a pint-sized artiste. Nobody infuriated to locate out much just about Gaedel after his fifteen minutes of fame. Nobody could make known you approximately Eddie the man on the other hand of Eddie the ballplayer which is for ever and a day inscribed into the game’s annals.
But the description of Eddie Gaedel the man is worth telling.
After his well-known game, St. Louis baseball writer Bob Broeg found him and started asking him questions. The first few questions were routine and Gaedel gave routine answers. Broeg plus told him that he was what he always wanted to be, an ex-supreme leaguer. Eddie subsequently became enormously proud of himself. The men shook hands and that was it.
Bob Fishel was the Brown’s publicist and spent a few days along between Eddie in the in the by now the game, the unaided baseball man to have a chance to know the man personally. “Veeck was looking for a midget, not a dwarf. When we saying him, there was no ask that he was right. However, I didn’t think the world of him” without elaborating new.
Eddie appeared very about speaking several TV shows in the moreover weeks earning $17,000 a totally large amount for those days. His playing goodwill had been for $100.
Three weeks after the game, regarding September 2, Eddie was arrested in Cincinnati for screaming obscenities. He tried to persuade a policeman he was a colossal league artiste. He was arrested for disorderly conduct and released upon a $25 bond. According to an interview bearing in mind his mom Helen in 1971, Eddie’s tiny size had gotten him in badly fright for a innocent portion of his energy.
Born in Chicago, his tally was stunted from the age of three by a thyroid condition. He was picked upon as a kid according to his mother. He made it through high school and was an errand boy for Drover’s Daily Journal, a Chicago newspaper. He worked as the Buster Brown shoe man appearing at gather together openings in Chicago and St. Louis. He in addition to worked in the Ringling Brothers Circus in the 50s and as a publicity man for Mercury Records but refused to go behind than the company to California because he was afraid to go out.
In 1961, Veeck now the owner of the White Sox hired Gaedel and auxiliary midgets as salesmen in the box seats. This was because fans were complaining about vendors blocking their view.
The slant was near however. Eddie was problem from high blood pressure and enlarged heart. On June 18, 1961 he was mugged upon a Southside Chicago street corner for the $11 he had later than than him. After the mugging, he apparently staggered quarters and died in his bed of a heart assault as paramedics were unable to revive him. The coroner reported he had bruises upon his viewpoint and knees.
His mother, penniless and out of fasten following her new kids was devastated. Adding verbal abuse to slight, she was swindled out of Eddie’s bats and Browns uniform by a man claiming he was representing the Hall of Fame Museum. The unaided remnants the Hall of Fame has are pictures of his brief career behind catcher Bob Swift upon his knees to obtain a head-high arena.
Gaedel’s death attracted tiny statement. The on your own person united taking into account baseball who attended his funeral was Bob Cain. “I never even met him but I felt obligated to go” said Cain who was by subsequently retired from baseball after a six-year career. “It warm of threw me for a loop that no option baseball people were there.”