The Hustler's Handbook

by Bill Veeck with Ed Linn

*** Please Read This *** Slight shelf wear - No marks on text - Ships from Ohio - Next day shipping - Free tracking - 15-E-32

Genres: Baseball, Sports, Nonfiction, Business, Biography

296 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1967

Reviews

[Woody Chandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am in the midst of a deep dive into the late-Bill Veeck and this is his follow-up to "Veeck As In Wreck", a book that he co-authored with Ed Linn when he did not expect to live much longer. Not only did he live, but he also co-authored this book and one other!

I am finding more and more that, if time travel is ever invented, I would like to attend a game at Comiskey Park and sit next to Bill in the stands. We are like-minded and I would relish the opportunity to smoke and stub out a cigar on his wooden leg!

I found myself nodding in complete agreement on p. 154, when he says: "Conformity is the villain. Everyone must fit the mold, march in lockstep, bow low to the public-relations man. Conformity in education, conformity in dress and conformity in thought has led, rather naturally, to conformity of behavior. ... They have been brain-washed, dry-cleaned and dehydrated! They have been homogenized, orientated and indoctrinated! Their mouths have been washed out, their appetites stunted, their personalities bleached! They say all the right things at all the right times, which means that they say nothing,"

This is especially true of the modern athlete, which is why I automatically tune out player and coach/manager interviews. It is also true of the majority of society, which helps to explain why I failed in both of my mayoral bids and in my run for school board. 8=(

In case you are wondering why I did not award the book 5 stars, vice 4, I would point you to the unfortunate Chapter 9, "Mine Eyes Doth Tell Me So", which is filled with reverse racism. By all accounts, Bill was NOT a racist, but he goes out of his way in this chapter to demonstrate just why he was not one. It was like the old "joke", "How can I be a racist? Some of my best friends are [insert any term, whether a racial slur or simply a pigeonhole term based on color, creed and/or religion]!" I got to the point that I could not read any more of it and skipped ahead to the next chapter.

He quickly redeems himself in Chapter 11, "Harry's Diary - 1919" in which he transcribes notes found in the bowels of Comiskey Park during his first ownership of the White Sox! We gain an insight that was not as apparent in "Eight Men Out", which I read in 1989, before I switched my American League allegiances from the Oakland A's to the CHISox. The machinations of the day are fully outlined and would make great reading for any baseball historian on its own.

I was happy enough with it that I am now reading his "Thirty Tons A Day".

[Tom Stamper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although not as well known as his autobiography, Veeck As In Wreck: The Autobiography of Bill Veeck Hustlers Handbook is different and a classic in its own way. There are autobiographical moments here, but I would consider it a book of essays. Each chapter covers a different topic. Some of these chapters are things that Veeck worked on directly and other chapters are his observations and analysis about the game of baseball. Although he gives himself the hustler moniker and refers to it through the book, his explanation of hustling and how to do it is just the first part. The ideas he had to draw people to the ballpark were so outlandish and successful by his telling that it explains why Bill Veeck was never a rich man. I surmise that he seemed more interested in what he could accomplish rather than what he could earn.

Veeck goes into detail as to how you finance the purchase of a major league team and how it can be so economically precarious unless your wealth comes from a side business. By the 1960s most every club was inherited or bought by a corporation that had resources outside of the game. Veeck was never so lucky. He tells us in a long chapter about how CBS purchased the Yankees from Dell Webb and Dan Topping. Topping and Webb have had it with each other and Topping needs the money to pay his alimony bills among other things. Veeck is out of baseball when they sell to CBS, but he is well connected and not without influence on a few of the clubs namely with the owner he sold the White Sox to. Veeck lays out the mechanizations in selling the Yankees to CBS and I had never heard that story told before. CBS is usually just a footnote between the Mickey Mantle era and the George Steinbrenner era. Veeck points out the specific conflicts of interest and rule violations and how they ignored it.

Maybe most fascinating is the portion of the book where he deciphers a diary he finds in the White Sox archives that chronicles the Black Sox Scandal in 1919 from the first suspicions until the players are punished a year later. The author was a White Sox official well known to Veeck and Veeck’s father who ran the crosstown Cubs in 1919. Through the diary Veeck constructs a timeline of what the White Sox knew and when they knew it. It references other gambling scandals such as observations that the 1918 World Series was also fixed and Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker’s conspiracy to throw a regular season game.

White Sox owner, Charles Commiskey, wanted Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis to be named Commissioner to restore credibility to the league. President of the AL, Ban Johnson, wanted a different candidate. Commiskey won the pyrrhic victory as Landis banned every scandal tainted White Sox player and his team would spend 40 years in the wilderness, not returning to the World Series until Veeck owned the club in 1959. As the journal shows, Landis knew there were other instances of throwing games, but he had no interest in what happened before 1919. What Landis wanted was to scare every player not to try it again. Veeck is not a romantic about such things. He references the Alex Karras suspension in the NFL for gambling and suggests that baseball has probably not solved their problems entirely either.

There is also a lot here on how Walter O’Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles because they gave him real estate worth more than his team and how O’Malley convinced Horace Stoneham to come along and relocate the Giants to San Francisco. Or as Veeck suggests did Stoneman always want to move to SF and he tricked O’Malley into doing all the hard work up front?

This books just fills in a lot of gaps in baseball history and I find it to be a forgotten classic.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bill Veeck wrote this as a sort of sequel to Veeck As In Wreck, and has a similar sort of fast-paced, witty joking every other sentence old school writing style. He was a very entertaining writer indeed. Much of it is specific to the inner workings of 1960s baseball, specifically how bad the owners and GMs of baseball are at running their teams. That is much of the book which probably would appeal to hardcore baseball history lovers than a casual reader much more than his first book. Still, he has a funny way of putting things that you get the feeling that he'd be great to sit and drink a beer or smoke a cigarette with, a sort of stream of consciousness yet very directed way of talking. He wrote this inbetween his two stints as the Chicago White Sox owner, and is very ahead of his time when y0u boil it down to his ideas. Hell, he even claims, in the afterword written near the end of his life in the mid 1980s, that he had tried to begin a process of signing women baseball players (something I've started to see more traction around in recent years.)

I'd say if you love learning how deals are made behind closed doors and you love old school wit, you'll love this book. Veeck was a man who rankled the nerves of other owners, and this was another shot across the ownership class bows of the 1960s.

[Dave Capers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Depending on the chapter this book is alternately ahead of its time (the "art of promotion " chapter's ideas on enhancing the in-game experience via technology), of its time (the cringe-worthy racial politics of "Mine eyes doth tell me so" even if they were well intentioned and progressive for the mid 1960s) and off the mark (some of the "this is going to kill baseball" stuff is the same stuff you hear now, decades later and if baseball is dead as a business we should all be so financially dead). A must read for people seriously interested in the history of the game. A bit self-aggrandizing and in need of a better editor at points but you wouldn't expect anything less from one of the visionary thinkers and great promoters in 20th century America.

[David Hallstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid book with fascinating insight on the business of baseball (the section of the Braves owners hustling out of Milwaukee for Atlanta was prescient, if you know the story of the years before they sold to Ted Turner).

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

A visionary in the industry. Remarkable for something written in 1965.

[Spiros · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bill Veeck, as I may have written elsewhere (and I'll never tire of iterating) was one of my all-time favorite Americans, one of the Charter Starting Nine (hmm...Julia Child, catcher, making sure no one reaches the plate without eating EVERYTHING on it; Duke Ellington, ambassadorial at firstbase; Dorothy Parker, demurely ceding all secondbase responsibilities to shortstop Miles Davis; Hunter S. Thompson, doggedly manning the hot-corner when not under attack from giant lizards; Harvey Milk, a ball of energy in center, having to cover a ton of ground between Ben Franklin, his preoccupied leftfielder, and Dashiell Hammett, indolently vogueing in right). Veeck would be the starting pitcher, in every sense of the word.
In this book Veeck gleefully savages the stuffed shirts in positions of authority in the game in the mid '60's; and because Veeck cared very deeply about the game, there is a vibrant hum of moral outrage as continuo to the high notes of levity. These pages lay bare the wisdom of a very great baseball mind as he brilliantly forecasts the Yankee's Years in the Wilderness, stretching from the 1964 World Series loss, relieved a dozen years later when Reggie Jackson hit three home runs on a memorable October evening in 1977 and brought the Yankees back to relevance. Veeck astutely forecasts the disaster which corporate ownership would bring to baseball, and expresses his outrage at the many conflicts of interest manifest in the CBS purchase of the Yankees, over which figurehead Commissioner Ford Frick (really, they let HIM into the Hall of Fame?) couldn't even summon up the moxie to clear his throat.

One of the sweetest blendings of humor and outrage occurs in this passage, when Veeck is describing Red's GM Billy DeWitt's reaction to the publication of Jim Brosnan's The Long Season:
"Jim Brosnan is the most recent example of baseball's resistance to anybody who refuses to prostrate himself before the shrine. Brosnan wasn't a drunk. He was something far worse. Brosnan was a practicing literate. The truth of the matter is that Brosnan wrote even better than he pitched. He had the true writer's gift for the recognizable truth and the true writer's sense of rebellion. You read Brosnan's book and, knowing nothing about baseball, you had to say to yourself, "Yes, this is the way it is."
Brosnan wrote that baseball players drink hard liquor and have more than a cursory interest in sex. He even led some of his more gullible readers to believe that some managers and maybe even some baseball operators are neither lovable or competent.
So Bill DeWitt pulled paragraph 3(c) of the uniform players' contact on him. He not only silenced Brosnan but he revealed to the public that there is a quaint little LOYALTY section in which the player not only agrees to be diligent, faithful and obedient but in which he surrenders his right to say or write anything "without the written consent of the club" - a clause which is not only patently unconstitutional, but which is, far worse, stupid. What William O. and the rest of the herd do not seem to understand is that the public-relations pap that is forever "reaffirming the grand tradition of baseball as the National Pastime" by picturing players as somewhat retarded devotees of bubble gum and comic books does not really attract anyone except a few retarded devotees of bubble gum and comic books"

Put that into your pipe and smoke it, George Will.

P.S.: 4 stars, only because the opening chapter has too much facetiousness and too little substance.

[Billhotto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread this 1965 follow up to "Veeck as in Wreck". In a several essays, Veeck, then retired, takes stock of Baseball. The 60's were a turbulent time in what was still the National Pastime. Expansion, ten team leagues, the free agent draft, TV money changed front office operations although the game stayed the same. But this was small potatoes to what would happen in the next decade. In his usual breezy style Veeck shows that professional baseball is much more a business than a sport. Specifically it's show business, a giant reality show before "Survivor" was imported.
He takes pleasure in the downfall of the Yankees, explains the appeal of the Mets and tells a few stories about baseball execs such as Branch Rickey, Horace Stoneham, and Walter O'Malley. He has some new information about the Black Sox scandal and predicts divisional play. He laments the dropping numbers of African American players in the majors. He relates how he fleeced his fellow owners and admits that he has had his pocket picked on occasion.
Five years before the Curt Flood case he urges the owners to do away with the reserve clause. Over fifty years ago, Veeck had one major diagnosis of baseball's problem in the TV age. It was just too slow. And too hidebound by tradition to change.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the book, though it is not for the casual baseball reader or even someone who hasn't read about a few of the players of old from other books. Since I was born in the 70s and am reading this book in 2014, many of the names, inside jokes, and tales are either completely foreign or take some digging through to appreciate. In other words, without some previous background on some of the topics, this book could be challenging to read through.

The early chapter about promotions and baseball parks might have been informational in the 60s when the book was written, but (unfortunately) nowadays such strategies are commonplace. Think ads, ads, and more ads at the ballpark. Some stories about inside scoops of how owners, managers, and ballplayers handled each other were quite interesting, even if I was unaware of such events even occurring. I think that Veeck's freewheeling, sometimes mocking style makes the stories more enjoyable for the reader.

I haven't read Veeck's autobiography yet, so maybe it would have been better to have read that first before this sequel. Consider doing so yourself if you want to read about Veeck and his lengthy contributions to the game.

[Tim Timberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, a collection of essays about 1950s and 1960s MLB, contains some gems of baseball bureaucracy. Some knowledge of Major League Baseball from that era will definitely help. Veeck's autobiography is better, but this is also a good book for those, like me, who find Veeck to be very interesting.

[Kristen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was required for one of my classes. I'm not big on baseball and found it quite boring, but I can see how a baseball fan would really enjoy it.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

a great, if bloated and overlong at times, series of essays on baseball from an insider who was a decided outsider. too bad this isn't an audiobook!

[Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars because of the information on the Black Sox scandal and politics of major league base