The Tragic Story of Eddie Gaedel

If you have had an build up in baseball for a even though, you surely know the tab of Eddie Gaedel. For those of you who port’t heard of him and don’t know the relation, Gaedel was a midget, all of three feet eight inches high, who played one game of Major League baseball.

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Much is known of that hours of daylight going regarding for August 19, 1951. The 26-year-early Gaedel stepped happening to the plate for the St. Louis Browns closely the Tigers as the first verbal abuse in the second game of a doubleheader. Wearing number 1/8, he walked on the subject of four straight pitches from Bob Cain. He was pinch-permit know for by Jim Delsing and his career over and curtains amid as abruptly as it had started.

Eddie was not of course a career baseball artist. He appeared in the game as a announcement concocted by Browns owner Bill Veeck.

Ordinarily, the relation would fall there. Stories about ex-major leaguers who played in unaided one game are not newsworthy, even the version of a pint-sized artist. Nobody bothered to locate out much roughly Gaedel after his fifteen minutes of fame. Nobody could reveal you just very very virtually Eddie the man on the other hand of Eddie the ballplayer which is at all times inscribed into the game’s annals.

But the financial credit of Eddie Gaedel the man is worth telling.

After his competently-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 later told him that he was what he always wanted to be, an ex-all-powerful leaguer. Eddie in addition to became enormously snobbish of himself. The men shook hands and that was it.

Bob Fishel was the Brown’s publicist and spent a few days following Eddie back the game, the lonely baseball man to have a unintentional to know the man personally. “Veeck was looking for a midget, not a dwarf. When we saw him, there was no ask that he was right. However, I didn’t think the world of him” without elaborating optional optional association.

Eddie appeared in version to several TV shows in the gone weeks earning $17,000 a every one of large amount for those days. His playing concurrence had been for $100.

Three weeks after the game, concerning September 2, Eddie was arrested in Cincinnati for screaming obscenities. He tried to convince a policeman he was a massive league performer. He was arrested for disorderly conduct and released upon a $25 sticking together. According to an interview considering his mom Helen in 1971, Eddie’s tiny size had gotten him in make miserable for a pleasurable share of his cartoon.

Born in Chicago, his grow was stunted from the age of three by a thyroid condition. He was picked upon as a kid according to his mom. He made it through high moot and was an errand guy for Drover’s Daily Journal, a Chicago newspaper. He worked as the Buster Brown shoe man appearing at growth openings in Chicago and St. Louis. He furthermore worked in the Ringling Brothers Circus in the 50s and as a foster man for Mercury Records but refused to go following the company to California because he was alarmed to go out.

In 1961, Veeck now the owner of the White Sox hired Gaedel and addendum midgets as salesmen in the crate seats. This was because fans were complaining about vendors blocking their view.

The call a halt to was oppressive however. Eddie was problem from high blood pressure and improved heart. On June 18, 1961 he was mugged upon a Southside Chicago street corner for the $11 he had once him. After the mugging, he apparently staggered house and died in his bed of a heart attack as paramedics were unable to revive him. The coroner reported he had bruises upon his twist and knees.

His mother, penniless and out of join together going on when her calculation kids was devastated. Adding exploitation to insulted, she was swindled out of Eddie’s bats and Browns uniform by a man claiming he was representing the Hall of Fame Museum. The by yourself remnants the Hall of Fame has are pictures of his brief career behind catcher Bob Swift upon his knees to realize a head-high arena.

Gaedel’s death attracted tiny message. The only person linked along with than baseball who attended his funeral was Bob Cain. “I never even met him but I felt obligated to go” said Cain who was by also retired from baseball after a six-year career. “It nice of threw me for a loop that no accumulation baseball people were there.”

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