Baseball’s One-Walk Wonder

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To succeed in the big leagues, pitchers have to be able to throw strikes, of course. If they can’t put the ball inside the prescribed “strike zone” at least three times out of seven, big-league hitters will let them walk them until the manager comes to the mound to take away the ball.

Some truly remarkable pitchers—the masterful Greg Maddux comes to mind—have pinpoint control, or “command”: the ability to put the ball inside a very specific spot, perhaps right on the “black,” the thin edge surrounding the plate.

None of these pitchers, not even Maddux, however, signed up to pitch to a batter like Eddie Gaedel.

A Certain Kind of Stardom

Eddie Gaedel holds the distinction of being the most famous batter in the long history of baseball with only one at-bat. That’s right: he appeared at the plate only once, way back in 1951, yet his name is known to many of us baseball history buffs decades later.

You could call him a one-hit wonder, except he didn’t get a hit. He didn’t even swing. He walked on four pitches.

Have a look at the famous picture taken of his at-bat, and you will instantly understand the story:

Eddie Gaedel was 3 feet, 7 inches tall. When he crouched, as he had been instructed to do, his strike zone was 1.5 inches high, from his armpits to the top of his knees. That’s a really small zone. It’s also really low.  Pitchers just don’t train to throw to that spot from atop a mound that already is 10 inches higher than the plate.

Tigers pitcher Bob Cain did no better than most pitchers would have done. All four of his pitches were high, and Gaedel headed off to first base, where he was promptly replaced with a pinch runner. He never appeared in a big-league game again.

For one brief shining moment, though, Gaedel was a star. “For a minute,” he said, “I felt like Babe Ruth.”

Unlike the Babe, however, Gaedel was more stunt than star. His appearance had nothing to do with talent. Before that day, he had never even played baseball. He was there because Browns owner Bill Veeck put him there to create a sensation. It worked. Spectators laughed. Even Cain laughed. It was a joke, nothing more than a joke.

It was a joke that became a part of baseball lore, though—so much a part, in fact, that years later The New York Times ran an obituary for the player who was replaced by Gaedel, even though this player, Frank Saucier, himself played in only 18 big-league games.

All Kinds of Fame

Fame holds a lot of allure for many people. For them, there’s something appealing, even intoxicating, about the thought of all that attention. I doubt you need any evidence for this assertion, but, in case you do, I have two words for you: reality TV.

The question, then, is this . . .

Would you like to be an Eddie Gaedel?

Boiled down, fame amounts to attention, a lot of attention, and that attention can be paid for different reasons.  Maddux and all of those other pitchers who have done remarkable things with a baseball became famous for their skills, something all of us can develop—with baseballs, violins, words, paint, people, and more—with countless hours of practice and other forms of preparation.

Fame, however, also can come for reasons that have nothing to do with skills or talent. Some people were just in the right place at the right time. Abraham Zapruder may have had some skill with a camera, I suppose, but the real reason he became famous is that he happened to be filming President Kennedy’s motorcade progression through Dallas when the president was assassinated. Other people are willing to do crazy things on television, even making fools of themselves, to achieve fame, however fleeting it might be.

Then there are the Eddie Gaedels, who have something about them—often a physical feature—that makes them interesting—alas, even comical—to others. This something is not only a source of fame, but also a defining feature, something that may be hard for others to get past so that they can see the other qualities of their humanity. Eddie Gaedel earned a living by just being small. Outside of his famous baseball appearance, he appeared in rodeos and circuses. I’m not saying I blame him for this decision; in that day, perhaps he had few other promising choices. It has to be hard, though, to be known merely for what you are rather than what you can do, especially when you are sensitive about that defining quality, as Gaedel was.

“In the end,” Brian McKenna wrote for the Society of American Baseball Research, “his lifelong perception of himself as a little person, and the abuse he suffered from others because of it, led him to drink heavily.” One day, McKenna explains, a decade or so after Gaedel’s short stint with the Browns, he drank too much, became “combative,” and suffered a beating. His mother found him dead in his bed, the victim of a heart attack.

What Do We Value?

Fame did not kill Eddie Gaedel. Neither did the desire for it. I’m not even sure that he wanted to be famous—probably no more than many of us. If fame is a reflection of what we value, though, the story of Eddie Gaedel is a kind of cautionary tale. Veeck’s stunt, like countless circus acts and so-called “freak shows” offered up in the same spirit, capitalize on the static features of human beings. Their message is “I don’t care who you are or what you can do. Just show me something that makes me laugh or cringe, and I’ll toss you a coin.”

We can do better.

We can reward our fellow human beings—with fame, income, affection—for the things that they find fulfilling, the things that they can contribute with their talents, their personalities, their capacities to love and give and serve.

We can create a world where no one is a stunt and everyone is a star.