Bill Veeck; Baseball's Greatest Maverick

New York: Walker & Company, 2012. First U.S. Edition. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. x, 434, [4] pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index, small tear top edge of title page, bottom corner rear board & DJ bumped. Much more than an eccentric baseball owner, Bill Veeck was a transformational figure in the history of baseball. Nonconformist, visionary, and showman extraordinaire, he spent a lifetime challenging baseball's staid establishment. Paul Dickson has been an independent writer for almost 50 years during which time he has produced more than 60 non-fiction books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles on a variety of subjects. Dickson's Bill Veeck--Baseball's Greatest Maverick received five awards including: the Jerome Holtzman Award from the Chicago Baseball Museum, the Reader's Choice Award for the best baseball book of 2012 from the Special Libraries Association and the Casey Award from Spitball magazine, also for the best baseball book of 2012. Derived from a Kirkus review: Dickson delivers an engaging biography of Bill Veeck (1914-1986), an innovative, irascible and progressive influence within the staid world of baseball. For six decades, from the 1930s to the '80s, wherever baseball was played, Veeck was there. His father had been president of the Chicago Cubs-Veeck would go on to own and run four baseball teams. In each case, he turned moribund franchises into fan favorites through promotions ranging from exploding scoreboards to having a little person take an at-bat-and more. He had a keen eye for talent and produced winning teams-his Cleveland Indians won the World Series in 1948. He signed the first black player in the American League, Larry Doby, who would later become the second black manager in the big leagues. All of this brought him his fellow owners' enmity, as his insistence that baseball might be fun seemed to threaten the sanctity of the game. Dickson evokes Veeck's garrulous public persona, while at the same time showing the pain he endured as a WWII injury caused him to have amputations of portions of his right leg, leading to the ruin of the rest of his body, but not his spirit.