The Saint Of Second Chances

https://www.thedailybeast.com/obses...s-review-the-doc-that-is-making-grown-men-cry

Netflix. Now.
It kind of starts out the way you expect, and it's funny and offbeat and entertaining. I've harped for years that a good Bill Veeck biopic would be a lot of fun, and there's about 15 minutes of that here.

And then ... it's something different.

 

Remember reading about Mike's daughter's retinitis pigmentosa diagnosis in SI many years ago. Had no idea she later was diagnosed with a fatal disease.

 

I believe it was Bill Veeck Sr. who installed the ivy on the walls at Wrigley. Bill Jr. may have been on the work crew, I'm not sure he was ever the owner of the Cubs.

 

Veeck Sr. was never the majority owner of the Cubs, but he was the team's vice president from 1917-19 and then president from 1919-1933.

Bill Jr. worked as a general ballpark gofer for the Cubs while his father was alive and is generally credited with the idea of planting ivy (originally, bittersweet) on the Wrigley Field outfield walls.

Bill Veeck (who continued as an office assistant and then treasurer for the Cubs after his father's death) sometimes claimed to have largely planted most of the outfield foliage at Wrigley himself in 1937, but numerous other accounts have suggested it would be more accurate to say he "helped" to plant it.

 

Veeck Sr., who was a sportswriter for several Chicago papers before becoming a baseball executive, was described by Bill Jr, (and others) as a reserved, dignified figure who rarely raised his voice and almost never appeared in public in less than formal business wear (suits and ties).

I still think a multi-decade Veeck biopic could be great fun, but I think maybe it might be partly derailed by this documentary.

 

Even William Sr.'s story, usually lost in the hype surrounding Bill's revolutionary promotions, was pretty interesting.

In the Nineteen Teens, Veeck was an ink-stained wreck writing sports for the Chicago American at about age 40, when he wrote a series of columns advising how the Cubs should run their team, when chewing gum magnate William M. Wrigley somewhat unexpectedly found himself in majority control of the franchise.

In what was fairly common practice at the time, Veeck's columns were written under the American's staff pseudonym of "Bill Bailey," but Wrigley was impressed that most of his suggested moves for the team were level-headed and realistic, as opposed to the customary crazy pie-in-the-sky solutions suggested and demanded by fans and media (in 1917 much the same as 2023).

Due to financial setbacks for previous majority partner Charles Weeghman, seeking someone with more baseball expertise to run the show, Wrigley made Veeck a vice-president in 1917 and then a couple seasons later, team president with nearly full authority over baseball operations.

During his tenure running the team (1917-1933) Veeck had a rather inconspicuous public image, much in contrast to his flamboyant son (and later, grandson).

However, according to Bill's later books, when William Sr. developed intestinal cancer in late 1933, was in declining condition and could not digest normal food and drink, in his final days several cases of prize champagne (then restricted by Prohibition) were delivered to Veeck on the orders of Wrigley Field customer and acquaintance Al Capone.

 

A couple of other interesting things:

* 1910s-era sportswriter pseudonyms: There was actually a Philadelphia sportswriter using the name Jim Nasium. No word on whether Ben Dover or Heywood Jablome ever found their way into his stories.

* Capone was a huge Cubs fan, along with his rival Bugs Baer and his gang. Gabby Hartnett said that the players would often see the gangsters in the stands, but they would behave themselves and never bother the players or go after each other. But one time, Capone called Hartnett over before the game and exchanged pleasantries. The newspapers got pics of them smiling and shaking hands, and Judge Landis pitched a fit.

* Veeck Sr. received telegrams and phone calls about an early September 1920 game being fixed and notified his manager about it. The manager replaced starting pitcher Claude Hendrix with Grover Cleveland Alexander, who lost anyways. The subsequent investigation eventually led to the Grand Jury and the subsequent uncovering of the Black Sox Scandal.

 

Supposedly Capone was more of a White Sox guy in earlier years, but the Cubs vs. Sox polarization hadn't really taken full hold until the 1920s; by that time Capone's extracurricular activities had gravitated more to the North Side, plus in the roaringest of the Roaring Twenties the Cubs were contenders while the White Sox were generally comatose in the aftermath of 1919.
So Wrigley Field became more of a place to see and be seen, and Capone was pretty much a fixture at Cubs games, leading to the palsy-walsy relationship with several stars, prominently Hack Wilson, by many accounts a steady customer at several of Capone's booze-and-booty joints.

Certainly if somebody was going to make a streaming video prequel series covering 100 years of the Veeck family in baseball, a good chunk of Chapter One would cover the Cubs in the rollicking gangster days of Chicago (with teenage Bill as an onlooker).

 

Today Capone, Hartnett and Landis would have a deal with DraftKings in which they offer daily three-way parlays.

 

I couldn't get over the switches between documentary and biopic. A little confusing, but more it came across as a trick. How are the two genres supposed to be understood? How much is the biopic bit exaggerated and what does that mean for the validity of the documentary stuff? Plus, it's just bad to watch.

 

Well, in ways it harkens bsck to "Veeck, as in Wreck," the original book, which was really how the greater American sports public got to know the Veeck family at large.
That book (1962) and its direct sequel, "Thr Hustler's Handbook" (1965) are a similar mix: they start out to be pretty straightforward documentaries, with actual news reports as they happened, but along the way a lot of dramatized, likely somewhat exaggerated, and in some cases fabricated episodic anecdotes are thrown in to move the story along.

So this documentary handles Mike's story jn a similar way.

 

I just think it is a narrative cheat. It can be funny at one point in the biopic and switch over to 'real' in the docu bits, never explaining the difference or a reason for it.