I was half-listening to the NPR guy talking about three must-read baseball books, and my ears perked up when I heard Veeck — as in Wreck.” It’s a funny title based on the whacky baseball life of an unapologetic baseball huckster. He left his mark with the Cleveland Indians, among other baseball franchises. I remember seeing it on my dad’s nightstand in the last year of his life. My dad grew up in the Cleveland area, Solon mostly, moved to Columbus when he was in high school and went to Ohio State (as did I — go to Ohio State, that is, not grow up in Solon). But he always had great affection for all things Cleveland, including the Indians and the Browns. Both teams had good years, and they had interminable stretches of being either mediocre or downright awful, especially the Indians.

Veeck (rhymes with wreck) was one colorful character connected to the Indians, staging goofball promotions and fielding funny characters in the games — anything to put butts in chairs, as the expression goes. As far as I can tell, he was not connected with the 10-cent beer fiasco of the early-mid ’70s, one of the most infamous riots in sports history.

But that radio commentator declaring Veeck — as in Wreck a must-read seemed to create a connection to a memory that had begun to fade.

Brought a smile to my face. The reason Alan Schwarz of the New York Times liked it and the other two titles so much is that they didn’t get all nostalgic about the “good old days” when baseball was pure and innocent — because it wasn’t. It was racist, for starters. As Lou Brock told him a while back, baseball tends to reflect society as a whole. Baseball in the ’40s was segregated, observing the same ugly Jim Crow laws American society honored. To look back at the ’40s and ’50s and see segregation viewed as something that’s normal is as foreign to today’s kids as is the concept of slavery. It simply does not compute.

So yeah, maybe you could get a bag of peanuts for a nickel and a beer didn’t cost $8 (or more), but there are some things in baseball’s history that we ought not be so proud of.

Kind of got off on a rant there, didn’t I? Oh, well.

Alan Schwarz, sportswriter for The New York Times, has three must-read books about baseball. On NPR radio, he rhapsodizes about some of the great characters of the game, including an especially colorful owner, in the autobiography Veeck — as in Wreck:

” (Bill) Veeck rollicks through his days of running the Cleveland Indians, the old St. Louis Browns and the Chicago White Sox, all the while introducing us to characters such as Satchel Paige, Hank Greenberg and, of course, his famous walk-drawing leadoff man, Eddie Gaedel. Veeck dedicated his life to the notion that the fan is king.

“Who can’t love a guy who writes, ‘Nothing annoys me more than to be told [not] to do something … because it is lacking in dignity’?”

The other two must reads are The Long Season by Jim Brosnan and October 1964 by David Halberstam. They aren’t schmaltzy pinings for the “good old days” when baseball was pure and innocent because, well, it wasn’t. October 1964 pays attention to the racial tension during that world series in the height of the civil rights movement pitting the integrated St. Louis Cardinals vs. the all-white New York Yankees.

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