The Short and the Short of It

This Friday we celebrate the birthday of Eddie Gaedel who has now been dead 10 years more than he lived, but then he always got the short end of the stick. Gaedel, for those of you not familiar with the Venn (should that be Veeck?) diagram where obscure baseball and obscure midget trivia meet, got to pinch hit in a major league game in 1951. Not surprisingly for a man who could limbo under one of our greyhounds without bending, Gaedel took a four pitch walk, then was removed for a pinch runner as there was a sign in the St. Louis Browns' stadium that said, "You must be this high to run these bases." Therefore, his career was cut, uh, short. (Sorry, might as well have Randy Newman playing in the background here.) Gaedel retired with a 1.000 on base percentage, thereby making him one of Baseball Prospectus's favorite players.

Needless to say, this was pretty much the high point of the little guy's life. Baseball impresario Bill Veeck brought him back a couple other times for gags--indeed, Gaedel led a special vertically-challenged squad of vendors in 1961 who were hired so they wouldn't block peoples' views while they ordered their foot-longs--but Gaedel quit when he realized that if a family of four bought the weiners, he was shorter than their sausages put together. He just didn't cut the mustard as a vendor, the poor little peanut.