I’m not really sure about the legal issues involved here, but I think I’m correct in stating that the Commissioner (maybe it was the league president) forbade Veeck from employing any future midgets. It was actually all MLB teams, and the ban may just be understood, rather than explicitly banning midgets from play.  Certainly we haven’t seen any midgets on an MLB roster since August 19, 1951. The official ruling may have just said that "All MLB contracts must be approved in advance by the league," because Veeck had just signed Gaedel to a short-term contract the day before the game.  (Gaedel got about 100 bucks, if you’re interested, for his day’s work.) Presumably, in vetting any last-minute contracts of non-MLB players, the league now checks carefully how tall the new player is.

But is this legal, or fair, or just? (If you want to read details about the Veeck-Gaedel episode, try Veeck’s autobiography Veeck as in Wreck, which is hilarious, maybe my favorite baseball book, certainly the best document an MLB team owner ever wrote, or ever will write.) Being very short is, simply, a useful skill in baseball, and if a team wishes to devote a roster spot to someone who possesses that skill, why should they be barred from doing so? To my legal point: someone who has that useful skill is being deprived, by the formal or informal anti-Gaedel ruling, of a gigantic salary. Very few midgets earn the MLB minimum which is something like a half-million bucks per year, and I think there are a few MLB teams that would be improved by employing a midget if they were allowed to.

Tactically, it’s just a matter of how valuable one spot on the roster is. In 1951 (and basically before Bill James beat this point into baseball’s thick skull in the 1970s) walks weren’t considered especially valuable. People used to argue that players who drew a lot of walks—like Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams, for example—were kind of cowardly, meekly accepting the gift of a free base rather than swinging at the ball, like a he-man would do. Roger Kahn actually described Duke Snider’s joyful facial expression upon drawing a fourth ball with a kind of contempt and disgust. These guys were capable of jacking the ball out of the park, but instead they allowed the pitcher to walk them, and so left the real job of hitting to some other player, the wussies! And guys who couldn’t hit as well as Mantle, Williams, and Snider but who drew a lot of walks—guys like Eddie Stanky or Eddie Joost or Eddie Yost or Eddie Bodyelse—got Dangerfield-like levels of respect for their high on-base percentage. One of my favorite stats concerns Richie Ashburn in 1962, his last year for the NY Mets, who virtually led the league in on-base percentage (he fell a few plate appearances shy of qualifying for the league lead). Ashburn retired (from one of the worst teams in MLB history, mind you) because he was felt, and felt himself, to be over the hill, not really effective anymore. Can you imagine how teams would compete today to sign a 35-year-old outfielder who could lead the NL in OBP, which is widely considered to be the single most important offensive attribute in the game?

Ashburn, of course, could still play the field, and still hit. (He batted .306 that final year, and played 54 games in centerfield, though not nearly at the Gold Glove level that he’d played it at in his youth). But he ‘only’ had an on-base percentage of .424, while midgets in their total on-base percentage throughout major league history have an OBP of 1.000 (composite plate appearances: 1). If an MLB team wanted to devote a roster spot to someone who could certainly draw a crucial walk in most (if not all) of his at-bats, and then put in a pinch-runner for the OBP specialist (a nice euphemism for ‘midget’), that might be an excellent strategy.

I drafted the previous five paragraphs in 2009, a few years before Bill James came out with much the same view: in a throw-away line, Bill opined recently that a midget with a decent lawyer might make a pretty fair case in court, but I’d be interested in hearing what a lawyer specializing in such cases has to say about the pitfalls of bringing such a suit. (I’m an Internet-Rules Lawyer, of course, and a fair clubhouse lawyer, but am not certified to plead, except for mercy, before any court of law.) Obviously, there’s something here that’s keeping a suit like this from being brought against MLB, though I’m not quite sure what the reasoning would be. I suspect it has to do with the limited number of MLB roster spots.

MLB would argue, I suspect (if it ever got to this point), that a roster spot is just too valuable to waste on a single at-bat specialist, who would need to be removed from the game immediately after being used-- but who limits roster sizes in the first place? MLB does, in agreement with the Players’ Association. Certainly (I would argue, if I owned a pair of striped trousers) after the September 1 roster expansion, you could spare one roster spot for a guy with an all-but-guaranteed 1.000 OBP. I can certainly remember plenty of moments when my teams have desperately needed baserunners in September games.

Come to think of it, there have been moments when I would have given up four post-September 1 roster spots to get a single run across the plate in the form of four straight Eddie Gaedels stepping up to the plate. The argument against four Eddie Gaedels, or even one, is "You’re making a mockery of the game," but I don’t know how that stands up, legally, against the claim that the rules of baseball unwittingly favor midgets, and if MLB wants to discourage midgets from playing baseball, it needs to come up with better rules. Declaring a minimum size for a batter’s strike zone? Making a rule that pinch-hitters must play the field for a certain proportion of their innings?  I don’t know exactly what could be done, but I do know that having a gentleman’s agreement that people under a certain unspecified height, in the Commissioner’s judgment, are permanently banned from MLB is highly questionable from a legal perspective. 

The arbitrary size of the roster is itself intriguing, quite apart from the vexing problem of midgets. Which orifice, and whose, was the magic number "25" yanked out of? It probably has its basis in actual practice (how many players can a team actually use at any one time?) and tinkering (remember the Holy Hell that broke loose a decade or two ago when they tried reducing it to 24?) and history. In the 19^th century, as I understand that benighted century, there were just a few extra players, and any emergency beyond that could be accommodated by volunteer players seated in the grandstand, but we seem to have arrived at "25" at some point in time, and have pretty well stuck with that number.

A twenty-five man roster is now set in stone after negotiations with the Players’ Association, but everything that’s negotiated can be re-negotiated, and roster size determines baseball tactics and strategy, especially now that a dozen pitchers is considered the bare-bones minimum for a 25-man roster, leaving four or five players sitting on the bench, one or two of whom may not be available for pinch-hitting or –running duties in any given game, and one of whom (the backup catcher) might only be used very late in the game if at all. So certain tactics, such as Casey Stengel pinch-hitting for his weak-hitting infielders very early in World Series games, would now be considered crazy (or crazier). Stengel probably had 7 or 8 bench players available when he last did that, so he could afford to play that card. (I’ll check—the 1960 Yankees’ World Series roster had 10 pitchers and 7 bench players when Stengel pinch-hit for Cletis Boyer in the second inning of Game 1 that year.) Nowadays, managers must hoard their bench players more carefully than a miser does his nickels.  But why not change that roster-size in recognition of changes in the game since it was arrived at, seventy or eighty years ago?

One obvious suggestion concerns the changes in the way pitching staffs are being used. Not only are there more pitchers on an average roster, but they’re being used in much more rigid roles, especially the starters, who relieve only in the most desperate of desperate situations. Otherwise, they’re serving largely decorative functions four days out of five—so why not expand the roster to, say, twenty-eight players, of whom you may designate three as "To be used only after the fifteenth inning" or something of the sort?

This expansion of the roster assumes, of course, that we want pinch-hitters and relief pitchers galore—and actually, I don’t, especially the relief pitchers. It seems to me a self-perpetuating problem: if you have eight relievers, and you go through a stretch as every team does where you don’t use several of them for a week, you’re going to try to give them innings, or batters at least, just so they get work and so they feel a part of the team, whether you actually need them or not.  Your other relievers, meanwhile, are going to feel that they can rely on this surplus of pitching, allowing them to pitch in their designated roles, and only in those roles. But sometimes I wonder if it would be a more exciting game if players were asked more often to operate outside their roles.

What I’m talking about is a reduced roster. In its more extreme form, I’m talking about maybe nine pitchers on a team and eleven position players, or just enough players to (barely) cover emergencies. The most immediate benefit (to me, as a viewer of games) would be a real reluctance for a manager to replace any pitcher. He could still do it, of course, but that would require him to spend one of his precious nickels—every pitching change would represent him spending a coin while knowing full well he only has a few left clanking around in his pocket. "Can I afford to spend this?" he’d have to ask himself, as now he does not need to ask that question, because the answer is  "Sure, I can. I’ve got almost half-a-buck’s worth of nickels left in my bullpen" and so we have to sit through pitching change after meaningless pitching change, day after day, month after month, all because the cost to the manager is almost nil. I don’t want to hinder managers from making choices, but I do want there to be a real downside in making changes willy-nilly. (A great, very under-rated player, incidentally, Willie Nilly.) I want there to be at least as much disadvantage to the manager in making a pitching change as there is for me sitting on my couch, enduring another car dealer’s bombastic commercial for the 374^th time.

A lot of the radical ideas I plan to float before your boats here involve making the game more difficult (I’d prefer "more challenging" but I’ll live with "difficult") for the players—and that’s fine with me. Some pitchers will deal better with midgets than other pitchers will: a cigarette-pack sized strike zone (to re-use Bill’s wonderful description of what Rickey Henderson in his crouch offered to pitchers) will be impossible for one pitcher to deal with, but barely possible for a control specialist to cope with. That’s virtuous to me, rewarding pitchers with exceptional control, penalizing pitchers who can’t hit the broad side of a cigarette pack from sixty feet. (Practically speaking, btw, a shoebox is more like it, since the plate is going to stay as wide as it is—only the distance between shoulders and knees is going to be affected.) But I do have a problem wherever the game is "comfortable" for players—I want the game to be stressful, difficult, challenging for the athletes because I think that’s where athleticism best presents itself, under difficult circumstances, where greatness among the greats emerges. That’s what I pay to see, not what’s comfortable, or safe, or traditional.