From Neal Karlen's 1999 paean to the independent leagues, Slouching Toward Fargo: A Two-Year Saga of Sinners and St. Paul Saints at the Bottom of the Bush Leagues with Bill Murray, Darryl Strawberry, Dakota Sadie and Me.
Tom Whaley had started working with the Saints from the beginning, throwing away his own private law practice to help run the carny. True, he also played guitar in the popular local rock band Tarwater and could talk for hours about Kurt Cobain or Bob Dylan or the future of rock & roll. But he was also a master of disguise who could go from scruffy-looking ticket ripper to a shaven, suit-and-tied lawyer with horn-rim glasses, a wife, and two small children within minutes. Like all Saints employees, he was supposed to do everything: that year the team attorney had even been charged at the last second with the important task of finding the St. Bernard that Bill Murray would ride onto the field while doing his imitation of the loathsome Marge Schott. Whaley found one, just in time.
"Like I said, we were all misfits," Whaley said during the off-season. "I was dying to get out of my regular litigation practice, so when I heard St. Paul was getting a minor league baseball team, I wrote Mike [Veeck] a letter out of the blue." He also purchased a piece of lutefisk, the disgusting-tasting salted fish that is one of the symbols of Scandinavian Minnesota.
"I got some frozen lutefisk," Whaley recalls, "wrote my resume on the back of it, and sent it off to Mike with a letter saying, 'This is what people in Minnesota eat.' I knew it was risky and absurd, but I had to take the chance. My dad had a stroke at fifty-four; he was a successful lawyer and, boom, he went down. That killed me and was the reason I wanted to work here. I realized there was no tomorrow, and if you wait around to chase your dream, it ain't going to happen. Do it now or hold your peace."
Magically, Mike wrote Whaley back, "I hate attorneys," Mike wrote, "but you seem like a Renaissance attorney, which intrigues me. We've got a thing going in the Northern League, so call me and I can show you how to ruin your life."
Tags: Neal Karlen, Slouching Toward Fargo, Baseball
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