Markazi: Relative of Eddie Gaedel has full-size baseball dreams

From Arash Markazi at ESPN.com on August 19, 2015:

It is one of the most unforgettable, if not one of the most unusual, images in major league baseball history.

Eddie Gaedel, all 3-foot-7 and 65 pounds of him, crouched over in the batter’s box, waiting for a pitch that would never come anywhere near a strike zone that was estimated to be 1.5 inches in height.

The stunt pulled off 64 years ago — Aug. 19, 1951 — was the brainchild of St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck, who was widely regarded as the game’s greatest showman during his tenures as the owner of the Browns, Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox.

Kyle Gaedele, Eddie’s grandnephew (Eddie dropped the last “e” in his surname after constant mispronunciations), is only 25 years old, but he never gets tired of talking about a play he discovered just 14 years ago.

The 6-foot-3, 220-pound Gaedele is an outfielder in the San Diego Padres farm system currently playing for the Double-A San Antonio Missions. He admits he didn’t know much about his great-uncle’s legendary (and only) plate appearance when he and his family were invited to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, for the 50th anniversary of one of the most famous walks in history in 2001.

Read the full article here: http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/13468439/eddie-gaedel-6-foot-3-grandnephew-kyle-gaedele-embraces-family-baseball-connection



Originally published: August 20, 2015. Last Updated: August 20, 2015.