Bill Veeck (53 page)

Doby seemed to understand why Veeck had made the move, and he had only praise for Veeck for the rest of his life. “Probably one of the best, down-to-earth
human beings I've ever met,” Doby enthused. “He didn't throw rhetoric around. Dealt with the truth, the facts. I lost my father when I was eight years old. But, he was my father back then…. He would never get the accolades that he should get.”
¹⁵

Money was looming larger, but Veeck kept on going even as he watched the price of free agents skyrocket, unable to do anything about it other than buy from the lowest rungs of the talent ladder and make quips about the situation. When asked whether free agents leaned toward playing in big cities, he responded: “Not really. They lean towards cash.”
¹⁶

The new year brought the tongue-in-check announcement from Veeck that he was adding an additional ladies' restroom to the left-field corner of the park because 36 percent of his paying customers were women, “and they drink beer.” Rick Talley wrote a column on the smoke-and-mirrors press conference with the headline “Veeck Gives Smoke a Very Hard Sell.” The simple fact was that Veeck had precious little else to announce in terms of the team he would field in the spring.

In February 1979 Veeck turned sixty-five and stood still for several articles profiling him, including one for
Esquire
in which he was described as “surviving despite 32 operations and 4½ years flat on his back in the hospital.” Veeck was awaiting the delivery of a new artificial left knee, and noted that he was known to go through two or three wooden legs a year. The Bards Room became the scene for a birthday party staged by Rudie Schaffer. To Veeck, there was nothing special about the occasion; as he said, “You see one birthday, you've seen 'em all.”
¹⁷

Throughout the 1978 season and into the early days of the 1979 campaign, Veeck watched as the changes that would end his baseball career took place. The irony that he had advocated for many of them did not escape him. Then Commissioner Bowie Kuhn let the George Steinbrenners and Ted Turners of the world run amok by not forcing them to share the revenues from their massive local television contracts with MLB, a Veeck idea that would have brought parity to baseball even before Pete Rozelle did a similar thing in the National Football League. Steinbrenner proved, with Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter and free agency, that you could buy a World Series ring. Veeck couldn't compete with the big boys anymore, and his promotional genius could no longer make up the difference, try as he might. The home opener in 1979—a 10–2 loss to the Toronto Blue Jays—was such a disaster that Veeck invited the fans to come back for the following game without having to pay. “Give us another chance, please!” he pleaded.

The Sox lost the free game as well, putting them at 1–4, an inauspicious omen. Veeck fully realized that he would have to rely increasingly on gimmicks to keep the ballpark filled. Attempting to attract younger fans, he put his son Mike in charge of new ideas, which included some free rock concerts. Bill was harking back to ideas he had used before, including giving an award for the team's greatest performer the previous season to organist Nancy Faust.

In late June, Veeck was admitted to Illinois Masonic Hospital again for tests. On July 2, after the team had run up a 1–10 record, Veeck called a summit to discuss what could be done to salvage the season, officiating from his hospital room. Mike's job was to ratchet up the promotions to keep the fans coming through the turnstiles.

In the popular mind, there are two bookends to the life of Bill Veeck. The first is Eddie Gaedel and the other is Disco Demolition Night. The latter was Mike's idea, but his father agreed to it. Mike had gotten the idea from a Chicago disc jockey named Steve Dahl of WLUP—“The Loop”—who was leading a crusade against disco music. Dahl took the position that disco threatened rock and roll, and this became a rallying point for those with a disdain for the dance music then at the height of its popularity.

Mike invited Dahl to blow up a huge wooden crate full of disco records in center field between games of a twi-night doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers set for July 12, 1979. Dahl's followers were told they could get into the game for 98 cents if they brought a record to be destroyed. Mike was in charge of the event and hired security for an expected crowd of 35,000. On the day of the game, the elder Veeck unexpectedly checked himself out of the hospital and showed up for the event.

“What are you doing here?” Roland Hemond asked.

“I'm worried about this promotion,” replied Veeck, who added, “It could be catastrophic.”

Some 50,000 fans crowded the stadium, another 5,000 rushed the gates, and others gained admission by climbing ladders they had brought. Approximately 35,000 more were either outside the stadium or stuck on the Dan Ryan Expressway. The smell of marijuana wafted through the grandstand. “This was not a typical baseball crowd,” Mike later recalled. “Most of these kids probably didn't know Bill Veeck from Mr. Bill. This is the Woodstock they never had.”
¹⁸

As the first game got under way, Mike sent most of his security people to the gates to stem the flow of gate-crashers, which left the playing field
unguarded. But thousands more gained entry through gates that had been forced open. By the time the first game ended with a 4–1 Tigers win, probably 60,000 fans were inside the stadium, which had a seating capacity of 41,000.

Suddenly the air was filled with flying LP records. “They would slice around you and stick in the ground,” Rusty Staub of the Tigers later recalled. “It wasn't just one, it was many. Oh, God almighty, I've never seen anything so dangerous in my life. I begged the guys to put on their batting helmets.” Others reported flying whiskey bottles and firecrackers.
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And people continued to arrive. “As soon as I got out of the El stop at Comiskey Park, I was wading nearly ankle deep in broken records,” recalled a man who was there that night. “By the time I got to the ballpark, it was already after the first game. Tickets were already sold out at this point, and so I wandered around outside the stadium with hundreds if not thousands of others who could not get into the park either. It was an incredible scene. There were bonfires of burning records on the streets, and records thrown Frisbee-style into the air were slicing down. Cops on horses were charging all over. I still vividly remember how imposing a man mounted on top of a 600-pound block of galloping muscle was. It was a wild scene.”
²⁰

Leading a chant of “Disco sucks,” Steve Dahl strode onto the field dressed in military fatigues and a World War II–style battle helmet and blew up the records. All hell then broke loose. Anti-disco forces stormed the field and refused to leave. They ran the bases and then stole them all, including home plate. The batting cage was pulled loose and destroyed, along with other field equipment. People from the upper deck slid down the foul pole to get onto the field.

“It was funny but sort of tragic at the same time,” remembered Ernie Harwell, who was announcing the games for his audience in Detroit. “It was quite a scary night because it looked like they were trying to burn the stadium down. There were fires everywhere and nobody was trying to put them out.”

Veeck came out and stood where home plate had been with a microphone in his hand, begging the fans to return to their seats. He was completely ignored, as was Harry Caray, who chanted, “People, people, please get off the field!”

Veeck's beloved fans had become a destructive mob of non-fans. “I felt sorry for Bill Veeck last night,” Art Hill wrote in his running account of the 1979 season,
I Don't Care if I Never Come Back
. “He was obviously dismayed
by the monster he had built, and he spent two hours out on the firing line, first pleading with the revelers to put out their fires and get off the field, and then pleading with the umpires not to forfeit the game.” Veeck was even more frustrated when the umpires surveyed the field and deemed it unplayable, causing the Sox to forfeit the second game.
²¹

After this announcement, players from both teams had to lock themselves in their clubhouses for hours to protect themselves from rampaging fans. The action spread to the parking lots, where players' wives who had come to pick up their husbands were forced to lock themselves in their cars while fans rocked the cars back and forth. The fans were finally removed by police in full riot gear. Thirty-seven fans were arrested.

If the midget was an idea borrowed from a James Thurber short story, Disco Demolition was right out of Nathanael West's
Day of the Locust.
It seemed emblematic of all that was wrong in the country and in baseball at the end of the 1970s, and it demonstrated that the game—and the times—had passed Veeck by. Veeck's outmoded carnival approach was blamed for causing the riot. Many fans had turned into chemically impaired thugs, and a small operator such as Veeck could not afford the elements of modern crowd control.

“Riot at Comiskey” was the headline in the
Sun-Times
, and the
Tribune
declared the event a “disgrace.” Although Veeck was reportedly very unhappy about what had happened, he was at the mercy of those in baseball who saw him as the man who had gone too far and lost control of his own stadium.

The anti-disco movement may have benefited from the night, but there was no benefit to Veeck, the White Sox, or baseball. Forty years later Clarence Page of the
Chicago Tribune
noted: “I think American cultural history will show that Disco Demolition may have killed disco but definitely killed dancing among young white guys.”
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Mike Veeck blamed himself for the disaster even though his father tried to console him by saying, “The promotion worked too well.” But things later got worse, as three rock concerts followed that did further damage to the playing field, exacerbated by some of the heaviest August rains to fall on Chicago in years. Red Sox right fielder Dwight Evans pondered suing Veeck after he suffered a pulled muscle on the chewed-up field in late August; Evans said that, judging by the condition of the field, Veeck had no regard for the safety of players. Three games had to be postponed when umpires ruled the field unplayable. Tons of sand were dumped on the field, and two massive loads of sod were laid down. Veeck took $9,000 out of his own
pocket to pay for the sod. He was criticized for having removed the artificial turf from the stadium, and some urged the White Sox to install Astroturf for the 1980 season. Confronted with the issue of a failing playing field, Veeck became philosophical: “We've endured some tough times, but I'm a firm believer things will always get better.”
²³
Still, at the end of September, Veeck would let it be known that if someone came along with the right offer to buy the club, he might agree to sell the team he had bought four and a half years earlier.

Early in August, in the throes of a seven-game losing streak, manager Don Kessinger resigned. Veeck—with an assist from Roland Hemond—selected Tony La Russa as the new Sox manager. The move was not popular with Sox fans. At thirty-four, La Russa was younger than many of his players, as was his thirty-one-year-old pitching coach, Ron Schueler. Critics laid into Veeck for what were perceived as cost-cutting moves by a begging-poor franchise. Eyes rolled when it was revealed that La Russa had a law degree.

The 1979 White Sox season ended with a 73–87 record, in fifth place in the American League's West Division. But the repercussions of Disco Demolition were still being felt. Mike Veeck stayed with the club for seven months after the event, but for him the fun was gone and he felt blackballed by baseball because of it. As he would confess later in his memoir, he dealt with all this by drinking, which led to the end of his first marriage and caused him to lose custody of his son. He drifted to Florida, where he hung drywall, worked at a jai alai fronton, and, in his words, drank heavily “as I pondered the failure of Disco Demolition Night and my lost baseball career.”
²⁴
In his 2006 paean to the team,
Sox and the City
, Richard Roeper called Disco Demolition “the most memorable stunt gone wrong in sports history.”
²⁵

In early November Larry Doby resigned from the White Sox because he no longer played a role with the major-league club. Neither Kessinger earlier nor La Russa had a spot for Doby, and he felt he was no longer needed or wanted. Veeck, in turn, said he owed Doby a debt of gratitude. Several players were disappointed that Doby would not be with the team in spring training, as they claimed he gave the best batting instruction. Among those expressing regret was Chet Lemon, whose 1979 batting average of .318 was the best Sox average since Minnie Miñoso had hit .320 in 1954.
²⁶

Ending a difficult year on a bad note, Veeck slipped on a wet floor and broke his kneecap in a fall at Tilden High School, where he had gone to speak at an alumni reunion. This required an operation and an estimated six weeks
to recuperate. The
Chicago Tribune
nonetheless found him resolute: “It takes more than an operation to insert two pins in his only knee to make White Sox owner Bill Veeck downcast, or even less feisty than he usually is.”
²⁷

Despite all that seemed wrong, Veeck came out of spring training in 1980 in a self-described mood of euphoria. Protégé Harold Baines was now in a major-league starting position along with an infield of eager but little-known players just brought up from the minors. Veeck had a nucleus of young talent, including pitchers Rich Dotson, La Marr Hoyt, and Britt Burns and young outfielder Ron Kittle, signed to minor-league contracts.