Disco Demolition Night

Disco Demolition Night was a promotional event which occurred on July 12, 1979 at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois during a scheduled twilight-night Major League Baseball doubleheader between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers which eventually turned into mayhem. It was also known as "Anti-Disco Night", or by its indelicate "underground" title, "'Disco Sucks Night".

Steve Dahl and Garry Meier, two radio disc jockeys for the Chicago radio station WLUP, came up with a promotion that involved people bringing unwanted disco music records to the game in exchange for a 98 cents admission fee. It would prove to be the most ill-conceived promotional idea since the infamous "Ten Cent Beer Night" in Cleveland in 1974 [1] (http://www.baseballlibrary.com/baseballlibrary/features/flashbacks/06_04_1974.stm).

This promotion apparently encouraged a lot of people to come to the park who were not "typical" baseball fans. Sox TV announcers Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall commented freely on the "strange people" that seemed to be wandering aimlessly around the stands. In Slouching Toward Fargo, Mike Veeck – son of then-White Sox owner Bill Veeck – recalled that the pregame air was heavy with the scent of marijuana. Many of the spectators threw their records from the stands during the baseball game.

After the first game, Dahl came out to center field along with the records in a box rigged with a bomb, in a mock demolition of disco music. When it was exploded, thousands of fans ran onto the field. Some started their own fires and mini-riots. The bomb also ripped a hole in the outfield grass surface. Bill Veeck took to the public address sytem and pleaded with the fans to leave the field immediately. Sparky Anderson, manager of the Detroit Tigers, refused to field his team citing "safety" concerns despite the fact that the field had been cleared by Chicago police. This was the sole reason for the cancellation of the second game, which also resulted in the forfeiture by the White Sox to the Tigers.

Blame

Although Bill Veeck took much of the public heat for this fiasco, it was known among baseball people that his son Mike was the actual front-office "brains", as it were, behind this promotion. This resulted in Mike being blackballed from any connection with the major leagues for a long time after his father retired. As Mike related in the book Slouching Toward Fargo, about the independent St. Paul Saints of which he is part owner, "The second that first guy shimmied down the outfield wall, I knew my life was over!"

In The National Pastime (Number 25), an annual publication of the Society for American Baseball Research, there is an article by James Forr, about various ball games forfeited since 1920. He discusses the 1979 game at some length, of course. Then he moves on to August 10, 1995, to Dodger Stadium, where the home team conducted an ill-conceived promotion that violated the first rule of promotions ("Don't give away something the fans can throw, especially a baseball"). The Dodgers handed baseballs to over 50,000 paying customers as they entered the gates. After sufficient liquid stimulation and some close umpiring calls, many of the fans began pelting the field with their souvenir baseballs, and eventually the game was forfeited to the visiting St. Louis Cardinals. Forr reports that with that game now the most recent forfeiture in the public memory, rather than Disco Demolition Night, Mike Veeck said happily, "I finally got it off my back, I'm a free man!"

External link

• Disco Demolition Night News Headlines (http://www.outernetweb.com/focal/disco/headlines/index.html) Steve Dahl created the anti-disco gang the insane coholips after being fired from WDAI after it went to an all-Disco format. White Sox management was expecting an additional crowd of 5,000 but 50,000 insane coholips turned out with thousands of others outside the park. Others climbed walls and fences in order to get into Comiskey Park.