Disco Demolition Night
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Disco Demolition Night was a promotional event occurring on July 12, 1979 at Comiskey Park in Chicago during a scheduled twilight-night American League 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".
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[edit] The Events Leading Up To The Night
Radio station WDAI went to an all-disco format and fired their DJ, Steve Dahl. In retaliation, Dahl, quickly hired by WLUP, created a mock organization called "The Insane Coholips" to oppose disco, and promoted it on the air.
Dahl and his on-air partner, Garry Meier, devised a promotion that involved people bringing unwanted disco music records to the game in exchange for an admission fee of 98 cents, representing the station's location on the dial. It would prove to be the most ill-conceived promotional idea since the infamous "Ten Cent Beer Night" in Cleveland in 1974.
[edit] The Event and Results
This promotion apparently encouraged attendees who were not "typical" baseball fans. White Sox management was expecting an additional crowd of 5,000, but instead, 50,000 turned out. Thousands of people were climbing walls and fences in order to get into Comiskey Park and others were locked out of the park.
Sox TV announcers Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall commented freely on the "strange people" wandering aimlessly in 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 spectators, realizing that long-playing (LP) records were shaped remarkably like frisbees, threw their records from the stands during the game.
After the first game, Dahl came out to center field with the records in a box rigged with a bomb in a mock demolition of disco music. When it exploded, the bomb ripped a hole in the outfield grass surface and thousands of fans ran onto the field, some lighting their own fires and starting mini-riots.
Veeck and Caray used the public address system to implore the fans to leave the field immediately, but this failed, and eventually the field was cleared by police in riot gear. Six people reported minor injuries and thirty-nine were arrested for disorderly conduct [1]. Sparky Anderson, the manager of the Detroit Tigers, refused to field his team citing safety concerns, which resulted in the forfeiture by the White Sox to the Tigers. The remaining four home games were postponed due to unplayable grounds, and for the rest of the season fielders and managers complained about the condition of the field.
To this date, this forfeited game was the last such in the American League.
Disco Demolition Night was ranked No. 8 overall in the book "Glow Pucks & 10-Cent Beer: The 101 Worst Ideas in Sports History" by author Greg Wyshynski (Taylor Trade 2006).
[edit] 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. As a result, Mike was blacklisted from 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 which he partly owns, "The second that first guy shimmied down the outfield wall, I knew my life was over!"
In The National Pastime (Number 25), a yearly 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 game at some length. He also addresses the game August 10, 1995 at Dodger Stadium, where the home team conducted a classic 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 the 50,000+ paying customers as they entered the gates. After a few rounds of alcohol and some close umpiring calls, many fans began pelting the field with their souvenir baseballs, and eventually the game was forfeited to the visiting St. Louis Cardinals, making this the most recent forfeiture in the National League.
Forr also reports that with Dodgers' game now the most recent forfeiture, rather than Disco Demolition Night, Mike Veeck said happily, "I finally got it off my back, I'm a free man!"
[edit] Apology
On July 12th, 2001, in a brief ceremony before the Florida Marlins home game against the New York Yankees, Mike Veeck, by then a marketing consultant for the team, apologized to Harry Wayne Casey, lead singer for KC and the Sunshine Band, a leading disco act [2].
