Visiting Mike Veeck, one of the first things you notice is the bubble machine on the deck outside his office. Ask him why it’s there, and his eyes widen and he looks at you like you’re crazy.
“Why not?”
And he laughs.
Mike Veeck laughs a lot.
He’s sitting in his office at Riley Park, home of the Charleston RiverDogs, a minor-league baseball team affiliated with the American League’s Tampa Bay Devil Rays. It’s hardly the setting one would expect for a team president — the beige room is small, one wall is cinderblock and the decor includes a hat made of artificial turf, a Groucho Marx ventriloquist’s dummy and a Green Machine Dancing Frog Band.
“If I ran U.S. Steel and you came in and saw all these toys, you’d say, ‘Whoa,'” he says.
But Veeck doesn’t run U.S. Steel. He helps run baseball teams — six of them, as a member of the Goldklang ownership group (he also serves as a marketing consultant to the Detroit Tigers and minor-league teams in Portland, Ore., and Brockton, Mass.).
And his goal isn’t to make money for stockholders, but to make fun for fans and for himself.
“There’s nothing intellectual about what I do. I know what a privilege it is to make my living doing something I love. The dumber I act, the more immature I act, the better job people think I’m doing.”
Veeck comes by the attitude naturally. His father, of course, was former White Sox owner Bill Veeck, the Barnum of Baseball who brought an exploding scoreboard, a pinch-hitting midget and some memorable stunts to the game, such as giving away 25-pound blocks of ice to fans on hot summer days and having cow-milking contests at old Comiskey Park.
“My dad’s in the Hall of Fame; I’m a journeyman,” Veeck says. “I’m very comfortable with that. It was easy being Bill Veeck’s kid.”
His mother, Mary Frances, says she sees a lot of Bill in all her children. But as for Mike being a chip off the old block, “I say I don’t know that. I think he’s a man of his time.”
When he was young, Mike Veeck wasn’t headed for a life in baseball. After college, he embarked on a musical career. He played guitar and drums — it was Mary Frances’ idea to give him a drum set (“What kind of mother does that?” she says now with a laugh) for Christmas when he was 10 or 11 — and was in several bands playing up and down the East Coast. But in 1975, Bill Veeck put together a deal to repurchase the Sox, the team he had sold 15 years earlier.
“When we were pretty close to getting the Sox,” Mary Frances remembers, “Bill said to me one night, `I need Mike on this.’ And I said, `So ask him.’ And he said, `I can’t ask him because he’s enjoying what he’s doing, playing in his band. And if I ask him, he might do it just to do his old pappy a favor.’
“He didn’t say he needed someone like Mike; he said he needed Mike. He didn’t say he needed someone young. We understood that.
“Finally he took Mike to lunch — there were always those famous long lunches — and they talked about it. And he asked Mike, `You want to be on board?’ And Mike said he’d be delighted.”
Memories of Bill
Ask Veeck about his childhood baseball memories and he’ll tell you about how he got a Johnny Callison glove — on the same day his father traded Callison. Or about going up the stairs at old Comiskey and seeing that green, green field. Or about just walking around the ballpark with his father. “Everyone would be yelling, `Hey, Bill!’ It was like he knew everybody in the world. That was something for an 8-year-old kid.”
Now it’s Mike Veeck whom fans call out to as he walks around Riley Park, and who has built a career in marketing and promotion that his dad would be proud of.
His challenge this season is to reinvigorate interest in the Detroit Tigers, who have been in the doldrums for a decade and who hired him as a consultant in February.
“There was never a plan other than to approach it with fun,” he says. “What the world doesn’t need is another commercial with a guy yelling about baseball and someone sliding into third base. My idea was to make it fun. I had what I called the Curmudgeon Series [of commercials]; these two guys sitting in the stands talking about the ballpark. And about having a great time. But no one liked my idea. Then when they started 0-11, my idea looked pretty good. Sometimes happenstance turns you into a wizard.”
Maybe sometimes, but many of the ideas of the 51-year-old Veeck are pure genius. He has offered free admission to pregnant women on Labor Day; he has held Lawyers Night (all attorneys had to pay double for their tickets); he had a tuxedo-wearing pig deliver baseballs to the home-plate umpire; he offered Mime-O-Vision, where five mimes re-created close plays; he had Tonya Harding honored at mini-bat day; and, of course, there was the self-explanatory Mullet Night.
Others are more straightforward: Sleepover nights, where Scouts come to games then sleep out on the field afterward; Books for Bats Night, when kids get two free tickets after completing a certain number of hours of summer reading; or Charleston County School Day, where last year 7,900 students attended a morning game.
Gimmicks are great, of course, but it takes more than Circus Freak Night to win fans over. Veeck tries to develop relationships not only with the guy holding the $2 beer and $1.50 hot dog — the same prices as when the park opened in 1997 — but within the community as well.
Local groups are always welcome in Veeck’s office (on a recent afternoon, he had meetings with the head of an organization seeking funds for a Charleston Naval Memorial; with someone who asked him to address high school students at a banquet; and with representatives from a local eye clinic). He gives some 200 speeches a year, in the Charleston area and around the country. When charities contact the team about contributing something for a fund-raising auction, they’re taken care of, whether it’s a ball signed by comic Bill Murray (Veeck’s longtime friend and one of his partners) or some piece of RiverDogs memorabilia. And every RiverDogs program has a page in Braille, an idea he started almost 10 years ago.
Can’t win ’em all
Of course, not every Veeck idea is as noble or has been met with enthusiastic support.
Last year in Charleston, for example, he scheduled Voodoo Night, planning to hand out voodoo dolls and have tarot card readers and fortune tellers on hand. Except that he and his staff failed to realize they had scheduled it for Good Friday.
“We had so many calls about how the devil was at our stadium and how they were praying for us,” says Stacy Wagner, the RiverDogs’ director of promotions and merchandising.
Veeck and Co. backed off and postponed the promotion until later in the season.
And who can forget Vasectomy Day? That one, scheduled for Father’s Day in 1997, was to feature a drawing, with the winner getting a free vasectomy.
“The phones lit up like a Christmas tree,” says Derek Sharrer, the RiverDogs’ general manager. “The bishop called Mike and threatened to cancel his season tickets. Mike ended up dropping it, which probably got more publicity than if we had it.”
Mirrors? Where?
The next potential for switchboard overload will be unveiled this month. Fun-house mirrrors, the type that make objects look larger, are being installed in the men’s rooms urinals at Riley Park. They’re sponsored by a penis enlargement clinic.
“This is, by far, the craziest thing we’ve done,” Wagner says.
But it’s so Mike Veeck.
“People think that Mike is this goofy, wild guy, but there’s thought in everything he does,” says Sharrer, who also points out that all of the Goldklang Group’s teams are financially successful.
Before a club goes through with a promotion, Sharrer says, it looks at three areas: Will it sell tickets? Will it sell sponsorship? And, maybe most important, will it get attention?
Veeck’s most famous stunt did even more.
“Disco Demolition filled out all three parts of the equation, and it added a fourth — it got him fired,” Sharrer says.
Before the promotional and financial successes he has had in recent years, Veeck was known for his biggest bomb: Disco Demolition Night on July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park.
The plan was for fans to bring disco records to the ballpark, where the platters would be blown up between games of a double-header with Detroit. The promotion, sponsored by a Chicago radio station, drew some 50,000 disco-hating fans, a large number of whom stormed the field amid the smoke and forced the Sox to forfeit the second game of the double-header. It was only the fourth forfeit in major-league history, and it made headlines around the country. Tickets, sponsorship and publicity. And one drawback.
“Mike says he got unanimously fired by the board,” Sharrer says, “and his father was the chairman.”
“That pretty much crushed my career,” Veeck says.
The stunt would keep him out of baseball for 10 years. More than two decades later, though, he has put it in perspective. Or maybe it has been put in perspective for him.
“Everyone called it a tragedy. A tragedy? No. A tragedy is kids who don’t have enough food in their stomachs.”
Or a 10-year-old girl who’s going blind.
It was about 2 1/2 years ago. Libby Veeck, Mike’s wife, calls it “the worst day of my life.” She had taken their daughter, Rebecca, for a wellness screening, the last part of which was a vision test. Rebecca told the doctor that she couldn’t see the large E at the top of the chart.
“I’m like, `Cut it out, quit goofing around,'” Libby says. “And she’s crying.”
More tests followed, and Rebecca was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa, the degeneration of photoreceptor cells in the retina that leads to blindness. There is no cure.
Today Rebecca’s central vision is just about gone. If she wants to see a person she’s face-to-face with, she turns her head away so she can see them with her peripheral vision. Her condition may stay the same indefinitely, it may deteriorate slowly or she could wake up blind one morning.
“The prognosis is there is no prognosis,” Mike says.
“She lies sometimes,” Libby says, watching her daughter swing in a hammock behind the family’s home. “She says, `I can see fine.’ She still thinks she’ll be able to drive. And she’s worried, `No guy’s going to want to date me.’ I told her, `This is just going to weed out the jerks.'”
Turning his life around
Mike and Libby met on New Year’s Eve, 1989. She was a pharmacist and lived in Englewood on the west side of Florida. He was starting a new life across the state in Pompano Beach.
“From ’79 to ’89,” Mike says of his post-Disco Demolition days, “I couldn’t get a job in baseball. Not Class D ball, nothing. Oh, I had radio offers and soccer offers, things where they like riots. But nothing in baseball.
Veeck says the turning point came shortly after the Goldklang Group purchased the Miami Miracle, a badly struggling minor-league franchise. One member of the group, Van Schley, ran into White Sox executive Roland Hemond on an airplane and told him about buying the Miracle.
“Roland told him, `If you’re dumb enough to buy the Miami Miracle, you’re dumb enough to hire Mike Veeck. He’s sitting down there in Ft. Lauderdale. Call him.'” Veeck says.
“I had had an ad agency then. And one day Marvin Goldklang [chairman of the group] called and offered me a job. He said, `There should be a Veeck in baseball.’ How many times had I heard that? I hung up on him. But he kept after me. I said, `There’s not a chance you’ll hire me once you talk to your friends in baseball. You’ll hear about Disco Demolition, you’ll hear I drink too much, and then you’ll call me back, `Oops, I’m sorry; I made a mistake. It was your cousin I wanted.'”
Persistence pays off
But Goldklang persisted, and Veeck finally agreed to run the struggling Miracle.
“Miami was drawing, like, 35 or 40 people a game,” Veeck says, in a slight exaggeration. “I was recently divorced [he has a 16-year-old son from that marriage], I was flat broke. But I was back in baseball.”
He moved into a duplex, where he hit if off with an upstairs neighbor.
“We’d sit there, smoking and talking and listening to Satchmo records,” he says.
It was Libby’s mother. When Libby came to town for the holidays and heard about the crazy guy who lived downstairs, she stopped in.
“This enchanting woman came down, and I was … wow,” Mike says. “We sat and talked and talked. And at 4 o’clock in the morning, she left. The next morning she was gone [back to Englewood]. I thought, what an interesting woman.”
The feeling was mutual.
“My initial impression of Mike,” Libby says, “was that if he were to die the next day, he’d already have done more with his life than almost anyone else.”
Coping with RP
Libby moved to Pompano Beach three months later and the rest, as they say, is history. Crazy history.
Mike’s job meant moves to St. Paul; Charleston; Sioux Falls, S.D.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; and back to Charleston, all within a half-dozen years. He was on the road much of the year with speaking engagements. And then came Rebecca’s diagnosis — and a difficult choice: Should they keep the story private or should they publicize it?
The Veecks decided to go public, telling the world about Rebecca and about RP and trying to do something.
They’ve become spokesmen for the Foundation Fighting Blindness. They raise money for the foundation through auctions; Mike and Rebecca appeared on ABC’s “The View” to discuss her situation; he promotes the cause by speaking at banquets; and he testified before Congress in an effort to emphasize the importance of continued funding.
“The Veecks were stunned by what happened to Rebecca, but they realized they have the power to create awareness and help bring additional funding,” says Allie Laban-Baker, director of public awareness for the foundation. “We’re fortunate to have them on our team.”
It’s the Veecks’ approach to life that has proven to be one of their best weapons against RP.
“We took Rebecca to [be examined at] Emory University Eye Hospital in Atlanta,” Mike says, “and we’re, `What do we do?’ So here’s this doctor with 27 degrees and she tells us, `You’re baseball people. You make a continuous joke out of life. That’s what you can do. Just make her laugh.’ And that’s what we do.”
“The Veecks are remarkable,” says Dr. Stephen Morse, Rebecca’s low-vision expert. “For folks who have to deal with this every day, they have a really good attitude. . . . They’re admirable models for other people who have to cope with this. And the attitude they passed on to Rebecca is the best thing.”
Rebecca is a bubbly, typical 10-year-old. Arriving home from school — she’s an `A’ student — she tells Mike about her day, runs through the shower and puts on fresh clothes before greeting some out-of-town visitors, plays with a family cat, Dylan, who seems about to be eaten by Maggie, the family dog, then heads out to a small pond behind the house, where she shows the company one of Mike’s crab traps.
Using valuable time
This summer, the Veecks will travel to the Pacific Northwest. It’s part of their plan for Rebecca to see all 50 states while there’s still time. They’ve hit 32 so far.
“States are the only thing I collect,” Mike says. “I’ve got all 50.”
Wearing a pair of black cutoffs and a black sleeveless sweatshirt, he’s pacing around his living room, on the phone to Brockton, Mass., where they’re working on a commercial for the Brockton Rox (the team’s mascot, of course, is a rock). He scribbles some changes on a page from the script, then asks Libby to fax it.
“Just the side you wrote, honey?” she asks as she heads upstairs to his office.
“Yes, just the brilliance,” he says, smiling at his visitors.
And then there’s laughter from upstairs.
Funk at the old ballpark
Mike Veeck has devised some of baseball’s more memorable promotions. Here are a few, all of them, with the exception of Disco Demolition, pulled off on behalf of his St. Paul and Charleston minor league teams:
– Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in 1979 turned into a near-riot that cost the White Sox a forfeit and Veeck his job.
– On National Laundry Day, a picnic area at the Charleston ballpark was converted into a laundry room. Fans could drop off their clothes, have them washed during the game, then pick them up.
– For Dog Day Afternoon, fans brought their dogs to the ballpark, an idea that has since been copied by the Sox, among others.
– To celebrate night baseball, Veeck arranged a ballpark seance in which a medium tried to reach Thomas Edison (but could only contact a spirit named “John.”).
– On Lawyer Night, attorneys had to pay double for their tickets.
– Veeck once had a Catholic nun give massages in the stands.
– In St. Paul, he had pizza delivered to unsuspecting fans each night.
One idea that got scuttled: Vasectomy Day. On Father’s Day in 1997, the plan was to give one lucky fan a free medical procedure.
If nobody shows up …
Here’s a sure bet: Mike Veeck’s Charleston RiverDogs will set a record on July 8. That’s when he has scheduled Nobody Night, which is guaranteed not to fill Riley Park.
“The lowest attendance [in baseball history] was when one person came to a game,” Veeck chortles. “It was in Portland in the 1930s. So we’re having Nobody Night. We’re closing the gates and there’ll be no one in the ballpark for 4 1/2 innings [making it an official game]. Then we’ll open the gates.”
Conventional wisdom says you shouldn’t lock fans out, nor can a team afford to lose 4 1/2 innings worth of concessions revenue. But this is Mike Veeck.
Nobody Night is just part of what he has planned this season in Charleston:
– June 4 is Psychic Night. Fans will fill out sheets predicting the score, how many bases will be stolen, how certain batters will do and so on, with prizes for those who get things right.
– June 6: Game Show Night, a homage to the TV game shows of the 1950s and ’60s; there will be trivia questions and a game show host as emcee.
– June 21: Boy Scout all-nighter, with laser tag and tents in the outfield after the game.
– July 19: Girls Night Out. There will be massages, roses for every woman who attends and giveaways ranging from a car to an apartment. After the game, moms and daughters can spend the night in the ballpark’s suites, getting their hair and makeup done.
– July 24: Big Splash Day. The ballpark will be turned into a water park. Firefighters will set up a giant spray in the picnic area, with kiddie pools placed around the park and sprayers attached to railings to hose down the crowd continuously.
