How I Did It: Mike Veeck
Midgets? Nuns who give massages? Disco Demolition Night? Free vasectomies on Father's Day? If there's one thing Mike Veeck learned from his father and from building a profitable empire of minor league baseball teams, it's this: Fun is good.
Published April 2005
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEAs told to Alan Schwarz
Laugh if you want at Labor Day, when pregnant women get in free. Chuckle at the mascots running bases, the silly gags, the goofy promotions. That's exactly what Mike Veeck wants.
One of minor league baseball's most successful owner-operators, Veeck and his Goldklang Group partners have built an empire of six teams on the universal currency of laughter. With franchises from South Carolina to Minnesota, Florida to New York, Veeck has spent the past 15 years reinvigorating the once-languid landscape of minor league baseball into a vibrant, profitable enterprise. He is baseball's Barnum -- after all, who else would have a nun giving massages in the stands?
This nut didn't fall far from the tree. Veeck's father, Bill, spent about 40 years tweaking Major League Baseball's stuffed shirts with his legendary promotions -- including sending a midget up to bat -- and bequeathed to Mike an appreciation for the absurd. But succeeding in his father's shadow was never a given; in fact, being named Veeck kept Mike virtually banned from baseball for more than 10 years, when his career and life both entered a tailspin.
But given a new chance in the minor leagues, Veeck has thrived beyond his dreams, turning clubs that were purchased for less than $2 million combined into assets worth close to $30 million. This spring, he will publish a book about his business mantra, Fun Is Good (Rodale Press).
When I tell people that fun is good, whether they're my employees, reporters, or a crowd of 500 executives paying way too much to hear me speak, their most frequent reaction is to think I'm an utter crackpot. Hey, they might be right -- but my philosophy certainly isn't why.
Fun is a basic human need. Fun is oxygen. Fun is the primary way that I have helped build six minor league teams into a roughly $25 million annual business.
When you work in baseball and your last name is Veeck, people wonder, What's that wacko gonna do next? Yeah, I'm the guy whose team has groundskeepers drag the infield...in drag. I'm the one who has the nun giving massages in the stands, the pig delivering baseballs to the umpire, and inflatable bats with Viagra on them. I tried to give away a free vasectomy on Father's Day, but the local church got, shall we say, snippy.
I learned that fun is good from my dad. Running major league teams from the 1940s into the 1980s, Dad always put the fans' enjoyment first. If they'd get a kick out of seeing a midget step up to the plate, he'd send him up there. If they'd ooh and aah at exploding scoreboards, he'd gladly light the match. Dad was a guy's guy with zero pretense -- he built an ashtray into his wooden leg, for crying out loud. But he also understood people, and that when they had fun, they would spend money.
I never wanted to follow Dad into baseball. He was a legend, and I wanted to follow my own path. I was ambitious enough to graduate 29th in my high school class -- out of 29 -- and spent several years in the mid-'70s playing in a rock band. Then Dad asked me to give him a hand running his Chicago White Sox in 1976. I said okay and began to truly enjoy myself. Then all hell broke loose.
I'm the one who came up with the idea for Disco Demolition Night, when fans were encouraged to bring disco records to Comiskey Park, and we'd blow 'em up between games of a double-header. Did it work? So well that more than 100,000 people tried to get in, traffic was snarled for miles, and when we did blow up the records, our customers -- bless them all -- rioted in celebration, forcing us to forfeit the second game. The embarrassment to baseball was so great that soon enough, after Dad sold the club, I was essentially blackballed from Major League Baseball. No one would hire me.
