"Fun Is Good"

                                     

This is the second book I have read in the last year on the subject of fun.  Mike Veeck, pictured above, is the owner of the minor league baseball team, The Charleston River Dogs, located in Charleston, South Carolina. One of the other owners is actor Bill Murray who lives in the area.  Mike Veeck owns five other minor league baseball teams and his late dad, Bill Veeck was the hall-of fame former owner of The Chicago White Sox.

I have not met Mike Veeck yet, but I drove his son "Night Train" to the airport a few years ago and he is listed in my book as my fourth favorite rider.  I sent "Night Train" (named after Hall-of-fame football player, "Night Train Lane"), my book and I've been in touch with him.  When I spoke at Hall's Chophouse in Charleston, I spoke to the same organization that Mike Veeck has spoken to and I talked about his son and this book.

Mike Veeck and his dad are responsible for starting all the promotions that are common today in sports. He's an incredible marketer who was best known for "Disco Demolition Night" in 1979 in Chicago.  For ninety-eight cents and a disco record you could get into the stadium and they were going to blow up all the disco records in center field before the second game of a doubleheader was played.  It was a disaster: a fire, the crowd rioted, and the second game had to be forfeited

He lost his job in the major leagues and it took him twenty years to get back there and he did it with his philosophy of "Fun is good." This is his business plan for all his businesses. His first minor league team, The St. Paul Saints, won three of his first five years and they had a waiting list of 2,000 people to get tickets.  He created kid zone playgrounds and had a trained pig deliver baseballs to home plate to start the game.

These are a couple of his promotions:

Enron Night with paper shredders at the entrances to the stadium and they kept changing the attendance figures for days after the game.

Mime-O-Vision: He had five mimes lined up near the dugout and they would reconstruct many of the plays in the game.

Salute To Duct Tape was a joke until a duct tape company called and offered money to sponsor it.

Two events that he canceled before it was scheduled was Voodoo Night and Vasectomy Night.

On Netflix is an incredible documentary, "The Saint of Second Chances." It's the story of Mike Veeck's life and it's a lot of fun to watch. And this book-it's a lot of fun to read also.  

Jim McgIngvale, owner of Gallery Furniture, had a great quote in the book explaining the success of Mike Veeck: "Turn your product into something bigger than what it is, which is what Mike Veeck does with minor league baseball.  He turns it into an incredible experience."