Hard to believe that this was 30 years ago, but here’s some excellent local news footage of a notorious moment in baseball history: the White Sox ill-fated “Disco Demolition” promotion. In the end, Comiskey Park descended into a riot after a Chicago DJ exploded a crate full of disco records in the middle of the field between games of a double-header. The NYT has a nice chronicle of the unfolding disaster:
[Mike] Veeck, [son of the White Sox owner], ordered yellow-jacketed guards to go outside to stop fans from crashing the gates.
That allowed the spectators inside the ballpark to storm the field without much resistance. Jack Morris, a Tigers pitcher, recalled “whiskey bottles were flying over our dugout” after Detroit won the first game, 4 – 1.
Then Dahl blew up the records.
“And then all hell broke loose,” Morris said. “They charged the field and started tearing up the pitching rubber and the dirt. They took the bases. They started digging out home plate.“
Watch for Greg Gumbel in the footage above; he was a sportscaster for a Chicago-area station.
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