Early on the afternoon of the Northern League exhibition season opener, Midway Stadium is bustling with activity. The Rolling Stones are blasting from the public address speakers, and players are already stretching and running in the outfield grass. Underneath the grandstand, in the cramped bunker that serves as the offices of the St. Paul Saints, the phone is ringing off the hook and the atmosphere is one of jovial chaos. The Saints command center is decidedly short on the streamlined ambience and formal atmosphere of most offices. It looks, in fact, like it could be the reception area of a thriving small-town automotive garage.
Mike Veeck has commandeered someone else’s spartan office, and is looking uncomfortable perched behind a desk. The ringmaster most often associated with the unlikely and phenomenal success of the Saints, he’s clearly a guy who likes to be in motion. Even sitting down, he never quite manages to sit still. Veeck’s a fidget, with the wild eyes of a man who has a lot going on in his head. In fact, he is ridiculously busy these days. He’s promoting his new book—Fun is Good: How to Create Joy and Passion in Your Workplace and Career (Rodale Press)—and has a full slate of speaking engagements. And then there are the six minor league baseball teams he operates and owns (along with such high-profile partners as Bill Murray and Jimmy Buffett).
Right now, Veeck is in the middle of writing a giant pile of thank-you notes, by hand, to every Saints season-ticket holder, and conversing with a visitor, while people keep wandering in and out of the tiny space—some simply to say hello and others to check on some detail related to the upcoming season. One guy comes in to look for a VCR that has apparently vanished. A question blurts from the office’s intercom: “Who recorded the song ‘Bus Stop’?” Veeck pauses mid-sentence to answer (the Hollies), then picks up the conversation right where he left off.
Thirteen years ago, Veeck moved to St. Paul to help launch the Saints in the fledgling Northern League, a confederation of professional teams that intended to operate outside the umbrella of Major League Baseball. At the time he was in a gambling frame of mind (actually, he’s always in a gambling frame of mind). He had recently given up an advertising career to help resurrect a floundering minor league franchise in Florida. That stint with the Miami Miracle followed more than a decade in exile from professional baseball, after he was essentially blackballed following his role—okay, it was his idea—in the now-legendary Disco Demolition promotion at Comiskey Park in 1979. That stunt, which involved blowing up thousands of disco records between games of a White Sox doubleheader, resulted in damage to the field, a near riot, and Chicago’s forfeiture of the nightcap. Collateral damage notwithstanding, the episode was a classic Veeck production. The games were sold out, and it was estimated that tens of thousands of fans were turned away.
Veeck, of course, has a first-class baseball pedigree. His grandfather was a Chicago sportswriter who became president of the Cubs back in 1917. He was the man who had the idea to grow ivy on the walls of Wrigley Field. Bill Veeck, Mike’s dad, was one of the most colorful and innovative entrepreneurs in baseball history, and is in the Hall of Fame. At various times in his life, he owned and operated major league franchises in Cleveland, St. Louis, and Chicago, where he pioneered all manner of ballpark promotions and amenities. Most famous for once sending three-foot-seven, sixty-five-pound Eddie Gaedel to the plate for an at-bat with the Browns (he walked on four pitches), Bill Veeck also introduced the exploding scoreboard at Comiskey Park and was the first owner to put player names on the backs of jerseys. He loved mingling (and drinking) with the fans, never had an unlisted number, answered his own phone, and had a wooden leg with a built-in ashtray. Mike Veeck is an apple that didn’t fall far from the tree (he wrote Fun is Good while recuperating from a broken leg sustained, he said, while “playing basketball on my bike”), but he was a late bloomer. When he accepted investor Marv Goldklang’s offer to run the Saints, he was moving into his forties and had a wife and two kids (including a son named Night Train). He was strapped, and maybe more than a little desperate.
“I bet every nickel I had on this thing, and I was scared to death,” Veeck said. “Everybody thought we were nuts.”
Veeck’s original marketing plan for the Saints consisted of exactly three words: “Fun is good.” Everything else followed. “We wanted to run a ball club with people who didn’t have preconceived notions about how things work,” he said. “We wanted to foster an environment where people loved to come to work, and where they were appreciated for what they did. And we were going to put all of our energy and attention into creating an atmosphere that ensured that when fans came out to the ballpark, they had a good time and went home happy. Is that simplistic? You bet. But I don’t think you’ll find that attitude in a lot of companies.”
That simple philosophy—and a constant string of unpredictable and sometimes insane promotions—have turned Veeck’s and the Goldklang Group’s initial investment into a collection of minor league teams with an estimated combined value of thirty million dollars.
Veeck’s book argues that humor can be an asset in any company. “You can’t force or fake this stuff,” he said. “And I know that corporate America has never been tremendously receptive to this sort of philosophy. They do, though, always have an interest in anything that works. It’s a competitive world, and now more than ever there’s a direct correlation between the attention people receive and their satisfaction with an experience. That’s as true of employees as it is of customers. A lot of people, from the top on down, are starting to realize there are going to have to be some changes.” —Brad Zellar
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