Good evening. This is Dead Legends. The baseball newsletter that covers the cool, crazy, obscure, and sometimes scandalous side of the game’s history.

Let’s dive in.

Today’s story is about one of the wildest nights in baseball history.

POV: It's the summer of ’79, and DJ Steve Dahl is feeling some type of way about disco music taking over the airwaves.

This dude absolutely LOVED rock music, and he hated disco with the same amount of passion.

At the same time, the White Sox were having a dogshit season and needed to give people a reason (other that the product on the field) to come out to the ballpark.

So the Sox’s owner, Bill Veeck, who was always open to wild promotions, decided to team up with Dahl to do the “Disco Demolition Night” promotion.

The massive event was set to be hosted at Comiskey Park, where they planned to blow up a bunch of disco records during the intermission of a double header.

Admission was only 98 cents if you showed up with a vinyl record, and people flooded Comiskey in droves.

The White Sox had originally hoped for a crowd of about 20,000, but instead 50,000 people showed up.

Max capacity was 44,492.

The first game went off without a hitch; the Tigers beat the Sox 4-1.

But then, things got a little out of hand.

As the crowd waited for the records to be blown up, some people started tearing apart seats and setting small fires.

Shortly after the records exploded, fans started spilling onto the field. 

Pretty quickly, the White Sox realized this whole thing was going to hell in a handbasket, and they needed to call the police.

Thousands of fans defaced the field, set it on fire, and a few people climbed the foul pole.

It was a complete shit show.

There was hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, and sveral people got hurt.

But, even though it was a nightmare, it's still remembered as one of the most iconic nights in music and baseball history.

BASEBALL TRIVIA

STRANGE NAMES 

If you're just joining us, we play this game every day where we try to find the weirdest names throughout baseball history.

Why? Don't ask us, it's just something we like to do.

If you've been rocking with us for awhile now, you know what time it is.

Today's winner is:

Bumpus only made 8 appearance in major league appearances.

In his first outing, he threw a no hitter.

After that he was pretty much terrible; in less than a year, he was out of the big leagues altogether

He remains the only player in MLB

history to pitch a no-hitter in his first game.

THE DEAD LEGENDS ARCHIVE

If you like this story, check out some of our past favorites:

• The Cockroach: Dirty Kurt clutches up

• The Bullet: Hazing saves a rookie from a gunshot wound

• The Signs: How a deaf player from the late 1800s changed the game forever