Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Saint Of Second Chances’ On Netflix, A Documentary About Mike Veeck, Who Made Baseball Fan-Friendly, Just Like His Hall Of Fame Dad

Directed by Jeff Malmberg and Morgan Neville, and narrated by Jeff Daniels, The Saint Of Second Chances tells the story of Mike Veeck, the son of Hall Of Fame baseball owner Bill Veeck, and how he parlayed his second chance in baseball into a minor league empire that influenced how games at that level are presented.

THE SAINT OF SECOND CHANCES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The film starts Mike Veeck’s story in 1975, when his father told him that he was looking to reacquire the Chicago White Sox, for which he was the principal owner from 1959-61, and wanted to bring him on board. Mike, who didn’t have a super-close relationship with his dad, took the opportunity to work with him, and worked hard to not be just known as the owner’s kid. That included helping his dad with promotions and stunts, something Bill Veeck (“Veeck as in wreck,” he’d say about the pronunciation of his name) was famous for in his previous spots in St. Louis and Cleveland.

The Chisox were “underfunded”, as Mike said, so any promotion that would bring people to Comiskey Park was considered. One of Mike’s biggest ideas was 1979’s Disco Demolition Night, where local shock jock Steve Dahl would blow up disco records collected from the crowd, who brought them in for deeply discounted tickets for a doubleheader. You know what happened next: The records were blown up, about a quarter of the sellout crowd stormed the out of the stands, and the Sox had to forfeit the second game of the doubleheader due to the crowd wrecking the field.

Bill Veeck sold the team in 1981, and Mike was out of baseball for about a decade, when he started a family — he named his son Night Train — got a divorce, tried all sorts of careers, and developed a drinking and drug problem. But when an investor called in the early ’90s, looking to start an independent minor league, Mike was back, this time as the principal owner of the St. Paul Saints.

He pulled out all of the tricks his father taught him to make the environment in St. Paul fun for fans and players alike. A pig brought out the baseballs to the umpires. There were outlandish promotions, including one where the crowd was purposely locked out. Bill Murray was brought in as an owner and he often appeared at games. Ila Borders pitched for the team, becoming the first woman to pitch in a men’s professional baseball game. The team did will from its 1992 debut, setting a standard that has permeated through affiliated and independent minor league baseball.

The film also discusses Mike Veeck’s daughter Rebecca, who slowly went blind due to Retinitis Pigmentosa, but was always a presence at the ballpark and had her father’s knack for promotion. The two of them took a months-long trip across the US and abroad when she was in the final stages of losing her vision. She passed away in 2019 at 27, after battling Batten’s Disease.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Saint Of Second Chances has a similar vibe to the 2014 film The Battered Bastards Of Baseball, about another scrappy minor league team.

Performance Worth Watching: The film makes extensive use of reenactments, with Charlie Day playing Mike Veeck and Mike Veeck playing his father Bill. We generally don’t love reenactments, but in a film that’s fostering the same fun vibe that Veeck fostered during his teams’ games, the reenactments made sense. And both Day and Veeck were fun to watch, especially in their scenes together.

Memorable Dialogue: Mike Veeck’s second wife Libby is the unheralded star of the movie because she always was able to give Mike unvarnished opinions about things. When his fellow owners wanted to bring in Daryl Strawberry after his umpteenth drug-related arrest, Mike was the only one hesitating. As Libby recalls saying to him, “You would not be here at all had you not gotten a second chance. Why on earth wouldn’t you do that for Darryl?

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Neville and Malmberg knew that their subject had a larger-than-life personality, and his father’s personality was equally bombastic. They do a good job of keeping the tone of The Saint Of Second Chances most light to match the Veecks’ personalities. Even when Mike Veeck discussed his daughter Rebecca’s short life, it was done with a tone that was more about love and admiration than about tragedy and loss.

Even the years when Veeck was lost in the woods after Disco Demolition Night were treated with a bit of irreverence, with Day playing a constantly drunk and high Veeck and the time period set off with the graphic “A Few Shitty Years Later…”

Speaking of Disco Demolition Night, we give the directors credit for having Veeck address the fact that, in the decades since, the night has been seen more as a repudiation of the music of Black and gay culture at the time than just a promotion gone bad. That wasn’t what the Veeck family was all about — Bill signed Larry Doby, the American League’s first Black player, and wanted to bring up Black players to the Phillies after he bought that team, which scuttled the sale — and Mike Veeck was given the chance to reflect on that and offer his regret 44 years later.

We also enjoyed the story of how Strawberry regained his love for the game during his brief time with the Saints, including his friendship with Dave Stevens, whom Veeck gave an opportunity to play for the Saints despite the fact that Stevens has no legs. Again, it was told in a funny, heartwarming way, one that gave insight to Straw’s state of mind and what propelled him to come back to the majors with the Yankees, where he won championships in 1996, ’98 and ’99.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Saint Of Second Chances is a fun film about a fun figure in the history of baseball, and how Mike Veeck’s own second chances paralleled the ones he gave others on the teams he owned.

.Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.