‘The Saint of Second Chances’ Review: A Baseball Showman Gets a Fittingly Eager-to-Please Doc Portrait

Daniel Fienberg
·5 min read
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Watch as many documentaries as I do, and you’re bound to see the Chicago White Sox’s notorious Disco Demolition Night come up in a wide variety of contexts. Sometimes the 1979 fiasco is used as a case study in racism and the marginalization of Black voices in music. Sometimes it’s used as a case study in homophobia.

In Morgan Neville and Jeff Malmberg’s new documentary The Saints of Second Chances, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, Disco Demolition Night is reduced to an origin story. Yes, Mike Veeck is remorseful that anybody has read negative subtext into the ill-fated promotion, but he makes it clear that he just wanted to impress his father and pack a stadium. Like several dark things in The Saint of Second Chances, any other insinuations get lost in a sea of stylistic flourishes and heart-tugging button pushing.

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Don’t get me wrong, The Saint of Second Chances is a playful, entertaining and emotionally effective documentary, one tailored appropriately for the Veeck family, a multi-generational clan of baseball showmen. Does it always earn its wild deviations of tone and feeling? The people within the film do, but I’m not as convinced about the film itself.

Mike’s father Bill is a baseball Hall of Famer, owner of several franchises and a legend famous for innovations as substantive as integrating the American League and as frivolous as giving the 3-foot-7-inch Eddie Gaedel a single at-bat in 1951. When Veeck purchased the struggling White Sox, he hired his son to orchestrate stunts to pack the seats. Only one, Disco Demolition Night, culminated in on-field rivalry and seemingly ended the professional career of both Veecks.

Were that true, though, this documentary would have a different name. Veeck went to the lowest levels of professional, independent league baseball to revitalize his career and, in the process, revitalize his life. A story that starts off focusing on fathers and sons becomes, instead, a saga of fathers and daughters, but really only in the last 20 minutes, with a shift that definitely left me teary and also feeling manipulated.

The Saint of Second Chances generally isn’t worried about whether or not you feel manipulated, so long as you feel entertained, as befits the Veeck brand. Mike is a gregarious storyteller and Neville and Malmberg follow his lead. The documentary has plenty of archival footage to play with, chronicling bad ideas like the White Sox’s much-maligned phase wearing shorts and that whole Disco Demolition riot, which is sometimes projected behind Veeck’s interviews, in case you didn’t know it’s always playing out in the back of his mind. Jeff Daniels narrates with “Can you believe this guy is for real?” bemusement that’s shared by various talking heads, including Darryl Strawberry, who got his own second chance with Mike Veeck’s St. Paul Saints.

But just as the Veecks knew that sometimes a t-shirt or bobblehead night is insufficient incentive to attract a crowd, the directors here know that a Veeck documentary requires more embellishment. Sometimes the baseball crowd talks directly to the audience. There’s a seventh-inning stretch inserted within the documentary.

Then there are the re-enactments featuring It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star Charlie Day as the initially eager-to-please, then down-on-his-luck, then eager-to-please-again Veeck. Those re-enactments are driven more by a greatest hits-style soundtrack than by scripted dialogue, which proves to be a perfect vehicle for Day’s expressive performance style, which in this case borders on mime. Featuring Veeck playing his own father in a nice touch, the re-enactments are more about enhancing the story’s larger-than-life vibe than conveying information, but they aren’t distracting (unless you find a clean-shaven Day to be slightly unnerving, which I initially did).

Veeck is a crowdpleaser, and that’s the thing Neville and Malmberg are best at here. The Saint of Second Chances plays big and broad. Just as Veeck emphasizes that he staged a version of baseball for people who don’t necessarily like baseball, The Saint of Second Chances is like Chapman and Maclain Way’s The Battered Bastards of Baseball for those who like a little less baseball in their independent minor league baseball documentaries. That The Saint of Second Chances will join Battered Bastards on Netflix offers one of the most micro examples yet of Netflix’s “something for everybody” philosophy.

It’s the last chapter of the film, appropriately after the seventh inning stretch, that will leave some viewers a sobbing wreck — “Veeck” does, after all, rhyme with “wreck” — and others scratching their heads. I won’t spoil what the change of course is, because it’s treated as a surprise or a twist — a documentary tactic that can come across as exploitative and does here as well, even if Veeck and the other talking heads handle it with full sincerity. The problem is that “full sincerity” isn’t a smooth complement to Neville and Malmberg’s approach for the first hour.

What’s organic to life just isn’t always organic to a 93-minute documentary. And one can be fully conscious that strings are being pulled and be moved at the same time. Veeck, the inventor of the exploding scoreboard, Tonya Harding Bat Night and Free Pot Night (at which attendees received… a flowerpot) probably wouldn’t be concerned about the purity of audience reactions as long as people respond — and The Saint of Second Chances will make you respond. Leave it for other documentaries to treat Disco Demolition Night with substance.

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