Disco Demolition Night - Aftermath

Aftermath

Although Bill Veeck took much of the public heat for the fiasco, his son Mike was the actual front-office promoter behind it. As a result, Mike was blacklisted from Major League Baseball for a long time after his father retired. As Mike related, "The second that first guy shimmied down the outfield wall, I knew my life was over!"

According to the 1986 book Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, "the following year disco had peaked as a commercial blockbuster". Steve Dahl said in a 2004 interview with Keith Olbermann that disco was a fad "probably on its way out. But I think it hastened its demise".

Nile Rodgers, producer and guitarist for the disco-era group Chic, said regarding the general anti-disco movement: "It felt to us like Nazi book-burning. This is America, the home of jazz and rock and people were now afraid even to say the word 'disco'." However, Harry Wayne Casey, the singer for disco act KC and the Sunshine Band, did not believe Disco Demolition Night itself was discriminatory, stating simply that he felt those involved were "idiots". Years later, on July 12, 2001, Mike Veeck apologized to Casey for the event.

The book A Change Is Gonna Come states that "The Anti-disco movement represented an unholy alliance of funkateers and feminists, progressives and puritans, rockers and reactionaries. The attacks on disco gave respectable voice to the ugliest kinds of unacknowledged racism, sexism and homophobia." Dahl, however, rejects the notion that prejudice was his motivation for Disco Demolition Night. "The worst thing is people calling Disco Demolition homophobic or racist. It just wasn't...We weren't thinking like that."

To this day, the second game of this doubleheader is the last American League game to be forfeited. The last game to end in this manner in the National League was on August 10, 1995, when a baseball giveaway promotion at Dodger Stadium went awry, forcing the Los Angeles Dodgers to forfeit the game to the St. Louis Cardinals.