White Sox assistant hitting coach Greg Sparks made sure he got a T-shirt.
As a wide-eyed, 15-year-old batboy on July 12, 1979, Sparks had a front-row seat to Disco Demolition Night, the ill-fated promotion at Comiskey Park during which disco records were blown up by WLUP-FM disc jockey Steve Dahl after the first game of a doubleheader against the Tigers.
Sparks was only hoping to get a glimpse of Lorelei, the original Loop Rock Girl, but what he saw instead, as then-owner Bill Veeck put it, was “a disaster.”
The field was so damaged by the explosion and the fans who rushed onto it and trashed it that the Sox were forced to forfeit the second game of the twin bill.
“Stuff was flying from the upper deck, and [Sox outfielder] Ralph Garr gave me a skullcap to wear,” Sparks said, “because empty liquor bottles were coming down, and records were coming down and sticking in the grass.”
The Sox gave away Disco Demolition T-shirts to the first 10,000 fans Thursday to commemorate the infamous night.
Roger Bossard, an assistant to his father, Gene, the head groundskeeper at the time, also got a shirt, but he already has his memento. It’s a photo of himself, shirtless, repairing the dilapidated field the next morning. The night before, he had ordered 700 yards of sod to fix it up.
“We all have a day or two we remember in life; that was the one I’ll never forget,” Bossard said.
Bossard said it was the only time he questioned whether he was in the right profession.
As infamous as it may be in their history, the Sox included Disco Demolition Night in their T-shirt giveaway series and invited Dahl to throw out the first pitch. The team is in Oakland on July 12, and the closest home Thursday date is July 4, thus the giveaway night well in advance of the 40-year anniversary.
Objections to the Sox celebrating what some view as racist and homophobic because of disco’s connection to black, Latino and gay communities have been raised, but Dahl didn’t see it like that.
“You can’t look at something that happened 40 years ago through today’s lens,” Dahl said Thursday.
“It’s a recent phenomenon because of social media, I think. I just wanted to rock and roll, that’s all.”
In any event, Sparks, the son of ex-first base coach Joe Sparks, will never forget it.
“I like disco music, I liked rock and roll and I listened to Steve Dahl, but I was more interested in seeing Lorelei, the Loop lady,” he said. “But I never really got a glimpse of her. But all that, I was a 15-year-old kid — it was something.”
Moncada eyes weekend for return
Third baseman Yoan Moncada, who left the game against the Nationals on Tuesday with a mid-back strain, took ground balls but expects to miss a couple more games.
‘‘I want to be sure that when I come back, I’m 100 percent healthy because I don’t want to have any lingering issues going forward,” Moncada said.
