Mike Veeck is an interesting guy who also has had a pretty curious life and career, and Netflix documentary film “The Said of Second of Chances”, which was released a few weeks ago, could not possibly be less entertaining at all if it just focused on what he says in front of the camera. As a matter of fact, I often found a certain part of the documentary rather distracting for a reason I will talk about later, but, fortunately, I mostly remained engaged during my viewing as observing the ups and downs of Veeck’s life and career with enough curiosity and amusement.

As some of you know, Veeck was the son of legendary MLB (Major League Baseball) franchise owner Bill Veeck, and the early part of the documentary pays attention to how much Veeck tried to distinguish and prove himself in the 1970s. While he was not a hot shot MLB franchise owner anymore during that period, Veeck’s father decided to have the last shot of his via buying and then running the Chicago White Sox, and he eagerly recruited his son into his new business plan simply because he believed in his son.

Right from his very first day in the Chicago White Sox, Veeck was very determined to show others that he was more than the owner’s son, and, for a while, it seemed that he could actually succeed in that. While his father’s casually likable public image drew lots of affection from the fans of the Chicago White Sox, Veeck enthusiastically developed a series of showy events for drawing more audiences to their home ground, and many of them actually worked to his delight. As a matter of fact, these ridiculous ideas of his, which looked too showy at that time, have been frequently used in the MLB games these days, and he was certainly proud of his rather brilliant idea on how to generate more excitement from each home run, though that turned out to be much more cumbersome than expected.

Because his father and Chicago White Sox were constantly in the need of more money, Veeck really had to push the limit by any means necessary, and, not so surprisingly, this eventually led to a disaster to remember on July 12, 1979. For the extra entertainment for the audiences in the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox, Veeck planned a big event involved with the increasingly popular backlash against disco music, but this event soon went out of control on that day, and the following catastrophic moment smashed not only his career but also his father’s. Although his father willingly took all the blame from that incident, Veeck ended up being ridiculed and criticized a lot in public, and that was the beginning of the darkest period of his life.

While hitting the bottom of his life in one way or another, Veeck eventually found a way to rise up and then save himself. Around the time when he met a woman who would become his second wife, he pulled himself up more for doing anything for getting him back in business, and, what do you know, there indeed came the second chance for his life and career. He was asked to handle a little independent baseball team in Minnesota, and, though he was well aware of how low his new job was compared to his former position in MLB, he took the offer without much hesitation.

What followed next is a remarkable case of redemption. Because there was no bottom to hit in his career, Veeck fearlessly went all the way for promoting the status of that little independent baseball team, and, again, many of his outrageous tactics worked well enough to boost the public image of his team. Just like his father, Veeck simply wanted the audiences to experience a lot more than merely watching a game, and the audiences surely got experiences to remember fondly thanks to him.

In case of his players, Veeck was quite open to give a chance to almost anyone out there. For example, he gladly recruited a legless guy because this physically disabled guy simply wanted to play baseball as much as he could, and he also did not mind at all about allowing a female player to have a professional career of her own in his team. In case of a certain infamously disgraced MLB player who is incidentally interviewed in the documentary, even Veeck hesitated a bit as all of American major baseball teams rejected this player after this player screwed up in an epic scale, but he changed his mind after reminded by his no-nonsense wife that this player deserved the second chance as much as he once did.

Although he did not make a glorious comeback as he hoped in the end, Veeck chose to become a better husband and father to his family, and his personal story with his two children is certainly a big weepie for any good father out there. Although he was not exactly a perfect father, Veeck tried his best once he saw what was the most important in his life, and the documentary becomes quite poignant when Veeck and other interviewees reminisce about Veeck’s close relationship with his daughter, who left her family too early due to her rare terminal illness.

On the whole, “The Saint of Second Chance”, directed by Jeff Malmberg and Morgan Neville, is fairly enjoyable, but it is less effective whenever it switches to the redundant reenactment scenes with Charlie Day playing young Veeck. I wonder whether this part would be less distracting if Veeck were played by a much less famous actor instead, and I also think Malmberg and Nevill should have trusted Veeck’s engaging presence as a storyteller more. In my trivial opinion, he looks like someone who can easily entertain and amuse you a lot at a bar as you are sipping a glass of bear right next to him, and it is a bit of shame that the documentary does not put much trust on him.