Let's Remember Some Civil Unrest! Ten-Cent Beer Night

 

WYTS: Cleveland Browns. Original post here.

 

Shout-out to the May Day Riots riots in 1919, where the IWW and their fellow socialists opposed the conviction of their leader and Pullman Strike veteran, Eugene V. Debs, for sedition. Debs even had his citizenship revoked. This was one of the biggest battlefields of the 1919 Red Scare, when both sides were either inspired or terrified of the Bolshevik Revolution. The protesters were hit by police insanity, which included a tank shipped over from the Western Front. Two people were killed. That sounds important but let's do a silly one again. (We don't have many of those.) Here’s Ten-Cent Beer Night!

Cleveland at the end of WWII was an industrial powerhouse. It was a hub of the arsenal of Democracy that defeated Hitler. Post-war, the good times rolled on. Their baseball team, then known as the Indians, won a World Series in 1948. The new Browns football team were the greatest in the NFL pre-merger. Life was good. This city was far from being a punchline.

I sure hope Clevelanders had a Buddhist attitude about the temporary nature of things. Inevitability came, and the joke-ification of Cleveland began. You know the story of the second half of the 20th century, it’s the same in almost every city: deindustrialization, highway building, redlining, a lot of cars and a lot of suburbs and a lot of decline. The Browns started sucking in 1973 and never stopped, only pausing to get rocked by the Broncos for awhile, or to become the Ravens. Also, Seventies baseball was not much better. Forget World Series, these guys hadn’t had a winning record since 1968. This riot is probably the highlight of Cleveland baseball in this decade. I’m not sure there is much else to talk about.

Wikipedia helpfully tells me that beer back then was usually 65 cents at Cleveland Stadium, about $4.24 today. Ten-Cent Beer as a fun crowd gimmick would mean your beer costs about $0.65 in today’s dollars, so… oh, the 1974 price. I don’t know how much a Coors costs at Progressive Field today but in my experience, you’re talking $10 to $15 for a beer now. Back then, there were no credit limits on how many beers you could buy, no cut-offs at the 7th inning, and crowds of drunken assholes were just something to be expected. The boujee box seat revolution to make a baseball game a luxury item had not yet begun, these were tough working class crowds. This team would end the season with a depressing 77-85 record, the river was probably still on fire, your factory job was gone, if you’re in Cleveland at these games, you’re getting drunk.

Our story begins May 29th, 1974, in Arlington Stadium with the brand new Texas Rangers team and a player named Lenny Randle. The Indians were visiting and this game was getting punchy after Randle broke one of the sacred arcane “Unwritten Rules” of the baseball, meaning he was due for a beanball from the Cleveland pitcher, Mitt Wilcox. Instead, Randle bunted, on purpose, in a brilliant ploy to drag Wilcox off the mound to tag him out. This left Wilcox wide open so Randle could flatten the shit out of him when the pitcher least expected it. Excellent form, Randle barely loses a step as he gets to first base.

This creates a huge bench clearing brawl, classic baseball. Feelings are hurt, Cleveland fans are furious, especially when they lose 3-0. It isn’t made any better when Rangers manager Billy Martin cockily told reporters he was not afraid of going to Cleveland next week. “Nah, they won’t have enough fans there to worry about.”

Ten-Cent Beer Night could not have landed at a worse time, with both teams furious at each other. Now it is June 4th, there’s 25,000 people in the stands, twice as many as usual (Martin wasn’t wrong about attendance problems), and these fans are getting plastered. Many came drunk already. Or came with firecrackers and various other missiles in their pockets such as rocks, batteries, golf balls, and at least one hunting knife. They knew this would be a show. The Rangers do not make things any easier for themselves when they have an undiplomatic 5-1 lead just as the crowd is losing control.

There’s so much to tell before it gets really bad, who knows how many of these stories are apocryphal: a woman ran topless onto the field and tried to kiss the umpire. A naked man slid into second base in the fourth inning, which sounds very painful to me. Two guys mooned the Rangers outfield. Billy Martin walked out onto the field, receiving a blizzard of thrown beer cups, and blew kisses to the audience. I think he wanted a riot too.

In the ninth inning, the Indians rally to tie it, but this game is going down like a sinking ship without enough lifeboats. Baseball was on nobody’s mind at this point. There’s stories of random chaos in every direction. Somebody not in a kissing mood threw a hunting knife in the direction of the umpire, landing just short. When the umpire does not want to die that night, he calls the game off as a forfeit, Texas wins, attempted murder is not allowed in baseball. But the night is far from over.

That’s when Jeff Burroughs, Rangers outfielder, gets his hat knocked off by a speedy Clevelander who has also run onto the field. Burroughs trips, and Billy Martin, who was itching for a fight, marches his team out to battle. The crowd responds with hundreds of fans rushing the field, surrounding the Rangers. Billy Martin has proven to be a poor field general. Turns out the fans had the high ground in all directions and the numbers and the alcoholic momentum to be capable of anything. The Texans are now twenty-five mostly sober baseball players and one dumb manager in the outfield versus 200 of Cleveland’s meanest and drunkest. General Martin left no path open for retreat.

The Indians manager, Ken Aspromonte, in a moment of legitimate heroism, ordered his own team out there to fight their own fans and rescue Texas. After a brief battle, both teams fled the baseball field without casualties, locking themselves in the clubhouses. That left Cleveland Stadium in the hands of the mob. Fans run wild as security is overwhelmed, unable to take control – nobody had the wisdom to bring on extra guards or police before this night began. Every base was stolen along with anything else the fans could swipe. The broadcasters apparently kept going for another twenty minutes, detailing the madness with no game to report on, like the band playing ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ on the deck of the Titanic.

A half hour after the game ended early, Cleveland’s police finally restore order. The Indians would finish in fourth place in their division this year and would never win another World Series under that name, or any other so far. The Rangers finished their season in 2nd place, 84-76. Billy Martin would get fired from Texas in 1975 and then go on to get fired many, many more times under George Steinbrenner in NYC. Martin would win a World Series for the Yankees in 1977 and almost got into a fight with Reggie Jackson on national TV. Lenny Randle would play for the Mariners later on in his career, and infamously would blow on a baseball rolling on the turf into the foul line. Turns out you're not allowed to do that.

Nobody died for once in these stories, and as far as I can tell, nobody was seriously hurt either. Lotta hangovers the next day though.