Surprise Begonias
A polka is always better when shared by friendly strangers.
This piece is a bit of a Part 2. It has been about fifteen years since Part 1 was published, but what better way to start a passion project than by adding some important pieces to the story that inspired it. I reference an earlier work, but don’t worry, I’ve also got 2,000 brand-new words for you. The twist is that not all of them are mine.
Back in 2008, I wrote about an ill-fated night of Cleveland baseball for ESPN.com, and that’s Part 1. I know some of you have read it, and if you haven’t read it and don’t want to leave the cozy confines of our home here, I’ll give you the one-paragraph version:
On June 4, 1974, an ill-advised promotion at Cleveland Municipal Stadium facilitated what I believe to be one of the worst riots ever to happen inside a ballpark. On “Ten Cent Beer Night,” wild, drunken mobs invaded the baseball game they were ostensibly there to see. Players and umpires were assaulted, and at one point Billy Martin, the Texas Rangers’ manager, led a bat-wielding dugout charge to go and rescue some of his players who were being menaced in the outfield. The game was forfeited to the Rangers, because, Rule 3.18. This fiasco was extremely on-brand for Cleveland’s tarnished reputation in the middle of the 1970s.
How about that conciseness? 3600 words down to 107!
Don’t get used to it.
When I first learned of TCBN, I was smitten. This was no gambol in one of America’s green cathedrals, it was a gladiatorial battle in a stadium that was itself a monument to a whole region’s lost economic hopes and industrial dreams. And not to be hyperbolic in using combat metaphors, but my position is, whenever someone leads an armed charge of one group of people against another, you can call it a battle. This was a part of baseball’s tapestry I hadn’t known existed, a cultural canvas stuffed deep inside the sport’s closet, to be forgotten. Instead, I tried to remember it.
“Remembering Ten Cent Beer Night” was the first thing I ever got published, and it prompted what (to younger me) felt like a great deal of reader response, left in the comments section on the piece or sent directly to me via email. I also became a cited source on Wikipedia, which was on my bucket list (not near the top, but definitely on there).
The people who responded to the piece generally landed in one of two camps:
Camp 1: Baseball/sports enthusiasts who, like me, had no idea this version of history had ever existed and were glad it was getting its time in the sun
Camp 2: People who had lived this history and vividly remembered Ten Cent Beer Night
I think there are a lot of people living in Camp 1 these days. In 1971, Dick Young, one of the most prominent sports columnists of the day, offhandedly wrote that “Baseball is something special in American society because it has the mystique of purity.” That phrase rings true to me. You certainly see it reflected across the titles of some of baseball’s “Great Books”:
Why Time Begins on Opening Day
Baseball When the Grass Was Real
A Season in the Sun
The Glory of Their Times
The Summer Game
And these are all great books, at least to this reader, but a vibe emerges, doesn’t it? Reading down that list, you can almost hear the contemplative jangle of a piano playing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at half-tempo over a panning shot of a sun-drenched lawn so green it hurts your eyes. Any moment, Kevin Costner will begin a voice-over narration. Strong chins and incredible mustaches are everywhere. All of this is the work of the “mystique,” portraying baseball as some kind of cultural great white, a pastoral leviathan so perfectly formed and inevitable that it has managed to cruise, relatively unchanged, through the roiling waters of American centuries.
What makes Ten Cent Beer Night so interesting is that it hints at at the truth of baseball’s more complex evolutionary path. In reality, the institution of Baseball is imperfect as its parent country. In between countless moments of glory and the occasional body shot to the color barrier, baseball has messed up and been messed up, and it has clashed, wittingly and unwittingly, with its players, with its host cities, and its own fans.
Let’s look at that Great Books list again, but with a few imaginary titles added, reflecting the parts of baseball history that we’ll be on the lookout for here at Project 3.18:
Why Time Begins on Opening Day
No Refunds by Order of Police: Forfeiture in the Gilded Age
Baseball When the Grass Was Real
When They Still Allowed Glass Bottles (and Why They Stopped)
A Season in the Sun
Whose Team Is This? Baseball in the Expansion Era
The Glory of Their Times
Not Paid Enough to Die Here: Stories from the Outfield
The Summer Game
Now we are getting closer to the story of baseball in/and the United States. Note we didn’t take anything away–everything from the first iteration definitely belongs–we just added some parts that were missing. If baseball is worthy of the prominence it holds in our collective memory, and I believe it is, we should love it, flaws-and-all, with an understanding of what has occasionally gone wrong informing our appreciation for what somehow managed to come out right. The people from Camp 1 who took the time to write to me in 2008 felt the same way. Project 3.18 will study the flaws and the scars of baseball history and reflect on how these have helped baseball grow and survive, imperfect all the while.
It’s strange to look back at old writing, even the old writing you’re proudest of, but I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I won’t do myself. Reading it again, the piece I wrote in 2008 is still one of the best accounts of TCBN I’ve ever seen, which is what I’d set out to write back then. And it is a true story. Not based on a true story, that is what happened, as far as I could tell and as hard as that is to believe. What a mess.
But there are a couple of things I would change if I could.
For one, it’s a little mean and comes down a bit hard on Cleveland, a place that I am actually quite fond of. Cleveland doesn’t need that, but I was at an age where I hadn’t quite mastered the nuance between “laughing with” and “laughing at.” Sorry, Cleveland, I really do love you. I got married at the Old Courthouse!
For two, I relied entirely on secondary sources—books, newspapers, photographs, etc.
My secondary sources produced many outstanding facts, and my job was to piece them together into a narrative, but I missed an opportunity to find and include some primary sources-–firsthand accounts of people who were there that night and witnessed (or even took part in) the fracas. That frenzied, anonymous crowd would have been much more interesting if I’d been able to point out even a few individual faces.
What a revelation it was for me, then, after the piece went out, some of those people contacted me to share their stories, including one man who attended that game in his early twenties and went on to become a reputable attorney in Columbus, Ohio. According to this credible source, I’d gotten it right, but he added so much in just a few paragraphs:
“I grew up in Cleveland and went to countless games with friends. The rapid transit line went downtown for 35 cents, and tickets in the 60's and 70's were generally free or almost free. Somebody always had access to giveaway tickets, and the bleachers only cost a couple bucks. With 80,000 seats and an average crowd of seven or eight thousand, there were plenty of seats available.
[That night,] I was in the bleachers with a couple fraternity buddies and can vouch for many of the details in the story. If anything, in person I thought it was worse than [you] portrayed.
From behind the outfield fence in the right field bleachers I saw the entire Jeff Burroughs affair. The detail that really sticks in my mind is that in the chaos in the bottom of the 9th a fan runs at Burroughs, and suddenly out of nowhere Duke Sims slams the guy to the ground like a linebacker. Maybe deserved under the circumstances, but it was chilling. Cherry bombs were blowing up in the bleachers as we literally ran out of there.
I will confirm that behind the outfield fence were beer trucks serving six cups at a time for 60 cents. The cups were normal sized, as I recall.”
As hard as it is to relate to today, this was baseball, in our living memory. And here was a fantastic, descriptive witness. We were going to talk more, and he offered to put me in touch with his fraternity buddies, too, but life happened and fifteen years went by and I regret I never took him up on that offer. I tried to look him up a few months ago, even sent a paper letter to an address that I hoped might be his, but never heard back. It had been too long. Time is popular history’s worst enemy, but with Project 3.18, we can fight it together.
Another reader wrote to add a link to the chain of Beer Night promotions—this Cleveland event was far from an outlier:
“The funny thing is that Milwaukee held the same promotion in 1972 and it resulted in similar chaos in the stands, but not the field. In Germanic Milwaukee, the trains have always run on time. The funny thing is that there has not been anything written on that one, nor does there seem to be any record of it. I was there, so I have wonderful beery memories of the night. Like the Indians’ half-hearted attempts to limit things, the Brewers wisely limited fans to only six beers at a time. The vendors gave up trying to carry beer around the stadium and simply stationed themselves to take 60 cents from each besotted fan.
The backstory was that the drinking age had dropped to 18 during this period, so the number of underaged drinkers was pretty high. Also, the team was pretty bad and they needed something to boost attendance. The one I went to was on a Friday night and it was complete chaos—I remember players on the top of the dugout watching fights in the stands. Lots and lots of arrests, including many of my friends. Stories were told for months afterwards.”
Another reader wrote of a Beer Night in Texas at Arlington Stadium. He didn’t recall much of what happened, which is understandable, but the image of a line of police wagons lined up expectantly outside the stadium stuck with him.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Cleveland’s Ten Cent Beer Night is that of the many other beer nights preceded it, and in a few cases followed it, only this one occasion went on to live in infamy.
And then there was this reader submission:
“I’m currently listening to the Grateful Dead’s June 8, 1974 show from the Oakland Alameda Coliseum, just four days after the debacle in Cleveland, and in between “Scarlet Begonias” and “Mexicali Blues,” rhythm guitarist Bobby Weir says, ‘I think we’ve seen the last of ten-cent beer nights in the American League, but we’re gonna play a polka anyway.’”
The concert recording is still up and can be found here, if you want to add some very fitting mood music to your reading today.
Consider how many people in the world: 1) knew of the digitized recording of that concert from thirty years prior, 2) had listened to it, 3) had read my piece, 4) had made the connection, and 5) were the sort of people to write strangers on the internet to share. It might be a list of one person, and luckily that one person wrote me to chip in this delightful little detail. With the inclusion, however minor, of Bobby Weir and the Grateful Dead, isn’t the history of Ten Cent Beer Night that much more perfect?
Even these brief reader contributions added so much to the story of Ten Cent Beer Night, and not only am I determined not to miss them again, I want to go after them with you.
Sound good? Shall we get started?
I was five years late for the big anniversary of the ‘69 Mets, but the fiftieth anniversary of Ten Cent Beer Night is four months away. Many of the youngsters in attendance that night are hopefully enjoying retirement and have a little more free time these days. Let’s find them and tell their stories and in doing so try to understand a little more of what happened, and a lot more of why.
Readers from Camp 2: Were you there in Cleveland Municipal Stadium on June 4, 1974? What were you doing? Or perhaps you weren’t there that night, but remember very well the tough assignment of being a Cleveland baseball fan in those days. What was a game at Municipal Stadium like? What did it sound like, smell like? What was baseball like, especially in contrast to baseball today?
Or maybe you remember a little more about one of those Texas Beer Nights. Or what it was like to be a Rangers fan in the ‘70s (another unenviable posting).
Email project318@substack.com and share, or leave a comment everyone can enjoy.
Readers from Camp 1: Perhaps you weren’t there, or even born, but maybe you know someone who was. Your dad, or your aunt, or your co-worker. It’s a story they love telling because it is kind of wild, but you are sick of hearing it. Please send them our way.
And if you don’t know anyone this time, stick around for a great story, and know that your moment may come down the road. Here at Project 3.18, we’ll be crossing the country and sometimes the world and traveling through decades, in search of moments when baseball didn’t go nearly as planned.
Up Next: We explore the unique history of baseball games never finished in “Now That’s What I Call a Forfeit,” coming on February 26!
I posted this story to the subReddit for the Cleveland Guardians and got one anecdote too wonderful not to share:
"My father was at the game. He was a part owner of a Japanese steak house like a Beni Hana. At the time, the cooks were from Japan. He took some of the cooks to their first American professional baseball game that day. Imagine what they told their pals back home!"
I didn’t go to a game with 10 cent beers, but my local bar near our college had one every Tuesday night in 1969-1970. And we had no classes on Wednesdays, so it was a BIG hit! So many (foggy) good memories!