The Texas Brawl
Guest writer Scott Jarrett chronicles the fight that teed up Ten Cent Beer Night
When we invited author and baseball historian Scott Jarrett to drop by Project 3.18 and share some essential Ten Cent Beer Night lore, we already knew what we wanted from him:
The Texas Brawl.
The May 29, 1974 fracas between the Texas Rangers and Cleveland Indians set the stage and tone for a June 4 sequel which, in a twist worthy of Ridley Scott or James Cameron, would pit these erstwhile foes together against some of the paying audience at Cleveland Municipal Stadium.
Scott tells this prequel story with the passion, scholarship, and humor that are the source code of his new book, the transparently-titled Ten Cent Beer Night, and we are delighted to share this excerpt from Chapter 11: “The Texas Brawl.” Scott kindly did some adapting to make this an accessible moment to drop into his larger story, but keep in mind we’re still opening in medias res here—in the middle of Cleveland’s middling start to their 1974 season:
On Tuesday, May 28th, Gaylord Perry was due to pitch and in a good mood. “You guys better score some runs,” an unshaven Perry (no shaving before a start) half-joked while driving to Arlington Stadium. He said, too, that his phone was ringing off the hook with media requests about his book, Me and The Spitter. “I didn’t know there were that many radio stations in Dallas,” Perry laughed. Teammate [and relief pitcher] Milt Wilcox told him that he could switch rooms with him as no one ever called him.
Perry and Billy Martin were old enemies. The Texas manager had been after Perry for his “greaseballin’ ways” for many years - they had crossed paths many times when the Indians played the Tigers or Twins. Perry sarcastically loved to refer to Martin in his book as his “good friend.” In his previous start, Perry had shut down the Orioles with a complete game three-hit shutout. The Indians had scored just 11 runs over their previous 7 games, but [Indians manager] Ken Aspromonte was understandably confident with Perry, who was in one of the most dominant stretches of his career, taking the rubber. Still, Aspromonte acknowledged the offensive struggles. “Gaylord will hold ‘em for us...the only trouble is how do we win zero to zero?”
It turned out that Aspromonte didn’t need to worry. Perry dominated the Rangers, throwing yet another complete game shutout. He struck out six, gave up just five hits (but walked five), while the Indians pounded out 12 hits. They won 8-0 and now stood at 22-23. The Rangers fell to 22-24. The win set the stage for a rubber match game on Wednesday, May 29th. The Perry win was the kind of game that infuriated Martin, who always believed that the old “greaser” was cheating, which was precisely what Perry wanted. Perry used the mere hint of ball doctoring to his advantage. Meanwhile, second baseman Lenny Randle had one of the five hits off of Perry. After the game, according to Milt Wilcox, Randle said something to the press about Perry’s decline and that he was “all washed up.” Perry read the news story and approached Wilcox, who was due to start the third game of the series, in the locker room. “Gaylord walked over to me and said, ‘Take care of him will you? The guy’s got a big mouth.’” Wilcox added, “I played with Lenny Randle later and I liked him. But when you played against him, you hated him.” Perry, too, had activated one of the secret bat signals1 in baseball: back up your teammates. Additionally, Wilcox called Perry his mentor. Ten years his elder, Perry and Wilcox spent lots of time together talking when they weren’t pitching. Perry also taught Wilcox during spring training that they weren’t throwing batting practice to Indians pitchers - rather, it was “pitching practice” for them. “He was trying to hit the corners and the guys would get a little mad at him,” Wilcox recalls. And Perry also made an impression on Wilcox as simply a pure competitor. “He just wanted to win so bad. I kind of took that mentality.” As for Perry’s pre-game request to shut Randle up? Wilcox received the elder Perry’s directive. “That’s just how baseball was played,” Wilcox recalled. “I didn’t think anything of it.”
As the game unfolded, tension rose on the field. In the fourth inning Randle slid hard into second base and slammed his shoulder into the Indians’ second baseman, Jack Brohamer. “It was a cheap shot, totally uncalled for,” Brohamer said later, “Randle is a hot dog and he hit me dirty,” Brohamer later said, adding that he didn’t have any chance to turn a triple play.2 Thanks to the baseball gods, Aspromonte made the call to the bullpen to bring in Wilcox in the bottom of the 7th. Now he had his chance to fulfill Perry’s request. Wilcox yielded a single to [Jeff] Burroughs then got [Tom] Grieve to ground into a double play. Lenny Randle, batting 6th, strode to the plate and dug in the box. Wilcox toed the rubber, wound up, and sailed a fast ball behind Randle’s head. Randle put his hands on his hips and stared out at Wilcox. He turned to Indians’ catcher Dave Duncan for clarification. “What’s going on?” he asked Duncan. “The pitch just slipped, I guess,” Duncan replied. Randle didn’t buy it.
In the age-old duel between hurler and hitter, the pitcher is given the obvious advantage, particularly if there is any ill-will. Satchel Paige liked to call his purpose pitch, ideally whistling under a batter’s chin, “a bow tie” and passed that idea along to the game’s all-time strikeout leader, Nolan Ryan. That approach could have almost applied in this situation, apart from the fact that the pitch rocketed several inches behind Randle’s head and not under his chin. Randle stood briefly and stared out at Wilcox. After his brief conversation with Duncan, he dug back in then attempted a revenge tactic that rarely works for the hitter: a bunt along the first baseline intended to draw the pitcher in close enough to enable proximity. Or, in Randle’s case, a bunt along the first baseline that might allow him to revisit his old Arizona State football days – with Milt Wilcox as his opponent. Such a bunt would have to be almost perfectly placed - forcing the pitcher to field it and putting him in a less-than-defensive position while he did. Randle’s bunt was perfectly placed. Wilcox fielded it and Randle veered left onto the infield grass, and lowered his arms as if trying to bust through collegiate gridiron defenders. He made a beeline for Wilcox, hammering him with his forearm and launching him into the air. Amazingly, Wilcox, who was 6’2” and 185 pounds, somehow held on to the baseball, and sprang back up to proudly show the umps that he had done so. He spiked the ball and sprinted toward Randle, who was already beneath the loving embrace of Indians first baseman John Ellis, who was listed at 6’2 and 225 pounds. Home plate umpire Dave Phillips signaled that Randle had been tagged out then retreated a few steps while the benches and bullpens emptied. First base umpire Bill Deegan waved his arms as if to say, “Let ‘em have at it…they don’t pay me enough to get into this.” All hell broke loose or, as they might say in Texas, “Someone tipped over the outhouse.” The bullpens emptied. Someone sucker punched the already targeted Jack Brohamer. Duncan wrestled with someone just beyond first base. Martin was out there in the mix. Randle later called the bunt his “bump and run.” “You gotta protect your family, your jewels and your stuff,” he said years later. “None of that was my fault - it was his fault. If John Ellis hadn’t tackled me, it wouldn’ta been a brawl. He (Wilcox) threw the ball away.”
During the melee, Rangers first baseman Mike Hargrove - heeding Martin’s directive to get into the mix - tackled Brohamer from behind. “I ran toward him (Wilcox) and got tackled from behind - blindsided,” Brohamer said. “I had no idea what that was about until the next day when I saw the newspaper and saw that it was Hargrove.3 The 5’9” Brohamer said that the six-foot Hargrove punching down on him was equivalent to him punching down on the diminutive Indians clubhouse attendant, Cy Bunyak. When order was finally restored, the Indians returned to their dugout where they were greeted by a raucous crowd. Ranger fans, who were snot-slingin’ drunk, united to form a sort of fire brigade - but with beer - passing down cups of brew to a middle-aged man positioned by the Cleveland dugout.4 He showered the Indians, including Aspromonte, with the frothy stuff. One local fan wearing a shirt that said, “Eat More Possum,” poured beer on Duncan and sought to test his pugilistic skills against him. Duncan was more than willing to oblige, attempting to scale the roof of the dugout to get to him, but half of the Indians’ dugout pulled him down. Eventually three policemen, with hands on their guns, arrived and hauled the troublemaker off and eventually fined him $27.50.5
After the game, Aspromonte said he didn’t condone fighting, but - just as Martin expected of his players - that if one did break out, he expected to see his entire team out there. They weren’t. “Not all of them did, and I’m not very proud of those who held back,” he said. His reflections, and those of reporters covering the series, were prophetic. Aspromonte thought about the Rangers fans around the dugout. “Those people were like animals in a zoo,” he said of the Rangers fans. Little did Aspromonte know how prescient the words he had just uttered would be. The same could be said for the report of Plain Dealer writer Russell Schneider, who wrote that he had been astounded by the brawl, particularly the lack of security. “Nobody appeared to quell the near-riot at the dugout for more than five minutes. Somebody, fan or player, could have been severely injured.”
As for Wilcox’s attention-grabbing pitch, few people in Arlington Stadium thought the ball slipped. But 44 years later Indians manager Ken Aspromonte said the same thing. The ball had simply slipped. “It was a misunderstanding,” Aspromonte said. “Wilcox told me the ball slipped out of his hand. It’s hard for the other team to understand that. I tried to talk to Billy at the time and he understood.” Randle claimed he was simply trying to bunt his way on and not “laying an ambush” for Wilcox (and Martin seconded his player’s emotions). Martin also claimed that Randle didn’t veer. “I don’t know if they were throwing at Lenny or not,” Martin said. “But he never got out of the baseline in the collision with Wilcox.” Randle maintained the same line of defense. “I don’t know if he was trying to hit me,” Randle told The Fort Worth Press. “I was just trying to get on base and I didn’t think they would be expecting a bunt with two outs. I didn’t try to hit Wilcox. We just sort of collided while I was running to first,” he said with an angelic grin.
The sequence of events - the Brohamer/Randle play at second, the purpose pitch, the bunt, and the brawl - were filmed and are available through SMU’s G. Williams Jones Film Collection and on YouTube - unusual for footage of a midweek game in 1974 to have been captured. In any court of law - baseball or otherwise - Martin and Randle would have a tough time presenting a solid counter argument as the video shows that Randle clearly veered from the baseline and directly into Wilcox.6
Duncan said he always thought of Randle as a “pretty nice guy.” “It’s too bad he had to do something like that,” Duncan added about Randle’s beeline toward Wilcox. “There was nothing between me and him and the goal line.” [Indians pitcher Fritz] Peterson, though, did not speak highly of Randle. “He’s a (censored). He wouldn’t do that on the road.” And Brohamer alleged that Randle had a history of violating some of baseball’s unwritten rules. “In the minor leagues, he stole third base on us and his team had a 12-run lead. That’s the kind of guy he was. It was a cheap shot. I didn’t have a chance for a triple play.” Brohamer added that Randle was “stupid.” “He’s a good ball player, but he’s got to learn something upstairs. He’s a pop off, he argues everything, a real hot dog.” Aspromonte avoided writers by repeatedly going to take a shower. “I have nothing to say,” was all he would, well, say.
Martin pointed out that he was in the midst of the melee in an effort to aid the peacemakers. He said he was knocked down twice, but didn’t throw any punches. He also said that he wasn’t quite what he used to be in terms of such baseball dust ups. “I’m slowing up getting out there. Me? I was going after my pitching coach, Art Fowler. I was trying to make sure that somebody who might be trying to break up a fight didn’t get popped. Those are the guys who usually get hurt. I got knocked down twice. First time my uniform’s been dirty all year. This was my kind of game, though. Good base running. Good pitching. Some defensive plays. Those fans in Cleveland will really be on my back when we get up there next week. Anytime there’s a fight, people always think I started it.”
The Rangers won the game 3-0 to put them at 23-24. They were very pleased with the pitching performance of Jackie Brown, who gave up just three hits on his way to a shutout and who apparently hung back from the fray. “Press box observers credited him with a no-hitter in the brawl.” Brown said the fight “jacked him up” and allowed him to finish the shutout. Randle claimed he was just trying to get on base. Shropshire recapped the night with this lead for The Star Telegram that turned out to foreshadow what would transpire the following week: “A quietly routine evening at the ball yard exploded into a scene reminiscent of nickel beer night at Harold’s Cave Creek Saloon.”
Both teams would play one another in six days, but Martin told a group of reporters that he was unconcerned about retribution. Reporters then delighted in telling him that the Indians had planned to host a Ten Cent Beer Night promotion. “I couldn’t give a (expletive deleted),” Martin snapped. Meanwhile, several of the Indians were pleased, anticipating that the combination would lead to greater intensity. “It’s a break we hadn’t counted on,” joked Duncan. But the nitpicking and diatribe certainly mattered, setting a definite tone for the media to latch onto, not to mention greasing the wheels for the next meeting between the two teams.
What a table-setter!
You could not make up a story more narratively compelling than this one, and Scott has captured it with verve and a flair for building tension. If you want the full story of Ten Cent Beer Night, please add Scott Jarrett’s just-released Ten Cent Beer Night to your bookshelf.
Here’s a link to purchase digital and print copies (we went with print, to the surprise of no one reading this, we’re sure).
And be sure to follow Scott on TwitterX: @10CentBeer!
With this key backstory in place, we head to Cleveland, hitching a ride in the “Midnight Rambler” alongside several teenage friends who bought right field grandstand tickets for what looked like a fun summer promotion on June 4, 1974. 50 years later, Marty, Rich, and Don will tell us what it was like to be there when Billy Martin, cheap beer, and Cleveland collided.
TOMORROW: “(Re)Remembering Ten Cent Beer Night”
Pun intended!
The hard slide Brohamer refers to is also on YouTube via G. William Jones Film Collection at SMU: Indians @ Rangers Footage.
In 1980, Brohamer was playing for the White Sox while Hargrove had become a mainstay in Cleveland. Brohamer said he walked into a locker room at Municipal and saw a smiling Hargrove standing there waving a white towel. As for brawling, Brohamer agrees with Wilcox that it was just kind of the way baseball was played in 1974. And it’s no surprise that Martin was right in the middle of it. “He was just one of those old-school managers...he and Earl Weaver. In Chicago I played for Bob Lemon and he was more of a ‘Go out and play’ manager and didn’t get that mad, but Martin and Weaver were fiery.” Brohamer added that when he played for the White Sox they found themselves brawling with Weaver and Orioles. Bart Johnson, one of Weaver’s teammates, took a shot at Weaver, who didn’t know initially who had done it. “But Weaver found out through the papers - sort of like I did - and he said, ‘Bart, I will get you - even if I have to trade for you - I will get you.’”
Some have maintained that the Rangers were actually hosting a “beer night special” that evening, but there is no record of that.
The Rangers' ushering/security staff was completely unprepared for the quick build-up of angry fans during the brawl on the field in the first few rows behind the dugout. Standing at the top of the lower box seats and yet untrained in such growing kinds of fan misbehavior, they were unable to even reach the front row before fans threw beer at the Indians players returning to the third base dugout. As a direct result of this moment, security protocols were changed the next night to have security personnel standing at the front rows near the dugout and field between each inning, standing with their backs to the field and facing toward the fans in stands, to show "security presence" before such problems even started. This new protocol soon spread to most other major league stadiums and later into other sports venues, all in the aftermath of this beer-throwing event.
Video footage of Randle’s veering tackle of Wilcox is on YouTube under “WFAA Film of A Great Baseball Fight - Rangers vs Indians 1974”. It is a fine slice of early to mid-70s baseball. Check it out through SMU’s G. William Jones Collection. You’ll see Martin in the melee and an angry Duncan in the dugout. Also, pause it around the 42 second mark to see Gamble tomahawk a bat into the crowd, dangerously close to a little girl in the stands: Indians @ Rangers Brawl.
The warm-up to the main event. . .