Ten Cent Beer Night Reader Round-Up
“FROM One BEER Lover TO Another STROHS!”
Today’s post marks the end of our Ten Cent Beer Night Anniversary coverage. See you back here in 2074 for the Centennial!
If you missed it last week, you might want to check out our conversation with some of the spectators who were out on the field that night.
One of our primary goals for Project 3.18 is to find and preserve reader stories/fan stories, and build an archive of details and memories that might not be captured in traditional media descriptions of a baseball game. When we get enough of these, we’ll share them with you in a Reader Round-Up post, and this one is dedicated to Ten Cent Beer Night contributions.
If our long-form Baseball Stories are a seven-course meal prepared by an enthusiastic if overeager chef, Reader Round-Ups invite you to a lightly-coordinated but well-attended potluck where nearly everybody ended up bringing a tasty starch.
In that spirit, let’s dig in and see what the Project 3.18 community remembered about Ten Cent Beer Night, 50 years on.
I remember it well. I wasn’t there, but I watched it on TV. I was distraught. “Another gaffe for Cleveland,” is all I thought. It was baseball’s version of the Cuyahoga River catching fire. But the team hardly ever gets blamed for the ill-advised promotion. I remember Joe Tait, the Indians play-by-play announcer, promoting it on the radio by making comments like, “Come on down to the stadium on Friday night and help stick it in Billy Martin’s ear.” He should have been charged with complicity in committing a riot.
Still, I remain a Cleveland baseball fan to this day. I hope I live long enough to see them win a World Series. FYI, I’m 76, so they better hurry it up.—Bruce S (via email)
We’ve heard this from other sources as well—we’re sure Scott Jarrett addresses it fully in his book, but we are shocked that a radio announcer would take such a confrontational tone in promoting a game, even in the 1970s. And then the same announcer gets in trouble for calling what he sees that night a “riot” while on the air.
I was there; it was as crazy as people say. I had to stop my buddy from streaking; caught him before he could climb on the dugout. After that we went back to our seats and watched the madness unfold. Dude in the row behind us shared a joint with us.
Had to be 3.2%. I was 18 and at that time in Ohio you had to be 21 to drink full strength beer (wine and liquor too).
They weren’t selling beer in the stands; you had to go to a concession stand in the concourse. You were allowed to buy 6 beers at a time so that’s what everyone did.
—Charitable Redditor1
Back in the day, there was 3.2% beer with a red ring around the top of the can. It was legal for people over 18 but under 21 to drink. They may have been serving 3.2 that night. I think my friend may have mentioned that… I have a friend who was working at that game!
I remember it happening but I was only 10 years old around that time living In suburban Cleveland—it was a great place to grow up.
—Kathleen (Substack)
Tim Russert was attending law school in Cleveland at the time and went to the game. I believe his quote was something like: ‘I went with 2 dollars in my pocket. Do the math.’
—Nice Redditor
Ok, 1974, I had just graduated from high school and I recall that game. My future husband was there. He tells me this: streakers had been running onto the field between innings. Around the 6th inning another person runs around the infield, cop is chasing. Jeff Burroughs is kneeling in right field, a kid comes out dancing around him and knocks his hat off. Burroughs knocks kid down. Another guy comes out of stands and Jeff knocks him down. Dave Duncan, the Indians’ catcher, runs out to right field and starts fighting Burroughs! That’s when Billy Martin rushes onto the field and all hell breaks loose!
—Christine (Substack)
Christine’s account provides some key corroboration for Don, who we met in last week’s story. We’ll have to ask him if he ran into Dave Duncan out there.
Sure, my dad was five months old, but he assures me he was at 10 Cent Beer Night!
—Talented Redditor
That counts in our book! Somebody else said they liked to claim they were present because their mom attended while pregnant with them. Respectfully, we feel this is a bridge too far. The yardstick we use is: if you couldn’t at least get a contact high, you can’t claim participation.
I wasn’t there for TCBN (June 4 was our prom, which was forgettable, but that’s another story). But responding to a fan’s comment: bleacher tickets weren’t “a couple of bucks.”
They were 50 cents!
Six weeks later, I watched Dick Bosman come within a single error (his own) of a perfect game against the mighty Oakland A’s (for whom he would later pitch). There of us decided like 90 minutes before game time to go and drove up. Parked downtown for free and settled into the front row just in time for the first pitch.
For 50 cents. I still have the ticket stub.
(PS: The fans were trash-talking Reggie Jackson the whole game. Don’t know why.)
—Bob M (via email)
I was there with two friends sitting in the bleachers between left field and center field. We got stoned while driving up from Akron. I don’t recall the exact innings but things were getting out of hand well before the ninth inning, with lots of loud fireworks and drunken minors running amok in the stands. I recall the organist playing the Stroh’s beer jingle “…from one beer lover to another, Stroh’s….” repeatedly in the background. The beer cups were large. We watched in disbelief when fans entered the field accosting Ranger players followed by Billy Martin and team running en masse from their dugout bats in hand to defend their team. We hustled out of the stadium passing growling, drunken “fans” but avoided any conflict before driving home. I don’t recall getting drunk, although we had a couple of beers. It was surreal.
—Mark (via email)
Mark’s sonic detail intrigued us to seek out the jingle, so we could hear just what such a twisted organist would play repeatedly as order inside Cleveland Stadium broke down. We found a radio spot from the period and while this may be an upscaled version, the singer does the jingle twice at the end, and it is the nastiest sort of up-down earworm, in just a few bars. Imagining that playing over Ten Cent Beer Night is perfect. Thank you, Mark!
My dad and my uncle can’t remember if this happened on THE ten cent beer night or if it was one that happened before it. Because June 4 wasn’t the first time the promotion had happened. Anyway:
My dad and his older brother are scheduled to do some lawn work the next morning. My dad gets up, his brother isn’t in his bed. He waits at the kitchen table for him until it’s well past time to leave and finally says, screw it, I’ll go knock it out on my own.
Backs out of the driveway, starts to kick it into drive when something out of the corner of his eye registers: my uncle, passed out in the front yard. His friends had rolled him out of the car and left him there. He slept there all night. My dad woke him up, threw him in the car, and my uncle had the longest day of yard work ever. Their parents never found out, which was all they cared about.
—Gracious Redditor
I was at the game. My brother called me and said he was going, and so were a bunch of his friends, most whom I knew. I totally remember all of the beer trucks that surrounded the stadium. I was not yet 21 years old, so it must have been 3.2% ABV beer that they were loading in. We bought tickets for the bleachers, after all we were there for cheap beer, and some baseball. Once settled in, we decided that sending two people at a time to get ten beers (one for each of us) would be the best method to keep it flowing. It worked out quite well. I will never forget that the first streaker made it look easy, and with one hop up onto the rolled up canvases, they disappeared into the crowd. During the next break, about five people tried to do the same, and it just kind of continued from there. Of course, being in the bleachers, and either getting more beer, or going to restroom, some of the antics were missed by me, and so many years later, the memory isn't all that clear. But, it is the one game I can say to any fan that I was there, and they know what game I am talking about.
—Burnsey (Substack)
Somebody in that crew went on to a successful career in logistics management, we are sure of it.
I was there that night. I still have the ticket stub somewhere. I remember seeing the home plate umpire (Nestor Chylak) get hit with a folding chair that someone threw from the stands.
I couldn't find my ticket to the first beer night, but I did find a coupon from the SECOND Beer Night on July 18th, 1974...it cracks me up that they did it twice—and that I went both times.
—Jeff and Mike (
)
Scott Jarrett, TCBN Eminence, sent us a picture of the tickets from this follow-up promotion. They really did do it again!
My father was at the game. He was a part owner of Samurai, a Japanese steak house like a Benihana. 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!
—Dedicated Redditor
That’s it, folks, shut it down. This is the greatest TCBN anecdote possible. We don’t even care if it’s real. Now, we haven’t done any fiction in a long time, but at no point in that interim were we ever as tempted as we are now, to recreate this glorious story of the manager of a teppanyaki restaurant in Cleveland who takes his Japanese staff to their first American baseball game and that game just so happens to be June 4, 1974.
Yes, they all think, baseball. “Our cultures are so different, but we have baseball in common. Let’s go to the game and bond over this shared and familiar popular sporting experience. That will be fun.”
AND THEN IT’S TEN CENT BEER NIGHT.
Hey, that was fun. Let’s do it again soon, huh?
We’ve had such a good time returning to our old TCBN stomping grounds. And between the guys we met last week and everyone’s contributions, we feel like we’ve really added something to the record this year: the voices of the fans, and their memories.
Next: Father’s Day is coming up, and while we can’t promise a lot of synergy with major holidays around here, we are pretty curious about the time Rocky Colavito got thrown out for “fighting with a fan to protect his father.”
And no matter what the calendar says, the day where you get in trouble for fighting a stranger to protect your dad automatically becomes:
“Father’s Day (Observed),” coming on June 17.
Project 3.18 respectfully declines to reproduce Reddit/TwitterX usernames in our posts unless they obviously contain a first name, which we’ll extract. It sounds so clashingly ridiculous when someone in media cites a cogent or informative comment that was posted somewhere online, only to gamely attribute it to “DoofWarrior82.” Sorry, not going to do it. Instead, we’ll identify such folks by the platform and a randomly-chosen but sincerely-felt complimentary adjective.
I am really enjoying these additional tidbits about TCBN and agree with Paul - the visiting Japanese chefs in the crowd may top the list (do the Japanese have an expression for "take the cake"?). As I wrote and researched Ten Cent Beer Night, I loved hearing about various groups in the crowd - one Indians employee - Randy Adamack, who would go on to have a very long career with the Mariners - was there that night as a fan. He recounted how there was a group of nuns in front of him and they were (predictably) horrified as the game went on. Also, while I was in Cleveland last week promoting the book, it was a treat to have some guys come up to me and tell me they were there and add some memories. One told me that he was there with a group that I thought might no longer be around. They were "Indian Guides," a '70s program that was sort of like the Boy Scouts sponsored by YMCAs. First, it turns out the program is still around but now called Adventure Guides. Second, back to June 4, 1974, this guy went to the game that evening with his Indian Guides group. They were, he said, seated in the upper deck and shortly after watching some guys pee off of the upper deck onto the fans below, the leader of the group decided it was time to lead the boys to an early exit. Thanks, Paul (and everyone adding their anecdotes).
Paul,
Thanks for giving me a reason to get out of bed on Mondays. In the spirit of things, I read your column in the nude. I'm 67, I avoided the mirrors.