The Zoo is Closed - Part 2 of 2
In 1980, intergenerational angst fuels a battle for the soul of the Tiger Stadium bleachers.
Last time, losing his patience after the Tiger Stadium bleacher crowd began dispensing gratuities to opposing outfielders, the Tigers’ president and general manager, Jim Campbell, shut down 20% of his ballpark. Now, after the fans are turned away by shuttered box office windows, Detroit sorts through its sticks and carrots.
Here’s Part 1.
On the night of June 16, after yet another bleacher debacle at Tiger Stadium, Jim Campbell tossed and turned. “I was lying in bed after the game, thinking about what happened, and how we could put a stop to it. Something had to be done.” When he woke up the next morning, Campbell decided what “something” would be. The bleacher fans at Tiger Stadium had pushed him too far, and had now reached the “find out” phase of their season of misbehavior.
That day, on Campbell’s order, the Tigers played in front of empty bleachers. Not mostly empty, not nearly empty, not extended-rain-delay-in-April empty. The lights were on, the team was in the field, but the bleachers were closed. Twelve thousand seats sat fallow and forlorn as the Tigers beat the Brewers, 3-0.
“I’m just goddamn fed up with them,” Campbell said as he announced his decision to keep the bleachers closed. “I’m sick and tired. It’s dangerous. It gives the city a bad name.”
The closure was an extreme measure, but he felt the fans out there needed a reminder that purchasing a two-dollar bleacher ticket did not exempt the buyer from the terms and conditions of civilized society. Campbell acknowledged that closing off the cheapest seats in the park would unfairly punish the Tigers’ most budget-conscious fans for the actions of the bad actors in their midst, but something had to give.
We simply will not tolerate this mindless type of mischief. It’s not fair to our overwhelming number of good fans who come to the park to enjoy themselves with their families. It’s not fair to the visiting players who come to Tiger Stadium. We expect safety and courtesy to be extended to our players when they visit other parks. And we’ll do everything possible to provide it to visiting players in return.
The duration of the closure was open-ended, but a look at the team’s upcoming schedule suggested Campbell’s dramatic gesture wasn’t quite as bold as seemed. After June 17, the Tigers were leaving town on an 11-game road trip, and pulling back even further, the team would be on the road for 30 of the next 37 calendar days. Even closing the bleachers for a month would have a relatively minor impact on the team coffers, a sentence akin to punishing a pitcher with a seven-day suspension.
“I’ll guarantee you this, though,” Campbell said. “If something doesn’t work, I’ll close the goddamn thing for the rest of the year.”
“It’s a shame it had to come to this,” said shortstop Alan Trammell, looking out at the empty stands, “but I think it’s a pretty good decision. It’s been getting pretty bad out there.”
Platoon outfielder Dave Stegman played center field that night and he had to agree.
Probably that was the best move they could have made, until people show they can control themselves. They’re out there in their own little world. I don’t think I would enjoy a game too much out there. I think the people up there have to realize they’re not adding to the game, they’re detracting from it. I think that showed up last night. The rest of the fans were booing them.
Detroit’s sportswriters quickly circled back to their various bleacher sources, now living in exile across the city.
“They are not fans by any stretch of the imagination,” one regular bleacherite said of the bad actors who’d caused the shutdown, making a very period-appropriate analogy: “Calling those rowdy ones ‘fans’ is like calling Iranian terrorists ‘students.’”
“I’ve been coming to the park since I was six,” another said, “and I’ve never seen it as bad as it has been this year. It seems as though they are not watching the game. All they are doing is waiting for something to happen. The games run long and I guess children will get restless.”
Campbell was done waiting for something to happen, and his decision to leave significant money on the table spurred other authorities into action. The Detroit City Council looked into an emergency ordinance that would make smuggling in potentially dangerous objects (like bottles) a crime. Existing ordinances prohibited fans from throwing things on the field, but if they were caught bringing them in, there was no penalty other than the confiscation of the item. Under the new law, being caught with contraband would be a misdemeanor; violators would be subject to a $500 fine, 90 days in jail, or both.
The Tigers backed the idea, but even the city attorney supporting the legislation acknowledged its shortcomings. Private security did not and would not have the authority to strip-search anyone—George Puscas’ rum-smuggling friend1 was living proof of that. “We have to be concerned about [fans’] constitutional rights,” the attorney said. The city was also concerned about the capacity of Detroit’s crowded jails and overtaxed police. “The intent is to keep people from bringing these things in, not filling up the jails.” The concern was enough that the ordinance never made it to the Council for a vote.
The American League also took action, issuing a most novel edict. Beach balls had become a pretty regular hallmark in the bleacher seats, a tradition that had begun at University of Michigan and Detroit Lions football games and eventually spilled over into baseball.
At Tiger Stadium, the object of the game was to swat the beach ball around, keeping it up in the air and off the field. But as a ball drifted near the railing, an uncareful fan and a fickle breeze would inevitably push it out onto the grass. The last person who touched it would then be pelted with empty beer cups and other trash, but since these unfortunates were often those closest to the perimeter, much of that debris also ended up on the field of play. The Tigers kept a dedicated attendant stashed in the old center field bullpen whose job was to retrieve beach balls and beach ball-related detritus. In an earlier game against the White Sox, one reporter noted that a total of seven beach balls had landed on the field, which you are supposed to find appalling.
On orders of American League President Lee MacPhail, beach balls were now expressly prohibited. If an umpire saw a ball floating innocently out in the seats, they were to stop the game until stadium personnel had confiscated it. Repeated violations of the “no beach ball” rule could lead to a forfeiture. Call it the Campbell Rule.
“There’s no question that these beach balls falling onto the field leads to other forms of disruptive behavior,” Campbell said. “This is a ballpark, not a damn beach party.” Once lauded as one of the most patient executives in sports, Campbell had become an old grump seemingly overnight, vowing to keep the kids’ balls off of his very large and well-manicured lawn.
Not everyone thought the Tigers’ president was appropriately meeting the moment. The events of June 16 didn’t quite rise to the level of some of the previous decade’s harbingers of societal collapse, like Ten Cent Beer Night and, much more recently, Disco Demolition in Chicago. Tiger fans were a little rambunctious, but wasn’t having fun the point?
FM rock station WABX started a petition drive protesting the closure. The station had a major rooting interest, as it was in the midst of a season-long “Bleacher Creatures” promotion in which four or five listeners a night could call in to receive bleacher tickets for every home game. That nickname, “Bleacher Creatures,” had kicked around baseball here and there for most of the century, but between the WABX promotion and the overlapping run of misanthropy, it would become closely tied with Detroit’s “anti-establishment” outfield fandom of the 1980s.
“Jim Campbell just ought to be happy that people pay anything to see his last place team,” one angry columnist wrote. Another began referring to him as “Turnkey Jim.”
Campbell’s quest to tame the rambunctious youth of the bleachers mirrored countless other struggles between the aging Greatest Generation and the Baby-Boom hordes they themselves had unleashed on the world. Like so many of his peers, the Tigers’ president had served in World War II, in the Naval Air Corps, and the American way of life being featured in the outfield looked less and less like the one he’d bravely fought for.
“Some people don’t want to behave when they come to the ballpark,” he told the Detroit Free Press in an interview during the closure. “The chanting of obscenities…how do you stop it? You make an announcement over the PA system, and it gets worse…”
It wasn’t so much fighting in the bleachers as much as it was everybody seemed to be throwing debris of all kinds onto the playing field—from cherry bombs to bottles to old crumpled-up paper cups, what have you.
Was it getting rowdier out there over the last few years? the interviewer asked Campbell.
The bleachers here have always been a problem. Somebody said it’s kind of a launching pad. You’re high up over the players…but the other ballparks have had their problems. The Yankees, Boston, Chicago. But just because it happens in other places doesn’t make it right here. We’re just damned sick and tired of it and we’re not going to put up with it.
This last line may sound familiar, as it was becoming something of a motto in certain circles at the time:
“I don’t know,” Campbell said. “One fellow, a writer, suggested that it’s the unemployment…” He trailed off. Everybody did, eventually. “Hell, I’m no expert on these things. All I know is that it’s here.”
Was he an outdated relic? A defender of the American way? Or, as one commentator put it, “merely a man, in charge of a multimillion-dollar-a-year business, trying to run it the best way he knows how.”
The Tigers left on their road trip and dropped the first game to the Twins, leaving them in seventh (last) place in the American League East and 11 games out of first. But then they ripped off nine victories in a row, sweeping the White Sox in four, the Indians in three, and taking the first two from the Blue Jays. Returning home, the club had climbed to third place, within 6.5 games of the Yankees.
Riding the good vibes, Campbell announced the bleachers would reopen for the upcoming homestand “on an experimental basis.”
If the fans hadn’t learned their lesson, Campbell warned, any further notable infractions would result in the bleachers being closed for the rest of the season.
The Tigers made a few adjustments to their internal procedures. Beer would henceforth be limited to two cups per customer. In fact, this was supposed to have been the policy all along, but now the club would actually expect concessionaires to adhere to the rule.
Taps would be shut off in the sixth inning on doubleheader days, and—the coup de grace—Tiger Stadium switched to smaller beer cups.
The bleachers reopened on July 30 without incident. Roughly half the crowd of 30,000 that night seemed to be undercover journalists hoping to witness trouble, which may have contributed to how smoothly the evening went.
Members of a doubled security team counted beers and checked bags more inquisitively. “Security at the stadium was stiff enough,” one regular complained. “My wife’s beach bag is always searched for bottles at the gate, and she looks as dangerous as the Virgin Mary.”
Though glad to be back, many fans lamented what seemed to be the end of innocence. “Unbelievable,” one said, staring at a nine-ounce cup of beer he’d purchased for 75 cents. “You could snuff that much up your nose,” a nearby customer observed. Before the shutdown, a 14-ounce beer had sold for $1.15.2
Just one determined individual was arrested for public drunkenness and escorted out. Beach ball sightings were scarce and fleeting. With fewer distractions, attention turned back to baseball, and the baseball was good: Detroit beat the Cleveland Indians with a six-run rally in the seventh inning, and the team would soon make a cameo appearance in second place.
Jim Campbell had won this first round, but among many things the 1980s gave us was the advent of the bigger, louder sequel. In 1985, the Bleacher Creatures would claim proper-noun status and strike back with a devastating new weapon, prompting an even stronger backlash from the authorities, including Campbell. Coins and fireworks were one thing, but once fans started doing “the Wave,” there would really be hell to pay.
Project 3.18 will do that sequel at some point, but we’ll wait until the effects technology advances enough to support the story we have to tell.
It’s been a while since we’ve done any ejections, and we’ve decided to set ourselves a challenge for next week. We’re going to try to run the gamut of the human sensory experience in stories of people getting thrown out of baseball games. We feel strong on three of them, but the stretch is where the growth happens, right?
On September 23: “The Five Senses”
One More Thing
We’re not sure if it’s still a tradition, but for most of the 2010s, fans attending the College World Series coordinated at least one “Beach Ball Bonanza,” an event which seems to have been both unsanctioned and wildly popular. The image we used in this story is from the 2017 series (and Jim Campbell’s darkest, most feverish nightmares). Here’s a wonderful series of photos from the 2012 incarnation, if you like fun.
Campbell read the Free Press sports pages just like everyone else and he was not a fan of Puscas’ “rum under where?” column, which had become semi-notorious. “He’s trying to make a folk hero out of that guy…what the hell is going on when a reporter writes a column like that?”
If you do the math, at eight cents per ounce, the Tigers were actually offering a one-cent discount. Something for the fans.
Now he’s what Rizzuto would’ve referred to as a Huckleberry.
Nice piece Paul. I actually don’t remember any issues the Yanks had or at least that was in the news. But I do remember Reggie Jackson picking up change from the outfield grass fans were tossing. I kept thinking to myself, this guy owns how many cars & he’s picking dimes & quarters up off the ground?? Holy Cow!!