Short Stuff: Cleveland’s Infamous 10-Cent Beer Night

In 1974, the Cleveland (then Indians) baseball club held an unlimited 10 cent beer promotion to attract fans to the game. An actual riot broke out.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck and this is short stuff. And this is
yet another chapter in our ongoing coverage of Cleveland, Ohio history,
because when you dive into all of the stuff we've
talked about, Cleveland has come up a surprising amount of
times it has. And we got great listeners in Cleveland.

(00:27):
Shout out to our buddy Gayle Coonson her husband Mark
and uh they we sold out there and we love
our Cleveland or so we're not making fun of you,
but we can't not talk about ten cent beer Knight. Yeah, yeah, so, um,
ten cent beer Knight is a legendary night in Cleveland. Uh,
if you live in Cleveland, you know all about this.
And it took place in June. And it wasn't that

(00:49):
that the Cleveland at the time they were called the
Indians now they're called the Guardians. It wasn't that the
baseball stadium was giving away beer for ten cents that
made it so remarkable. That was actually like a fairly
routine promotion. Um, if you do the inflation math, that's
equal to about fifty seven cents today. Yeah, all over baseball,

(01:09):
not just Cleveland, right, exactly. And if you went to
the stadium, they weren't keeping track of how many you
had or how many you bought at one time. It
was basically an open invitation to come get very drunk
at the baseball stadium. That was the promotion, right. So
it wasn't just that they had a ten cent beer knight.
It was this particular night underscored how bad an idea

(01:30):
ten cent beer nights at the baseball stadium actually were.
That's right, Uh. And it had to do with, in
particular a lot of things. I watched a little video
about this, and they did point out that the the
mood in Cleveland at the time, given the pollution and
laid off factory workers and the Indians not being very good,
it just it all sort of culminated on this night

(01:53):
that they played the Texas Rangers, who a week prior
their ten cent beer knights. This is just crazy, uh
to think about now, if they had fifty seven cent
beer knight, you know, I would be down there unlimited
fifty seven cent beer night during nine innings at least. Yeah,
And I did see for the Cleveland one um they
had a limit of six cups per person at a time.

(02:17):
So they did. Okay, well, they did have some rules then,
all right, that's respectful. I figured that's just they figured
that's as many as you can carry at once. I
don't know, probably they didn't want you to strain yourself.
So a week before at in Dallas uh Fort Worth
at their stadium, they had tencent beer Knight and there
there's a there was a brawl on the field. There

(02:38):
was a hard slide by the Rangers, retaliation by Cleveland's picture,
which is what usually happens in baseball, and they charged
the mountain and a fight breaks out and it was,
you know, it was a pretty good baseball brawl. And
Billy Martin was coaching Texas at the time, and he
said that he wasn't worried about the next week in
Cleveland because they were asking about retaliation. He said, they

(03:00):
don't have enough fans to worry about, which did not
help the matter. Now, and if you know Billy Martin,
that's a total Billy Martin thing to say, right, So
Billy Martin says this just off handedly. Um. And also,
by the way, during that brawler, after the brawl, the
fans at the Rangers stadium through trash and all sorts
of stuff be dump beer onto the Indians as they

(03:21):
went back to their dugout. So there was a lot
of ire about this in in Cleveland, not the least
of which was Billy Martin's little quip. And there was
at the time a sports talk radio personality named Pete Franklin.
And if you're familiar with sports talk radio, they um,
they talk a lot of trash. They don't, you know,
suffer a lot of um of idiots. I guess you

(03:43):
could put it um. And this Pete Franklin seems to have,
if not been the origin of the modern sports talk
radio personality. He was definitely one of the early people
who was doing this, that's right. So I think he
just sort of riled people up, be the more on
the radio, right, and that would happened over the following week.
He spent most of his sports line show on w

(04:06):
w W e UM just getting everybody riled up to
get to this game, and too to show the Rangers
what we thought about them. All right, I think that's
a great time for a break, and we'll get to
what happened on June six right after this. Alright, So

(04:39):
I said June six, you said June six. It was
really June four, Please don't We just got it wrong
and didn't feel like re recording whole episode. Right, So
it was June four that this game started, and it
was the beginning of a three game homestand and by
the time that um, this this game rolled around twenty thousand,
Clevelander showed up at the game for ten cent Beer Night,

(05:01):
angry at the Texas Rangers, who the Indians were about
to play. That's right, uh, And to say things got
out of hand is again a pretty big understatement. Um.
The video I watched that told me about the six
cups at a time said that at one point people
were buying so much beer the vendors couldn't keep up,
so they just pulled the beer trucks in just outside

(05:23):
the outfield walls. And there were two teenage girls working
the station that got so overwhelmed they left. They just
ran away, and all of a sudden, there were beer
trucks they flipped over the table. And I don't know
if this is true or not, but there were reports
that some of them literally carried tapped kegs of beer

(05:44):
into the stands. Okay, from everything that I've read about this, night.
That is a percent believable, totally is so. In addition
to stuff like that happening, there was a lot of
like foreshadowing that this was not a normal game. A
lot of people were running out onto the field more
than normal. I mean, in the seventies, streaking on a

(06:06):
baseball field wasn't like just totally unheard of. But they
think there was a song about streaking. Yeah, the ones
put me in coach, I'm read give me um so, Uh,
there were two streakers at this game in the third
and the sixth innings, and then there was another I
guess you could call them streakers that came out at

(06:27):
I'm not sure what inning, but it was a father
and son duo who ran into the outfield and mooned
everybody in the bleachers. Yeah, the one one of the streakers. Uh,
this completely naked man and this is not advisable, went
in and ran and slid while the game was going on,
slid into second base but naked. So this is happening

(06:49):
like during this game, and this is this is while
a lid is being kept on everything like that's that's
how how this is like a simmering kettle at this point,
And so you can make a case that all that's
kind of in good fund, even though it's pretty rivaled
and a little unruly to say the least. But um,
it kind of started to turn ugly. Uh at one

(07:11):
specific point when Laren Lee, who was a Cleveland player,
hit a line drive back to the picture for the
Rangers Ferguson Jenkins, and it hit him in the stomach
and dropped Ferguson Jenkins like a sack of potatoes. And
rather than you know, show any kind of concern or
anything like that, that set off the fans to chant

(07:32):
hit him again, hit him again, which kind of tick
the Rangers off a little bit. Yes, so that rolls
people up even more. Uh, they start throwing stuff. They
start throwing hot dogs, batteries, beer, the usual stuff. Billy
Martin comes out and starts blowing kisses into the crowd.
Apparently there's a picture of them doing so this is

(07:55):
like classic Billy Martin. Again. That railed up people even more,
and they started shooting. They brought fireworks and started shooting
fireworks into the Rangers. Dugout, this is during a baseball game.
That's going on everybody. Yeah, they were still trying to
play the game. Yeah, So as this game is going on, UM,
the UM Rangers are winning most of the time. I

(08:18):
think by the UM I think the sixth they had
a five to one lead, but then the Indians scored
two runs in the sixth made it five to five
to three UM, and then they scored two more runs
in the ninth, so it was five to five and
they actually had the winning run on second base. And
we're at bat when the incident that proved to be

(08:39):
the straw that broke the camel's back and and let
all hell break clues happened. That's right, Uh, And it
was well, it shouldn't have happened, but it was a
bit of a miss understanding, and that a fan ran
out and tried to grab Jeff burrows hat off his head. Uh.
Burrows tripped and fell on the ground. But all the
range or saw was Burrows on the ground with a

(09:02):
fan right there, and they thought he was attacked. And
Billy Martin basically says, go get them guys and take
your bats with you. So the Texas Ranger baseball club
streams out onto the field with baseball bats looking for vengeance.
They're met by a flood of angry Cleveland fans who
starts streaming onto the field and they have more than
baseball bats. Bleacher Reports says that they had knives, chains,

(09:26):
and portions of the stadium seats that they had ripped off.
This is like the Simpsons rumbling or something like that.
It's cartoonish, but this is what happened in Cleveland on
this night. Uh that's right. I saw that there were
um fifty security guards in the whole stadium with twenty
thousand fans, so they did not adequately prepare for. Uh

(09:49):
you know what was ended up basically being a riot. Uh.
They ripped they stole the bases, not like, hey, he
stole second base, nice job, they ripped the bases out.
Apparently those bases are still not recovered, so like in
garages in Ohio, like someone has these bases still like guaranteed,

(10:09):
and I'm sure there's a tap k right next to it.
Oh I hope so so, um, we we should definitely
point out that, to their credit, the Indians streamed out
on the field with bats there of their own to
defend the Rangers because they're like, these people might actually
kill some of the Texas Rangers. So baseball players are
getting in fights with rioters on the field, baseball players

(10:29):
from both teams. UM. The the guy who is actually
the head official of the game, Nestor Chailac, suffered a
head injury because he was hit by one of those
stadium seats that have been ripped off. UM. He also
had cut on his hand because he had been hit
by a rock. And finally he calls the game and says,
this game is over. The Indians forfeit and the Rangers

(10:52):
are the winners. I guess, yeah, it's um. There are
a bunch of videos on YouTube that they don't show
it live, but they show photos. It is just it's
hard to believe when you see this this happened. I
mean it was a street brawl between professional athletes. It
showed people like bleeding from the head and being carried
off on stretchers. And you know, today like an NBA player,

(11:17):
you know, if he gets into a like a yelling
at a fan in the stands and there's a confrontation,
it's a really big deal. This was a street fight
on a baseball field during a baseball game. Yeah, it
was like that scene an anchorman. There was a guy
on horseback with a trident. You know, it's like that
but in Cleveland, and it was because everybody had drank

(11:39):
so much beer. So the Indians very wisely went back
to the drawing board and they said, we've got three
more of these beer and nights scheduled, and we've already
been publicizing him, so we can't really take them back
because they'll probably riot again. So we're going to change
it from unlimited beer to just four beers per person.
And that was that for ten cent beer and night. Yeah,
so instead of six at time for total. Yeah, I

(12:03):
saw and you know, again, who knows what these YouTube
videos if these are accurate, But I saw sixty thousand
beers consumed, and uh, how many people are there? Twenty
six thousand, you know, a lot of which were probably underage,
So you do the math um. And he said that
there were nineteen streakers total, So who knows? Man, isn't
that just nuts? Yes, it is crazy to think about.

(12:27):
And boy, if you were there, please please email us.
I would love to hear a story. Yeah, definitely, and
spara thought for those poor two teenage girls who were
chased off of the beer trucks for their lives. Yeah,
and anyone that got legitimately hurt. I mean, we're kind
of laughing at all this, but I didn't see that
anyone was like seriously seriously injured, right, blood streaking down

(12:48):
their face, and they're just like stitches and light stitches.
They were in handcuffs being led away. Had to call
in late for work the next day. I hope we
find another good Cleveland topic. This is turning out to
be by a series. Yeah, it's it's a rich vein,
isn't it. It is? You got anything else? I got
nothing else? All right? Everybody? Then, like beer Night in
June four, Short Stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know

(13:16):
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