10 Cent Beer Night: Cheap suds, rowdy fans and a forfeit for Cleveland 50 years ago (2024)

CLEVELAND, Ohio – In a way, 10 Cent Beer Night erupted over a ballcap.

OK, that’s not entirely true. It actually started with the idea to sell beer for a dime. What could go wrong, right?

The incident – an ignoble moment, blemished memory and oh-so-Cleveland – is marking its 50th anniversary on Tuesday, June 4. It resulted in a forfeit for the Cleveland Indians and spawned countless stories – some embellished, others first-hand accounts.

The Indians had held cheap-beer nights before and after the now infamous game in 1974 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. But the result of selling beer for 10 cents and taking a laissez-faire approach to how many each person could buy (six) resulted in a drunken riot.

For the record, the beer was Stroh’s, normally 65 cents at the ballpark then. Various reports looking back say they were 8-, 10- or 12-ounce cups. It was 3.2% alcohol.

But on this particular night you could go to the Stadium and, for the exact amount you would pay for a first-class stamp, have a beer to quaff to cool off from the 82-degree heat.

Pat Conway, who 14 years after the game would co-found Great Lakes Brewing Co., was in the bleachers. A drunken girl in front of him stood, lifted her dress and displayed a garter on her left thigh. Someone suggested he tuck a dollar in.

“I can’t,” he replied. “That would be 10 beers.”

Related coverage: Last year we spoke with former Cleveland pitcher Milt Wilcox for our coverage of 10 Cent Beer Night: ‘Oh, it’s going to be a wild night in Cleveland’

More coverage: Fox 8 will air “10-cent Beer Night at 50,” a 30-minute documentary at 11 p.m. Tuesday, June 4.

Baseball, beers and bedlam

“That was my first trip into Cleveland,” said Mike Hargrove, a rookie with Texas and who later played for Cleveland and managed the Indians after he retired. “I had never been to Cleveland. It was my first impression of Cleveland. And I came away not really impressed.

“I don’t remember being shocked or scared until it was all over with, until we were in the clubhouse. Then I realized how dangerous it was and felt very fortunate for everybody to get out of it relatively unharmed.”

The preamble to what happened could be seen in a few sparks igniting the proverbial fire.

A week earlier in Texas, brushback pitches against the Rangers’ Lenny Randle caused a brawl that left a bad taste for both teams. Then, before the game in Cleveland, radio man Pete Franklin roused the faithful on the air.

“He really had an audience; his ratings were terrific,” said longtime print and television reporter Dan Coughlin, now 85. “He was the only sports-talk show host in town. He started it. He got everybody riled up pretty good.”

In the stands, the fans - 25,134 had crossed the turnstiles that night – were imbibing to their heart’s content as the Indians opened a three-game series against the Rangers. On the field that Tuesday night, as the beer flowed, the Indians went into the ninth inning down 5-3.

Among the many forgettable fads the 1970s gave us was streaking, naked swooshes of bodies in public view racing across a field, stage or public event. A bit more colorful than, say, dabbing from a few years ago, but hey, it was the ’70s. Just two months before the game, a streaker on camera ran behind David Niven during the Academy Awards ceremony.

In the second inning, a woman ran onto the field and, using Cleveland’s on-deck circle as her stage, lifted her top.

“They were throwing firecrackers into the bullpens from the upper deck,” Coughlin said. The seventh-inning fireworks sent the Texas pitchers scurrying for the dugout. Cleveland pitchers soon followed.

Between the alcohol-soaked atmosphere there was a game, and it was a decent one. In the ninth, George Hendrick scored on Ed Crosby’s single. Cleveland’s Alan Ashby batted for Frank Duffy and beat out an infield hit to load the bases. When John Lowenstein came to the plate, fight-song music played. With a 3-2 count, he lofted a sacrifice fly. Crosby scored, and the game was tied at 5.

File the next moment under the one-bad-apple syndrome.

Fans raced onto the field, several intent on ripping the cap off Rangers right fielder Jeff Burroughs. At this time, Indians left-handed reliever Tom Hilgendorf was hit by a steel folding chair. He was not hurt badly, and a month later he saved a boy from drowning. Umpire Nestor Chylak – who earned a Silver Star and Purple Heart serving in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II – also was injured.

In the day and age when it’s en vogue to keep a “kill the ump!” mentality – what era doesn’t embrace that – Hargrove remembers Chylak fondly.

“I felt like he was really good umpire. His patience wasn’t very long. He got hit with a chair. … I liked Nestor a lot, I really respected him as an umpire.”

In the following day’s Plain Dealer, Burroughs was quoted as saying, “I could see that there was sort of a riot psychology. You have to realize all I had to protect myself with was my fists.”

He also had players from both teams get his back.

“The main thing I remember is turning around and looking out into right field and these people - I don’t know how old they were, they were old enough to know better - had circled Jeff Burroughs and they were reaching out and kicking at him and someone grabbed his hat,” said Hargrove, a multisport athlete who also excelled at football and went about 6 feet, 195 pounds. “When I saw that I took off for right field and got there to try to help out.”

Hargrove continued: “When I got to Jeff there was this great big guy and he was obviously just sloshed and he was standing there advancing on Jeff. He never saw me coming. I tackled him and knocked him to the ground. I thought, ‘He’ll stay here.’ Then I got up and took off and tried to keep other people off of Jeff. It took three cops to handcuff this guy. He was bigger and stronger than I could have handled. I’m glad he didn’t see me coming.”

The Rangers grabbed bats and headed out to help their teammates, and the Indians joined forces with their brethren on the diamond. (Coughlin contends then Texas manager Billy Martin probably saw the potential of a forfeit win and was happy to see the game end.)

Martin had been a scrappy player and expected the same style of play from his guys when he became a manager. But he never said anything to Hargrove about it afterward, and Hargrove did not remember Martin addressing the team in the clubhouse.

“Maybe it was silly for us to go out there, but we weren’t about to leave a man out there on the field unprotected,” Martin told The Plain Dealer then. “It seemed that he might be destroyed. They would have killed him.”

Then came a rich comment from Martin, no stranger to drinking or fighting and usually not a connoisseur of beer, preferring hard liquor:

“I guess these fans just can’t handle good beer.”

At this point, bedlam reigned.

“The things that were thrown at you on the field,” Hargrove remembered. “There had to be 200 pounds of hot dogs thrown at me. Nothing ever hit. We were far away from stands that thank goodness the fans’ aim was not very good. The main thing I remember is how the fans started jumping out of the stands one inning down the right-field bullpen and run across to the left-field bullpen and climb back up into the stands. That started out – if memory serves me, it was 50 years ago – two or three people did it one inning, then all of a sudden it was five or 10, then by the seventh inning it was a hundred people running back and forth. I remember a father and son went out in centerfield and mooned the crowd, which I thought was kind of weird. I remember a guy streaking, and security chasing him down. He had two black socks on. He jumped over the right-centerfield wall. Just as they got to him they grabbed his legs and came down with one black sock and he took off. I don’t know where he ended up. So they came away with one black sock.”

Meanwhile, in the press box, someone told Coughlin the game couldn’t continue because someone stole the bases.

“Talk about literally a stolen base,” he said.

And as Coughlin remembered, “There was so much going on, no one could see it all.”

But the alcohol haze lingered.

“The craziest thing I saw was at the very end - eight or 10 teenagers standing on top of the Rangers dugout chanting for them to come out and fight,” Coughlin said. “They had turned off all the main lights in the Stadium, the place was empty. With my reporter’s notebook clearly visible I climbed up on top of the dugout. I asked, ‘What are you guys trying to prove here, they’re gone.’ And a kid behind another one reached out and punched me right in the jaw. But I didn’t even feel it. I shook it off. He didn’t have his feet planted.

“Someone said it was a kid from Cathedral Latin, a big high school with tough Irish and Italian kids on the east side. Late,r I heard it was a kid from Solon. It couldn’t have been a kid from Cathedral Latin because they were tough guys. To say I didn’t even feel it would be a terrible insult for anyone from Cathedral Latin.”

The dust settles

The official forfeit score was 9-0. Lost in the night was the hitting exploits of Texas’ Tom Grieve, who banged out two homers. In the fourth inning, while Grieve was circling the bases on his second home run, a naked man slid into second base.

Just more than 1 billion dimes were minted in 1974. Safe to say a lot of them were flung at concessions stands in Municipal Stadium on June 4. And in case you were wondering, a dime then is worth about 64 cents today. So it’s a safe bet a similar promotion would go over as enthusiastically now as it did 50 years ago.

The closest thing to a dime beer in the park now are $2 cans of Miller Lite or Coors Light as part of the Cleveland Guardians’ Pregame in the District promotion. But that two-hour promotion ends before the game begins.

At least two Northeast Ohio breweries are holding 10 Cent Beer Night celebrations. Goldhorn has one scheduled for tonight – Saturday, June 1 – and Collision Bend will mark the day at its Cleveland and Euclid locations on Tuesday, June 4.

One Philadelphia-based marketing company, Braithwaite, even posted an item on its web page about the promotion, asking: “Can marketing be too effective?”

The story merited national headlines, but one city that had football, not baseball, on its mind was Seattle. On June 4, 1974, the NFL awarded Seattle a franchise for the 1976 season.

Security and police in Cleveland Municipal Stadium were overwhelmed. Forty-eight police officers were in attendance - 16 more than usual. About a dozen arrests were made, and 20 cars from three districts and the tactical and impact unit responded as backup.

Hargrove recalls a lot of waiting time after the game for the team to be shuttled back to their hotel less than a mile away. City police waited outside their dressing room.

“I remember coming off the field and people standing on top of the dugout and spitting down on you as you went back down into the dugout,” he said. “Then we went up to the clubhouse and sat there for I don’t know how many hours. Then we got on the bus and the police escorted us to the hotel. It was the old Hollenden House. We were told not to come down out of our rooms until noon the next day so a lot of us went to bed hungry.”

Martin called the Indians to thank them for helping.

The next night, the Indians – playing to a more typical crowd of 8,101 fans – beat Texas 9-3 on the strength of a seven-run sixth inning.

Hargrove would win Rookie of the Year honors in 1974, batting .323. He spent his final seven seasons in a Cleveland uniform and eventually would manage the Indians.

Ken Aspromonte managed the 1974 Indians, and Larry Doby – who broke the color barrier with Cleveland in 1947 – was a coach.

Aspromonte was quoted the next day, incredulous about what had happened.

“I’ve never seen anything like that in all my life,” he was quoted as saying, “and I have played baseball all over the world.”

I cover restaurants, beer, wine and sports-related topics on our life and culture team. For my recent stories, here’s a cleveland.com directory. WTAM-1100’s Bill Wills and I talk food and drink around 8:20 a.m. Thursdays. Twitter and IG: @mbona30. My latest book, co-authored with Dan Murphy: “Joe Thomas: Not Your Average Joe” by Gray & Co.

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