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These Facts Will Alter the Perception of Historical Timelines

Khalid Elhassan September 2, 2019 59 min

Things getting out of control during 10 Cent Beer Night. The Dollop

32. The 10 Cent Beer Fiasco (Part 1)

1974 was a bad year for the Cleveland Indians: the team sucked, and fans made their displeasure known by staying away. To boost attendance and drum up business, management brainstormed and came up with a promotion that would go down in infamy as one of Major League Baseball’s worst ideas: bargain basement-priced beer. The Indians informed their fans that the June 4^th, 1974, game against the Texas Rangers would feature 12-ounce beers at the ballpark, sold for just a dime instead of the regular 65 cents price. In of itself, the cheap booze was not a problem: the Indians had offered a 10 cent beer night in 1971. However, cheap booze in a game against the Rangers was a bad mix: a bench-clearing brawl in the teams’ last meeting a week earlier in Texas, had left many Indians fans harboring a grudge against the Rangers.

Promotion Success… and then Failure

The promotion worked far better than expected, with over 25,000 showing up that night. However, most were not there for the game: the concession stands were jam-packed with people buying up to half a dozen beers at a time. Everyone – the young, the old, the drunk, and the soon-to-be drunk – was chugging down the bargain brew, then staggering back for more. It did not take long for fans to get wasted, and in the second inning, after the Rangers hit a home run, a heavyset woman was thrown out after she stormed the field and flashed her big boobs at the crowd, then tried to kiss the umpire. The crowd went wild, then fans began passing joints. Then firecrackers began going off all over the place, making the place seem like a war zone. It was still early innings, and things were about to get way worse.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.