To fully understand the chaos of June 4, 1974, you have to go back a few days, when the teams met in the Rangers’ home ballpark in Arlington, Tex., on May 29. In the eighth inning, Texas second baseman Lenny Randle, angered that the previous pitch had nearly hit him, laid down a drag bunt, and as pitcher Milt Wilcox charged to field it, Randle ran out of the baseline and clotheslined him.
Cleveland first baseman John Ellis tackled Randle, sparking a benches-clearing brawl. “It was kind of a masterful attempt to get back at the pitcher,” Tom Grieve, who was the Rangers’ designated hitter that game, said in an interview last month.
In the Baseball-Reference.com box score, the play is listed as “Bunt Groundout: P unassisted,” proving the adage that some of the game’s little things just don’t show up in the box score.
The brew was flowing freely at Texas’s own beer promotional night — including on the heads of Cleveland players, courtesy of Rangers fans. A video of the incident shows an irate Dave Duncan — the Cleveland catcher who would go on to become one of the game’s best pitching coaches — scaling the dugout roof to go after a fan who had hit him with a full can of beer before teammates drag him back down.
After the game, Texas Manager Billy Martin was already dreading his team’s upcoming visit to Cleveland for 10-Cent Beer Night.
“Oh, Lord, that’s just what we need,” Martin said, adding that he expected Cleveland fans would be angry at him for the brawl, the Associated Press reported. “I’m not exactly looking forward to it. … I’ll get the blame on 10-Cent Beer Night — you can bet on that.”
But he also poked Cleveland’s fan base when a reporter asked him about the possibility of payback.
“They don’t have enough fans there to worry about,” Martin said, and there was some truth to the taunt. Cleveland’s team, which is now known as the Guardians, averaged fewer than 14,000 fans at Cleveland Stadium that season. But it would draw 25,000 for the beer-soaked rematch.
“There was a little bit of bad blood brewing between the Indians and the Rangers,” Grieve said. “And then you have 10-Cent Beer Night? It couldn’t get any worse than that.”
Cleveland wasn’t breaking new ground with its promotion. Minor and major league ballparks had staged similar ones throughout the early 1970s.
But several factors made Cleveland’s promotion backfire spectacularly in addition to the, well, 10-cent beer. The previous week’s brawl and Martin’s mockery helped raise the temperature ahead of the series — as did the provocative broadcasts of Cleveland radio host Pete Franklin.
“All week before that game, Pete Franklin kept up a steady drumbeat with listeners about how we needed to get even with the Rangers for the brawl the previous week,” Dan Coughlin, who covered the game for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, said in a 2012 interview with the paper. “He was priming the pump for an incident like the one that took place.”
It also was a chaotic era in American sports, with athletes often subjected to abuse from fans, sometimes in the face of undermanned security powerless to do anything about it. At the National League Championship Series the previous October, angry New York Mets fans at Shea Stadium threw everything they could get their hands on at Cincinnati Reds left fielder Pete Rose, including beer cans, hot dogs, hamburgers and even a whiskey bottle. The series ended in near-riot two days later when fans stormed the field after the final out.
Such misbehavior continued into the 1974 season. When Houston Astros outfielder Bob Watson crashed into the left field wall at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium in May, the broken glass from his shattered sunglasses led to gashes in his face. As he lay stunned against the fence, a group of fans pelted him with beer, ice cubes and paper cups, according to a June 1974 Sports Illustrated story, which reported that the fans challenged Watson’s teammates to come into the stands and fight them.
“It seems like everybody in the outfield stands is either young kids or drunk old men. It’s unbelievable what we put up with,” Astros outfielder Bob Gallagher told the magazine.
It was in this cauldron that young fans flocked to the Cleveland ballpark June 4 to take advantage of the cheap beer, many putting a down payment on the fun before the game. In his book about the 1973-75 Rangers, “Seasons in Hell,” beat reporter Mike Shropshire recounted what he saw on the train to the game:
“It was my educated guess that most of these fans were already loaded on Wild Turkey and whatever medicine it is that truck drivers take to stay awake on long hauls. Their condition suggested that they might be on their way home from, and not on their way to, a 10-cent Beer Night game.”
‘Uncontrolled beasts’
Cleveland pitcher Dick Bosman had the unique perspective of having been traded the previous year from the Rangers. He pitched 2⅔ innings out of the bullpen on 10-Cent Beer Night.
“You knew something was going to happen,” Bosman recalled in an interview last month. “Everything leading up to the game, you just knew that something really bizarre was going to happen. The home bullpen in those days was down the left field line and it was right up against the stands, and all you have to do is breathe deep and you’re going to get high because everybody was stoned.”
In the second inning, a woman came onto the field, exposed her breasts as fans hollered their approval and tried to kiss umpire Nestor Chylak, who rebuffed her advances. Although the promotion was clearly not designed to draw families to the ballpark, a father-and-son duo engaged in some 1970s-style familial bonding, jumping onto the field and mooning the players in the fifth inning.
“They mooned the stadium from second base and then raced through the outfield, jumped over the center field fence and disappeared,” Grieve said. He added that the players thought some of these high jinks were funny until they started to add up.
As night fell, the drunken antics turned darker. In the seventh inning, Rangers relievers relocated from the bullpen to the dugout after being assaulted by fireworks, smoke bombs and empty beer cups.
Few fans appeared to be paying attention to the game, which Cleveland had rallied to tie at 5 with two runs in the ninth inning. Then a fan ran onto the field and yanked the cap off Texas’s star right fielder, Jeff Burroughs. That fan, 19-year-old Terry Yerkic, told ESPN in 2014 that Burroughs turned around and kicked him in the thigh, then stumbled. Fans started pouring onto the field, and in the Rangers’ dugout, the pugnacious Martin rallied his men, grabbing a bat and reportedly exhorting, “Let’s go get ’em, boys.”
“To me, the most embarrassing picture is people coming out of the dugout,” Grieve said. “It looks like the charge of the Light Brigade.”
The Rangers soon found themselves encircled and outnumbered.
“What had been a largely congenial gathering turned combative,” Shropshire wrote in his book. “Woodstock had become Kent State.”
Fans on the field threw beer bottles, firecrackers and chairs, and some sported knives, according to a wire service story. Now Cleveland players came out of their dugout.
“We had to go out there and help the Rangers,” Cleveland pitcher Steve Kline said after the game, UPI reported. “We couldn’t leave them hanging.”
Cleveland pitcher Tom Hilgendorf got hit in the head with a steel chair, and Chylak, the umpire, also got smacked on the head.
“I figured as long as they’re not shooting or anything like that, we’ll get it done,” Chylak later told Cleveland announcer Joe Tait, as Tait recalled. “All of a sudden, I felt some pressure behind the left heel of my shoe. I turned around, looked down and there was a hunting knife sticking in the ground right behind my shoe. That’s when I said: ‘Game. Set. Match. We’re out of here!’ ”
He declared a forfeit against Cleveland, meaning a 9-0 win for Texas. It was the first MLB forfeit since 1971, when the Senators gave up a victory to the Yankees in their final game in Washington as fans stormed RFK Stadium in another scene of mayhem.
“It’s just disgraceful,” Cleveland Manager Ken Aspromonte said after the 1974 game. “
“It’s not just baseball. It’s the society we live in. Nobody seems to care about anything.”
“They were just uncontrollable beasts,” he said.
James T. Carney, Cleveland’s safety director, said the cheap beer turned young guys into “wild men” who didn’t know what they were doing. “They just went berserk. It’s just an act of God that nobody was killed.”
Still, Cleveland blamed the umpiring crew for the debacle and protested the forfeit, which the American League didn’t overturn.
“While we deplore the incidents which led to the forfeiture, we also feel that there was no warning given to the fans during the course of the game by the umpires that any continuation of interruption of play would lead to a declaration of a forfeiture of the game,” Cleveland General Manager Phil Seghi wrote in a telegraph to AL President Lee MacPhail. The team also argued Martin had provoked the fans by marching his players on the field. Martin, meanwhile, said the umps should have called the game a forfeit earlier.
“They blamed Martin. They blamed the umpires. They even blamed the full moon,” William Barry Furlong wrote in a June 7 column in The Washington Post. “They blamed everybody but themselves. And the beer they sold.”