Stadium Beer Night Fans Riot, Ending Cleveland 's Rally in Forfeit

June 11, 2022 8:18 PM

"They don't have enough fans to worry about." - Billy Martin. Cleveland’s Infamous 10-Cent Beer Night (STYK podcast) or watch on YouTube
posted by shoesfullofdust (9 comments total)

Mod note: Noting that the topic has been posted before — but from what I'm seeing, it's been many years, and is totally fine to repost at this point.
posted by taz (staff) at 2:51 AM on June 12, 2022

"What an unfortunate thing to happen on dozen egg night!"
posted by tonycpsu at 6:27 AM on June 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

A bunch of previouslies, thanks to zamboni! double thanks to taz for the relay!

Remembering 10-Cent Beer Night
Wow. This is uh... This is a black day for baseball.
“I remember from the get-go, it wasn’t a normal crowd.”
Rusty Torres Was At Three Baseball Riots
"Let's go get 'em, boys," he said, arming himself with a fungo bat....
posted by shoesfullofdust at 7:39 AM on June 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Staggeringly stupid event on a number of levels, but the linked ESPN piece is garbage copaganda.

A 70 year old man (whose rosacea suggests he may have had a few in his life) brags about beating down drunk ass teenagers alongside a SWAT team is pretty embarrassing "journalism".
posted by RajahKing at 8:01 AM on June 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thank you for this! I plan on going through these links.

I thought about this when I heard, through the MBMBAM podcast’s very funny reporting on it, that a fast food chain called Spangles was putting in 99-cent margaritas and screwdrivers.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:45 AM on June 12, 2022

The Dollop did a hilarious ep on this topic. They also did an episode on the Disco Demolition riot. I'm not a sports person but I do love tales of this sort of mayhem.
posted by LindsayIrene at 8:54 AM on June 12, 2022

One of the things that struck me about that ESPN piece was that it put this thing squarely in the context of the Rust Belt really starting to rust, with it hitting Ohio (and particularly Cleveland) really hard. The way that the fans really came to do damage (Nestor Chylak forfeited the game after nearly being hit by a hunting knife--who brings a hunting knife to a baseball game?) reminded me of a chapter from Bob Greene's Billion Dollar Baby, about him touring with Alice Cooper at about that time, and how when they played Toledo, the "fans" pelted the stage with sufficiently dangerous objects that the band left after about two numbers.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:49 AM on June 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

There are things that are obvious in hindsight. But there are also things that are obvious in foresight.
posted by tommasz at 5:32 PM on June 12, 2022

I always remember this Tim Russet quote (from the Wikipedia entry on 10 cent beer night:

"NBC newscaster Tim Russert, then a student at the Cleveland–Marshall College of Law, attended the game. "I went with $2 in my pocket," recalled the Meet the Press host. "You do the math."
posted by stltony at 9:24 AM on June 13, 2022 [1 favorite]