“I found out who the guy is,” Martin said, referring to his irascible critic after the Rangers had beaten Kansas City to stay one-half game ahead of Oakland. “He’s a doctor. Can you believe that? Before long I’m going to bust in on him while he’s operating on somebody and start yelling, ‘Don’t cut on his gallbladder, you stupid goddamn quack! It’s his liver that’s fucked up!’ and see how he likes that. This guy is a real son of a bitch and one of these nights …”
What Billy was trying to say, of course, was: “Look here at the feisty New Fan this team is bringing to the park.” He was right. Granted, the ticket-buyers who were finally discovering major-league baseball in North Texas were not exactly conducive to the wholesome family atmosphere that the tourist bureau of Arlington claimed would be showing up for the games in this middle-to-upper-class suburb. Rather, the fans who were turned on by what certain sports-writers had termed Ranger Madness took on the aspect of a motorcycle gang crashing a Pentecostal church service. But, to paraphrase Jimmy Swaggart, if they’re leaving money in the collection plate, then who gives a big rat’s ass?
Slowly, Martin watched as the personality of his team gradually appeared to fit the contours of the New Fan attitude, and at one Wednesday night game against Cleveland everything fell into place. One of a few new Rangers who had not seen any service with Whitey Herzog’s memorable F-Troop of 1973 was Lenny Randle, who could be plugged in to play second or third, center or left. Randle stood only about five-foot-eight, but was built like Mighty Mouse, biceps and calves like bowling balls, and was Billy Martin’s kind of guy. That was not surprising because Lenny Randle had also been Frank Kush’s kind of guy on the football team at Arizona State. Kush had been the coach who eventually punched out his own punter after he shanked a kick in a big game and in deportment made Woody Hayes look like Captain Kangaroo. So, when Lenny Randle slammed his shoulder into the midsection of Jack Brohamer, the Indians’ shortstop, to break up a double play in the fourth inning, this was a tactic that came naturally to Lenny Randle.
When Randle came to bat in the bottom of the eighth inning, Cleveland pitcher Milt Wilcox decided to retaliate against Randle for attempting to rearrange the Indian shortstop’s innards. Wilcox whistled a pitch that actually passed about six inches behind Randle’s head, the ultimate signal that a batter has done something to arouse considerable disfavor from the opposing team.
Randle ducked the pitch, looked at the Cleveland catcher, Dave Duncan, and said, “What’s going on?”
“The pitch just slipped, I guess,” Duncan told him. Baseball, at the professional level, revolves almost entirely around the arts of intimidation and, in this game, the pitcher commands the entire munitions supply. The man on the mound can direct his telemetry toward the temple, larynx or kneecap whenever the whim strikes him, and the batter has virtually no means of counter-argument except to lower his head and look the part of the fool as he rushes the mound like a jealous husband barging into a wayward wife’s motel nest d’amour.
There is one artful ploy that is sometimes discussed and that involves the batter dropping a bunt along the first base line and then extracting his vengeance when the pitcher comes prancing over to field the ball. But because of timing and location, that tactic is hardly as easy as it might sound, and Lenny Randle is the only player I ever saw actually make it happen.
On the next pitch after the one that sailed behind his head, Randle bunted the ball toward first. The bunt was not perfectly placed but close enough for mayhem, and Randle had only to veer about four feet from the base path in order to level a forearm in the direction of Milt Wilcox’s jawbone. Then, to continue his demonstration, Randle kept running and tried to butt first baseman John Ellis square in the nuts.
Ellis, who picked up extra money in the off-season working as a bounty hunter for bailbondsmen, was not the sort to take kindly to Randle’s show of pugnacity. Fists began to flail, players from both teams joined the brawl, people were punched, kicked, stomped. Unlike the fights that happen in pro football and ice hockey, players can actually get hurt in some of these baseball uprisings because they are not encumbered by helmets, face guards and skates.
In this particular fracas, nobody became disabled. But some of the Rangers’ fans decided that this should be an audience-participation program and were slinging cups of beer onto the visiting players. One, a bearded guy in cutoff Levis, a tank top emblazoned with the printed slogan “Eat More Possum” and wearing sandals, had climbed atop the Indians’ dugout and issued a direct challenge to Dave Duncan to join him there for a rumble just before being hauled off by the stadium cops. Afterward, Duncan said the man on the dugout “looked like Ben Hur and for a minute I thought I was going to have to fight him.”
“Our fans,” said an obviously pleased Toby Harrah, “are getting more and more like the ones in Venezuela.” The Rangers’ shortstop was talking about the patrons of the winter leagues who embellish the ballpark setting with live serpents and firearms.
One week later, the Rangers were scheduled to visit Cleveland and Municipal Stadium, the big hollow canyon by the lake. Some of the Rangers’ players had hinted that the resumption of unpleasantries might not come as a surprise. If that were to be the case, a ballpark promotion scheduled for the opening night of the series was well-timed to accelerate any hostilities. Wednesday was to be 10-Cent Beer Night at Municipal Stadium.
The same celebration had been conducted in Arlington a couple of times and, according to rumors, action in the cheap seats had resembled an old Clint Eastwood spaghetti western by the seventh inning. There could be little doubt that with the summer approaching, fans in Cleveland could certainly match those in Texas in the category of uninhibited behavior. Alcohol, adrenalin and testosterone can be a high-combustion combination in the bloodstream when mixed in the correct proportions.
On certain recent occasions I had found it more convenient to make travel arrangements separate from the baseball team. That had been the case when I arrived in Cleveland at six P.M. on Wednesday, an hour and a half before the start of the game. On the commuter train from Hopkins Airport into downtown it became clear that something really special—or at least different—was looming at the ballpark on 10-Cent Beer Night. At each stop the train was filling with young people obviously headed for the game to take advantage of the promotion. Everybody was wearing Indians baseball caps and Indians batting helmets. As a court-certified expert on brain abuse, 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. It appeared that many had been preparing for this event for perhaps a couple of days.
A paid crowd of 23,000 was in the stands when the game began at dusk—quite a gang for a weeknight game in Cleveland. Throughout the first inning little detonations that sounded like cherry bombs could be heard in the stands. The cadence of the drummers in rightfield was faster than usual. It was nice to see fans like these in such a jolly mood. Every Ranger was robustly booed as he stepped up to bat. That was, I felt, because of the afterglow from the big fight with the Indians in Arlington one week before. Of course, while those suckers in the stands were paying a dime for their cups of Strohs beer, we were drinking it free in the pressbox.
In the top of the second inning a fan climbed from the stands and appeared to stagger into the on-deck circle near the Indians’ dugout. This was a large female fan and she exposed her breasts to the crowd, spurring an ovation so thunderous that it must have eclipsed anything that Luciano Pavarotti would hear on his best day. Now the mood of the evening was clearly in place. A cop escorted the lady from the playing field. From the pressbox set up along the facing of the upper deck between home plate and first base, I was afforded a superior vantage point for that spectacle and most of those that would follow. If it is true the decade of the Seventies was earmarked by be
havioral residue of the spirit of the late Sixties, then Beer Night in Cleveland was the archetypal illustration of what all of that was to represent.
The Rangers jumped out to an early lead on Beer Night and when Tom Grieve crossed the plate after hammering his second homerun of the game in the top of the fourth, a naked man slid into second base. No—it was not a Rangers ballplayer but a fan who had escaped the stands. In the fifth, two males who were later identified by police as a father-and-son act, trotted out to an infield position and mooned the stands. Again, the Cleveland police were there to take this family unit into custody. In anticipation of fraternity-house ritual behavior at the stadium on Beer Night, the police had doubled its customary squad for ballpark duty. Forty-eight uniformed officers had been stationed in the stands, and the crowd, now eager to get on with the hunt, sensed that forty-eight cops would be a poor match against 23,000 drunks. After the seventh-inning stretch, the playing field was the place to be. The primary point of entry was an area near the rightfield foul pole. Many stopped by to say hello to Jeff Burroughs, the Rangers’ rightfielder, who looked like a campaigning politician glad-handing a procession of workers at the factory gate.
When the game reached the bottom of the ninth inning, the temperament of the crowd became strikingly like that of Billy Martin when he reached his hour of belligerence in the cocktail lounge. What had been a largely congenial gathering turned combative. Woodstock had become Kent State. Rangers outfielders were under missile attack now, bombarded with bottles, rocks, golf balls and other debris. Someone ran onto the field and attempted to snatch Burroughs’ glove. Burroughs responded, first shoving the intruder and then chasing him back over the rightfield wall. And now, people poured onto the field like ants.
From the Rangers’ dugout along the third-base line players surged out with the “yahoo” élan of the old Third Cavalry, racing out to rescue Jeff Burroughs, armed with baseball bats instead of sabres. Cleveland players were on the field, too, fighting off their own fans.
Nestor Chylak, the chief umpire, trotted into the Indians’ dugout and placed an urgent phone call to the public-address announcer, who then informed the crowd that the ballgame was over—forfeited to the Rangers. At this point they presumably ceased the sales of the dime beer as well. From my safe haven in the pressbox I was delighted by the entire spectacle since my dispatch to the newspaper back in Texas would offer something out of the ordinary and I figured that the players’ post-game quotes might not be as clichéd as usual.
This beat the hell out of Jim Merritt’s greaseball press conference here the previous August. By God, if a sportswriter is looking for a story, then come to Cleveland.
My first stop was not the visiting clubhouse but the little dressing room occupied by the four umpires. In the big leagues I believe a game is forfeited approximately every third decade. Chylak, the head ump who made the call to terminate the proceedings, was in a state of total rage. Nestor did not necessarily conform to the typical physical image of the major-league umpire in that his silhouette was never mistaken for that of a sumo wrestler, Ringling Brothers elephant or Boeing 747. But in attitude, style and overall delivery, Nestor Chylak was an umpire’s umpire.
“ANIMALS! FUCKING ANIMALS! THAT’S WHAT ALL THESE FUCKING PEOPLE ARE!” Nestor was shouting. I saw no reason, at this point, to ask Chylak to elaborate on his reasons for forfeiting the game.
“I even saw a couple of knives out there in that mob. Then they [the Rangers] charged out, they had to because those fucking animals wanted to kill somebody. I personally got hit with a chair and a rock.”
Case closed.
When I talked to the Rangers, most of them appeared rather shaken by what they had clearly regarded as an ordeal. Billy Martin was predictably verbose. “We got hit with everything you can think of,” Martin recounted with an air of seeming wonderment. “Chairs were flying down out of the upper deck. Cleveland players were fighting their own fans. First they were protecting the Rangers and then they were fighting to protect themselves. Somebody hit Tom Hilgendorf [Indians pitcher] with a chair and cut his head open.”
Martin offered special exoneration for two Cleveland players. One was Dave Duncan, the catcher who had been so involved in the saloon brawl that had happened in Arlington the week before, and the other was Rusty Torres, an outfielder. “They tried to reason with the fans and then laid a couple out when they wouldn’t listen.” Of course, Billy would pay box-seat prices to witness a production like that.
Jeff Burroughs, who had been the focal point of the concourse of fans, said, “It started in the third inning. One guy came out of the stands, then two or three and then they came by the dozens, mostly between innings. They were friendly at first, yelling and having a good time. Then it got mean.”
With Toby Harrah’s comments about the fans in Venezuela in mind, I asked Cesar Tovar—himself a card-carrying Venezuelan—if he might draw some comparisons between the Beer Night throng in Cleveland and the baseball enthusiasts of his homeland. “These people are different, very different. Got no respect for the police,” Tovar declared. “Of course, they’d shoot the people who tried that at home.”
Over on the Cleveland side, the Indians players were clearly less than thrilled by their night of adventure. Interestingly, the then most recent major-league forfeit had happened at the Senators’ final game at RFK Stadium, before the franchise moved to Texas. Spectators had taken to the field and refused to leave. Indians pitcher Dick Bosman, an ex-Ranger and ex-Senator at the time, said, “That experience was entirely different. Those fans in Washington were out on the field digging up souvenirs … it was the last game there, ever. This business tonight was mean, ugly and frightening.”
Ken Aspromonte, the Cleveland manager turned sociologist, was disgusted. “What happened in Arlington last week was part of baseball. This was a riot. This is what happens in our country when our people are angry and ready to fight at the drop of a coin [sic]. We complained in Arlington when people threw beer on us and taunted us. But look at our people. They were worse.”
Quite a few hundred of Aspromonte’s “our people” still lingered in the stands as I made my way back to the press-box to write and transmit the story back to the Star-Telegram. The stadium smelled of beer and reefer smoke. After finishing the stories I was faced with a dilemma. The team bus had already left for the hotel behind a four-car police escort. Now the cops had sealed off the stadium area and no cabs were venturing down. So, carrying my portable typewriter and telecopier, I walked some four miles back to the Hollenden House Hotel, where the lounge, I was thinking, had goddamn sure better still be open. En route, in a downtown park, I heard a gunshot and, like Ichabod Crane in the dark forest, panicked, broke into what might be described as an elongated stride, and gratefully realized that I was experiencing the rich and glamorous life of the sportswriter at its fullest.
About a dozen players were in the bar when I got there. One—Burroughs—pulled me aside. “Hey,” he wondered, “do the stats count in a forfeit? I hope not. I went 0-for-4, but the marijuana smoke was so thick out there in right-field, I think I was higher than the fans.”
Various debriefing sessions were held the day after. What had been largely overlooked in what was now nationally labeled the Cleveland Beer Night Riot was that the Indians had rallied to tie the game in the ninth and had placed what probably was the winning run on third base when Nestor Chylak decided to pull the plug. Now Ted Bonda, the Indians’ vice-president, said his team would formally protest the forfeit.
Bonda was blaming Billy Martin. Clearly born to enter corporate executivehood, he conceded that he had left the game in the eighth inning and had missed the main event, but, he said, he had received a “full report” on what happened in the ninth. “It wasn’t the Beer Night promotion … our fans were excited and really keyed up after the business in Arlington the week before,” Bonda insisted. “At some point Billy Martin started throwing gravel and shooting our fans the finger and
when he led his men out of the dugout, that was when matters got out of hand.”
Someone might have pointed out to Ted Bonda that Billy Martin was probably throwing gravel and shooting people the finger at his first communion and so his activities on Beer Night in Cleveland were in no way generated by any motivations to incite a riot. The Indians’ protest of the forfeit was hastily denied. The whole episode could and should have been written down and then written off as a footnote on what can take place when there is a full moon over Cleveland. (I don’t know if there really was a full moon in Cleveland that night, and if not, one can only marvel at what could have taken place had there been one.)
Unfortunately, the Beer Night calamity would produce one everlasting ramification. The people in charge of both big leagues met and ordained that dime-beer nights or any similar promotions were taboo, and henceforth guideposts to happiness would be labeled Clean and Sober. So it should be historically noted that the graceless puritans who write all of the house rules of the Nineties gained their initial foothold on that June night in 1974 when the fans went nuts in Cleveland.
Chapter 19
The late and oft-lamented publication called the Fort Worth Press, in truth, probably would have been rated by industry analysts as “uneven” in its overall presentation of the news. Nobody from the Press ever got close to being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Faithful subscribers could always rely on the same front-page photograph whenever the temperature reached 106 or higher. Some downtown secretary with big jugs would be recruited to pose beneath the digital thermometer outside the First National Bank and the caption always read “P-H-E-W-W!” And when the old Blue Northers blew through town and the temperature dropped under 25, another secretary would strike a similar pose, this time captioned: “B-R-R-R!”
Seasons in Hell Page 17