The 34-Ton Bat

by Steve Rushin

  Waite Hoyt would retire from the Reds when the team abandoned Burger as its beer sponsor. When Goebel gave way to Stroh’s as the Tigers’ beer patron, announcer Van Patrick stepped aside for Ernie Harwell. Harwell came from Baltimore, where he shilled on air for National Beer in his first three seasons. When the Orioles transferred sponsorship to Gunther Beer, National’s unholy rival, Harwell naturally feared for his job. Gunther only retained him when fans petitioned the brewery on his behalf.

  It could all be very confusing to a spectator trying to practice brand loyalty. In March 1953, when brewing titan August A. Busch Jr. bought the St. Louis Cardinals for $3.75 million from Fred Saigh—whose fifteen-month sentence for income tax evasion made owning the team problematic—Anheuser-Busch became proprietor of a team sponsored by rival Griesedieck. Worse, the Cards played in Sportsman’s Park, which they rented from the Browns, whose games were sponsored by Falstaff.

  More confusing still, Busch immediately bought Sportsman’s Park for $800,000 from Browns owner Bill Veeck, and renamed it Budweiser Stadium. On April 10, six days before the Cardinals’ first home game, commissioner Ford Frick strongly urged a name change, and the place became Busch Stadium instead, saving announcers from having to present Cardinals baseball, from Budweiser Stadium, brought to you by Griesedieck.

  Busch’s Anheuser-Busch brewery produced fewer than six million barrels a year, about the same as Joseph A. Schlitz, its rival for being the nation’s biggest beer producer. The Busch name was so renowned for beer that the name change to Busch Stadium was inconsequential to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. “You could toss up the three B’s,” said its president, Mrs. D. Leigh Colvin. “Call it Beer Park, Budweiser Park or Busch Park and they all mean the same thing. No athletic park ought to be named for a brewer because everybody knows that beer and athletics don’t mix.”

  Many others agreed. United States senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado introduced a bill that would subject clubs owned by breweries to federal antitrust laws. Johnson happened to be president of the Class A Western League, and didn’t like that Anheuser-Busch was broadcasting Cardinals games (and Budweiser ads) over 120 stations, many of them in minor-league markets, “with total disregard for local ball clubs and breweries.”

  Baseball had been “prostituted,” Johnson said, and become an “adjunct of the brewing business.”

  By then, many baseball broadcasts were two-hour beer ads. In St. Louis, the microphone flag bore not the station call letters but the words GRIESEDIECK BEER. The Ballantine sign above the scoreboard in right center field at Shibe Park was sixty feet across. Eighty-six different church and civic groups appeared before the liquor board in Baltimore in December 1953 to lobby against the Orioles, newly moved from St. Louis, getting a license to sell beer at Municipal Stadium. The Orioles’ president, Clarence Miles, informed the board by telegram that denying the application to sell beer would put the team’s very existence in jeopardy.

  Baseball and beer were by then difficult to tell apart. In 1957, the new president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union described baseball broadcasts as “beercasts.” “Baseball has become beerball,” Mrs. Glenn G. Hays of the WCTU said the year the Dodgers fled Ebbets Field and its overburdened urinals. “What was once the national pastime now appears to have become the star salesman of the beer barons, while club owners wonder why public interest and patronage have declined. Baseball is being taken from a wholesome spectator and sandlot sport into the realm of a national problem that includes alchoholism and drink-caused juvenile delinquency.”

  Beer was already the single biggest advertiser on televised baseball in 1944. By 1961, only the Los Angeles Dodgers lacked a brewery sponsor. Even the expansion Mets had signed a five-year deal with Rheingold to sponsor their broadcasts, though they wouldn’t play a game until the following season.

  The vast majority of games were still played in the day, an invitation to indolence and hooky. “Beercasts of the game try to convince anyone who hears or sees them that it’s the right thing to do to sit in front of the set and get drunk while viewing or listening,” said Mrs. Hays of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, but in fairness, fans were also encouraged to get drunk at the game, while sitting in the bleachers.

  Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia didn’t sell beer until 1961—the Volstead Act still echoed there—but fans were allowed to bring their own. The Phillies, in 1956, sought a license to sell it in paper cups, a request made more urgent when Phillies fans rained beer bottles and cans onto the Giants during the second half of a doubleheader that April, causing the interruption of the game. Two nights later, with twenty police added inside the park, a thirty-six-year-old man was arrested for walking out of the left field bleachers to engage a player in conversation.

  From the time the Braves arrived in Milwaukee in 1953, fans were also allowed to bring their own beer into County Stadium—“six packs, coolers, half barrels”—and they did, for eight libertine seasons. That era ended before the 1961 season, when the county passed an ordinance banning BYOB at the ballpark. The Braves still sold beer, twelve-ounce bottles decanted into paper cups, but the ban on bring-your-own appeared to pay quick dividends when a “small-scale riot” broke out during a game on June 24 of that season, Braves and Cubs fans pelting each other with beer cups. There were four arrests, but it could have been worse, had those cups been cans instead. (Or, God forbid, half barrels.)

  But attendance at Braves games declined by nearly four hundred thousand fans during the 1961 season. A citizens’ group formed—the “walking wets”—to “repeal” the Braves’ “prohibition.” After all, a six-pack of beer could be had for a buck outside the stadium, but it cost $0.30 a cup on the inside. The law was discriminating, said county board supervisor Cornelius Jankowski, against the “working man.” With attendance declining by another four hundred thousand fans in 1962, the county board voted that June to repeal the ban, allowing fans once again to bring their own beer.

  Whether beer was legal or illegal, sold or not sold, brought in or bought on-site, quaffed in bottles or poured into cups, fans were going to get drunk. Beer was a baseball constant. On Opening Day of 1964, the Braves’ penultimate season in Milwaukee, “several fans ran onto the field, some to shake Willie Mays’s hand and some to slide into second base.” And that was a Wednesday afternoon in April.

  The Washington Senators, meanwhile, had taken the Solomonic decision to ban beer sales in the grandstand, while offering it in the bleachers, where the umpires were suitably out of range. Its high price—$0.35—was deemed a suitable deterrent, as was the benign vessel it came in: a paper cup.

  In Washington as in Milwaukee, baseball had found the perfect delivery system: the waxed-paper cup. Emptied, inverted, and stomped on just right, it made a sound like a gunshot, but could not otherwise be made to mimic a weapon. With its bottom removed, it became a megaphone.

  The waxed-paper cup was bottomless in other, more important ways. It allowed for the cheap and prodigious dispensing of tap beer. When the Braves moved to Atlanta following the 1965 season, and Milwaukee got a new franchise five years later, the new club fully embraced beer culture, calling itself the Brewers and employing a lederhosened mascot—Bernie Brewer—to slide from a beer barrel into a frothing stein of beer after home team home runs. Lest the team mascot bathing in beer be seen as an invitation to inebriation, the club created a cartoon drunk called “the Two Fisted Slobber,” whose appearance on the scoreboard—bubbles issuing from his nose—was meant to encourage responsible drinking. Instead, the Slobber quickly became a folk hero, his every appearance drawing applause.

  Fortified with waxed-paper cups, the Brewers offered Ten Cent Beer Nights. They were so popular—unlimited beer at rock-bottom prices—they had to be abandoned, replaced by a coupon system, in which each fan could have only three beers, each of which came completely free of charge. “We threw out the ten-cent beer night for a lot of reasons,” owner Bud Selig said in 1974. “The main reas
on was the obvious one—drunkenness.”

  That year, 1974, the century-old codependency of baseball and beer came, as it were, to a head. On May 22 in Milwaukee, Tigers slugger Willie Horton was twice showered with beer after hitting a two-run homer to beat the Brewers. This was what the waxed-paper cup had wrought: Players and umpires were no longer bottled, enduring instead the less dangerous but profoundly undignified beer shower. Where once fans retained the beer and then threw the receptacle, they now retained the receptacle and threw the beer.

  A week later, in Arlington, the Texas Rangers and the Cleveland Indians engaged in an eighth-inning brawl that lasted ten full minutes. Upon returning to the dugout, Cleveland catcher Dave Duncan was given a beer shower by fans. Duncan tried to lead a delegation of Indians into the stands to confront those responsible, but was restrained by police.

  It was with some anticipation, then, that the two teams next met six days later, June 4, in Cleveland, on what was widely advertised as Ten Cent Beer Night. Such was the lure of cheap Stroh’s—which ordinarily sold for $0.60 a pop—that 25,134 people came to Municipal Stadium on that Tuesday night, roughly three times the Tribe’s average attendance. Many arrived already inebriated, to judge by the firecrackers and smoke bombs that were detonated early on. In the top of the second, a woman bounded onto the field, bared her breasts in the on-deck circle, and then tried without success to kiss home plate umpire Nestor Chylak. At inning’s end, forty more fans ran across the field, some of them turning somersaults.

  In the fourth inning, as Rangers designated hitter Tom Grieve circled the bases after homering, a naked man sprinted onto the base paths and slid into second. Other streakers would follow, one wearing a single sock. Which isn’t to suggest that beer was responsible for all of the night’s mayhem. It was a bottle of Thunderbird, after all, that narrowly missed the head of Rangers first baseman Mike Hargrove. But one fact was inescapable: Sixty-five thousand cups of beer had been sold by the bottom of the ninth inning, when the Indians had the winning run on third base with two outs in a 5–5 game.

  That’s when several fans jumped the outfield fence and—high on Stroh’s—endeavored to remove the cap, glove, and uniform shirt of Rangers right fielder Jeff Burroughs. Many other fans poured over the wall, like an invading army, bearing knives, chains, and pieces of their former seats. Tribe pitcher Tom Hilgendorf was hit on the head with a metal folding chair. Both teams, armed with bats, ran from the dugout onto the field to defend their teammates from the drunken mob. When umpire Chylak was also hit in the head by a folding chair, he abandoned the game, forfeiting it to the Rangers, after which all three bases were spirited away by spectators.

  “We’re lucky somebody didn’t get stabbed,” Rangers manager Billy Martin said afterward, while Indians skipper Ken Aspromonte feared that the seventy-four-year-old franchise might yet be given the death penalty. “Cleveland may have lost a ballclub tonight,” he said.

  “We could have gotten killed out there very easily,” Chylak said in the relative safety of his dressing room. By way of evidence, he displayed, in his bloody hand, a weapon he’d retrieved from the field: a beer bottle concealed inside several paper cups. Here was a visual history of ballpark violence in a single diabolical device: the beer bottle, and the cup that replaced it.

  All of this is to say that the $8 beer, as a barrier-to-entry of ballpark inebriation, has proved beneficial to the modern fan, though few have thanked the owners for it. The comically high cost of stadium beer, of course, has had an even more salubrious effect on those owners, not least the Busch family, which was selling just under six million barrels of beer when it bought the Cardinals in 1953. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of that purchase, in 1978, Anheuser-Busch was selling thirty-five million barrels annually, and by 1987—when the Cardinals hosted the World Series, and Gussie Busch was pulled by Clydesdales through the outfield at the second incarnation of Busch Stadium—the brewery was doing seventy million barrels a year. Those Budweiser Clydesdales had become, by then, ubiquitous advertising icons.

  When the Cardinals opened their third iteration of Busch Stadium in 2006—fifty-three years after Gussie Busch backed away from the name Budweiser Stadium—naming a ballpark for a beer had long since lost its taboo. The Colorado Rockies played in Coors Field, in the home state of the late Senator Edwin C. Johnson, who had opposed the sale of the Cardinals to a family of brewers.

  When that sale was being mooted, an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch approved: “Mr. Busch gives every evidence that he thinks of the Cardinals as a baseball club and not as a device for selling beer.”

  It was both. By 2008, Anheuser-Busch was producing one hundred million barrels a year and the brewery was sold to InBev for $52 billion. Anheuser-Busch had become the nation’s twenty-second-largest advertiser, and its endless TV and print and radio spots—its omnipresent stadium signage and sports sponsorships—were part of an annual marketing spend of $1.36 billion. By then, calling the ballpark Budweiser Stadium was scarcely necessary.

  Beer bottles had become plastic, stand workers removed the caps at the point of purchase to inhibit their use as projectiles, and most teams offered alcohol-free “family sections,” which Ryne Duren had long lobbied for. But beer and baseball were still inseparable. Over the years, a deep irony had developed. The only time many fans put their beer down at a ball game was at the playing of the national anthem, when once that tune was a cue to pick up one’s beer and start drinking.

  In 1766, a group of men began meeting fortnightly in London at the Crown & Anchor pub on the Strand, for drinking and singing and general conviviality. This new gentlemen’s club took as its name the Anacreontic Society, after the Greek poet Anacreon, bard of wine and lust, and a man so prodigiously bibulous that he was widely reported to have died from a grape pip lodged in his windpipe. (He didn’t.)

  Ralph Tomlinson, president of the Anacreontic Society, wrote a theme song for the club. It was called “To Anacreon in Heaven.” Tomlinson’s lyrics suggested that women and drinking were, as one might imagine, the principal topics of conversation at the Crown & Anchor, “where my good fellows we’ll learn to entwine/The myrtle of Venus and Bacchus’ wine.”

  Tomlinson’s words were set to music by another club member, John Stafford Smith, and “To Anacreon” quickly became a popular drinking song on both sides of the Atlantic, through the Revolutionary War and beyond, remaining familiar as late as the next hostilities between the two combatants, in the War of 1812.

  During that war, on the night of September 13, 1814, an American attorney named Francis Scott Key was aboard the HMS Tonnant, a British troopship in Chesapeake Bay, to negotiate the release of an American prisoner. For twenty-five hours, four miles from land, Key was forced to watch the British navy bombard Fort McHenry, in his native Baltimore, not knowing if it—and his hometown—had been captured in the night.

  The next morning, by dawn’s early light, Key saw the American flag yet waving over Fort McHenry, and on returning to Baltimore wrote a poem—“Defence of Fort McHenry”—to commemorate the battle. He gave the poem to Captain Benjamin Eades, of the 27th Baltimore Regiment, who printed more copies, one of which he took to a tavern next to the Holliday Street Theatre. There, in a bar, the poem was first read and then sung—as Key had specified it should be, in an instruction on the published copies—to that familiar melody: “To Anacreon in Heaven.”

  “Defence of Fort McHenry”—it was a music store that first published it under the title “The Star-Spangled Banner”—didn’t officially become the national anthem of the United States until an Act of Congress made it so in 1931. But long before then it was played at baseball’s most august occasions—at the opening of new ballparks and the raising of pennants, most of which coincided with Opening Day.

  In 1897, before a Phillies–Giants opener in Philadelphia: “The players paraded across the field company front, and then raised the new flag, while the band played ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ ”

 
The following spring, before a rain-dampened crowd of 12,000 at the Polo Grounds eagerly awaiting a Giants–Braves game: “The opening ceremonies were not unlike previous years,” as the New York Times reported. After the players paraded around the perimeter of the field: “The teams parted at the home plate, and then, doffing their caps, retired to the bench. The band, however, stopped at home plate, and when the enthusiasm had subsided, rendered ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ ”

  Two weeks later, across town in Brooklyn, to celebrate the club’s new Washington Park, Charles Ebbets’s young daughter May raised a flag as the Twenty-Third Regiment Band played the national anthem before the game. “Thousands of persons forgot baseball at this stage and stood up with uncovered heads. The wildest enthusiasm prevailed.”

  And so it was that long before the turn of the century, spectators were rising and removing their caps before a ball game, if only on Opening Day and other special occasions. By 1902, the Seventh Regiment Band marched around the Polo Grounds prior to the Giants–Phillies opener playing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” before stopping in front of the grandstand, falling silent, and striking up the anthem. “It was a noticeable fact that nearly all of the 18,000 rooters rose to their feet, and many of them uncovered when the national anthem was played,” went the New York Times account. “It was 3:30 o’clock sharp when Umpire ‘Hank’ O’Day tossed a new ball into the field and the baseball season of 1902 was on.”

  The anthem was played again at the Polo Grounds on Opening Day of 1905 when the Giants raised a blue pennant whose gold letters proclaimed them CHAMPIONS BASEBALL CLUB OF NATIONAL LEAGUE 1904. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played before games at the grand openings of Shibe Park in 1909 and Ebbets Field in 1913, among many other occasions. It was played, abortively, at the Baker Bowl in Philadelphia during the 1915 World Series, when fans thought they spotted President Wilson and his fiancée, Edith Galt, enter the ballpark. By the time the couple had arrived for real, play had begun and the bands had been banished from the field.