the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 142
on the National League. The surviving league absorbed some of the
American Association’s clubs and concluded that, as long as beer fl owed
like a revenue stream, maybe having the common element in the grandstands
wasn’t such a bad thing. Big-league beer drinking resumed, and
except for a few dicey years during Prohibition, the stadium taps have
remained open ever since in synergistic splendor, mostly without incident.
By the year 2000, experts estimated that the average major-league team
was grossing more than $5 million per year on beer sales alone.
Even so, beer and baseball usually aren’t enough to ensure large
crowds, especially for the less talented teams. Team owners have long relied
on giveaways and promotional gimmicks to put butts in seats. Fireworks
Nights are usually a good draw. Ladies’ Day was an early favorite,
followed by cap, poster, and bobble-head doll giveaways. (Ball and bat
giveaways proved problematic, as fans sometimes turned those into projectiles
and weapons when things got ugly.) The hopeless Washington
Senators once staged “Pantyhose Night,” offering free pantyhose to every
woman who bought a ticket, prompting the authors of one trivia compendium
to declare that promotion “the ultimate degradation of the national
pastime.”
The notion of using cheap beer as a lure—ten ounces for a dime—
seemed, at the time, just a natural extension of that tried- and-true promotional
formula. “The media didn’t seem the least bit put off by the
prospect,” noted Bob Dyer in his 2003 book Cleveland Sports Legends:
The 20 Most Glorious and Gut-Wrenching Moments of All Time. “In his
pre-game story in the Cleveland Press, baseball writer Jim Braham gleefully
proclaimed, ‘Rinse your stein and get in line. Billy the Kid [then
Rangers manager Billy Martin] and his Texas gang are in town and it’s
ten-cent beer night at the ballpark.’ ” Indians management’s only concession
to the eve ning’s potential volatility was its decision to increase the
size of the thirty-two-member stadium security force to forty-eight. It’s
just a guess, but that security force probably was not trained for tactical
response.