the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 144
which then escalated into a couple of thrown forearms along the fi rst-base
line, followed by a bench-clearing brawl. By the time the teams moved
their hostile rivalry to Cleveland six days later, the city was generally
pissed and ready to party. And, by coincidence, the first game of that
home series against the dreaded Rangers was being heavily promoted as a
cheap-beer extravaganza. Some reports note that the moon that night was
full.
“The Golden Age of Outdoor Partying”
Most Major League Baseball teams at the time considered the
million-fans-a-year threshold a benchmark of franchise success, but it
had been fourteen seasons since the Indians had drawn a million fans. The
1974 season was likely to continue that streak. According to Dyer, author
of Cleveland Sports Legends, average yearly attendance at Indians games
during the previous three seasons was about 611,000. So on one level, the
Ten-Cent Beer Night promotion worked like a charm. The Indians drew
a paid crowd of 25,134 for that game, more than three times the average
attendance that season. Even before the gate success of the first beer night,
the team’s optimistic management had scheduled three more beer nights
for later in the season.
While that may seem boneheaded, consider the times. America in
1974 was a far wetter place than it is today. Mothers Against Drunk Driving
(MADD) did not yet exist. Betty Ford was four years from disclosing
her addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs. Nancy Reagan was six
years from launching the “Just say no” mantra that would become the
hallmark of her tenure as first lady. In 1974, it was still more or less okay
to get stinking drunk in public, and many of the finest baseball players of
the day were role models in that regard. (Mickey Mantle, who was inducted
into baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1974, later did a stint in the Betty
Ford Center and died in 1995 after alcohol-related cirrhosis, hepatitis C,
and cancer ravaged his liver and spread throughout his body.) If drinking
then led to a spur-of- the-moment decision to doff your clothes and run