Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is short stuff. And this is yet another chapter in our ongoing coverage of Cleveland, Ohio history, because when you dive into all of the stuff we've talked about, Cleveland has come up a surprising amount of times it has. And we got great listeners in Cleveland. Shout out to our buddy Gayle Coonson her husband Mark and uh they we sold out there and we love our Cleveland or so we're not making fun of you, but we can't not talk about ten cent beer Knight. Yeah, yeah, so, um, ten cent beer Knight is a legendary night in Cleveland. Uh, if you live in Cleveland, you know all about this. And it took place in June. And it wasn't that that the Cleveland at the time they were called the Indians now they're called the Guardians. It wasn't that the baseball stadium was giving away beer for ten cents that made it so remarkable. That was actually like a fairly routine promotion. Um, if you do the inflation math, that's equal to about fifty seven cents today. Yeah, all over baseball, not just Cleveland, right, exactly. And if you went to the stadium, they weren't keeping track of how many you had or how many you bought at one time. It was basically an open invitation to come get very drunk at the baseball stadium. That was the promotion, right. So it wasn't just that they had a ten cent beer knight. It was this particular night underscored how bad an idea ten cent beer nights at the baseball stadium actually were. That's right, Uh. And it had to do with, in particular a lot of things. I watched a little video about this, and they did point out that the the mood in Cleveland at the time, given the pollution and laid off factory workers and the Indians not being very good, it just it all sort of culminated on this night that they played the Texas Rangers, who a week prior their ten cent beer knights. This is just crazy, uh to think about now, if they had fifty seven cent beer knight, you know, I would be down there unlimited fifty seven cent beer night during nine innings at least. Yeah, And I did see for the Cleveland one um they had a limit of six cups per person at a time. So they did. Okay, well, they did have some rules then, all right, that's respectful. I figured that's just they figured that's as many as you can carry at once. I don't know, probably they didn't want you to strain yourself. So a week before at in Dallas uh Fort Worth at their stadium, they had tencent beer Knight and there there's a there was a brawl on the field. There was a hard slide by the Rangers, retaliation by Cleveland's picture, which is what usually happens in baseball, and they charged the mountain and a fight breaks out and it was, you know, it was a pretty good baseball brawl. And Billy Martin was coaching Texas at the time, and he said that he wasn't worried about the next week in Cleveland because they were asking about retaliation. He said, they don't have enough fans to worry about, which did not help the matter. Now, and if you know Billy Martin, that's a total Billy Martin thing to say, right, So Billy Martin says this just off handedly. Um. And also, by the way, during that brawler, after the brawl, the fans at the Rangers stadium through trash and all sorts of stuff be dump beer onto the Indians as they went back to their dugout. So there was a lot of ire about this in in Cleveland, not the least of which was Billy Martin's little quip. And there was at the time a sports talk radio personality named Pete Franklin. And if you're familiar with sports talk radio, they um, they talk a lot of trash. They don't, you know, suffer a lot of um of idiots. I guess you could put it um. And this Pete Franklin seems to have, if not been the origin of the modern sports talk radio personality. He was definitely one of the early people who was doing this, that's right. So I think he just sort of riled people up, be the more on the radio, right, and that would happened over the following week. He spent most of his sports line show on w w W e UM just getting everybody riled up to get to this game, and too to show the Rangers what we thought about them. All right, I think that's a great time for a break, and we'll get to what happened on June six right after this. Alright, So I said June six, you said June six. It was really June four, Please don't We just got it wrong and didn't feel like re recording whole episode. Right, So it was June four that this game started, and it was the beginning of a three game homestand and by the time that um, this this game rolled around twenty thousand, Clevelander showed up at the game for ten cent Beer Night, angry at the Texas Rangers, who the Indians were about to play. That's right, uh, And to say things got out of hand is again a pretty big understatement. Um. The video I watched that told me about the six cups at a time said that at one point people were buying so much beer the vendors couldn't keep up, so they just pulled the beer trucks in just outside the outfield walls. And there were two teenage girls working the station that got so overwhelmed they left. They just ran away, and all of a sudden, there were beer trucks they flipped over the table. And I don't know if this is true or not, but there were reports that some of them literally carried tapped kegs of beer into the stands. Okay, from everything that I've read about this, night. That is a percent believable, totally is so. In addition to stuff like that happening, there was a lot of like foreshadowing that this was not a normal game. A lot of people were running out onto the field more than normal. I mean, in the seventies, streaking on a baseball field wasn't like just totally unheard of. But they think there was a song about streaking. Yeah, the ones put me in coach, I'm read give me um so, Uh, there were two streakers at this game in the third and the sixth innings, and then there was another I guess you could call them streakers that came out at I'm not sure what inning, but it was a father and son duo who ran into the outfield and mooned everybody in the bleachers. Yeah, the one one of the streakers. Uh, this completely naked man and this is not advisable, went in and ran and slid while the game was going on, slid into second base but naked. So this is happening like during this game, and this is this is while a lid is being kept on everything like that's that's how how this is like a simmering kettle at this point, And so you can make a case that all that's kind of in good fund, even though it's pretty rivaled and a little unruly to say the least. But um, it kind of started to turn ugly. Uh at one specific point when Laren Lee, who was a Cleveland player, hit a line drive back to the picture for the Rangers Ferguson Jenkins, and it hit him in the stomach and dropped Ferguson Jenkins like a sack of potatoes. And rather than you know, show any kind of concern or anything like that, that set off the fans to chant hit him again, hit him again, which kind of tick the Rangers off a little bit. Yes, so that rolls people up even more. Uh, they start throwing stuff. They start throwing hot dogs, batteries, beer, the usual stuff. Billy Martin comes out and starts blowing kisses into the crowd. Apparently there's a picture of them doing so this is like classic Billy Martin. Again. That railed up people even more, and they started shooting. They brought fireworks and started shooting fireworks into the Rangers. Dugout, this is during a baseball game. That's going on everybody. Yeah, they were still trying to play the game. Yeah, So as this game is going on, UM, the UM Rangers are winning most of the time. I think by the UM I think the sixth they had a five to one lead, but then the Indians scored two runs in the sixth made it five to five to three UM, and then they scored two more runs in the ninth, so it was five to five and they actually had the winning run on second base. And we're at bat when the incident that proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back and and let all hell break clues happened. That's right, Uh, And it was well, it shouldn't have happened, but it was a bit of a miss understanding, and that a fan ran out and tried to grab Jeff burrows hat off his head. Uh. Burrows tripped and fell on the ground. But all the range or saw was Burrows on the ground with a fan right there, and they thought he was attacked. And Billy Martin basically says, go get them guys and take your bats with you. So the Texas Ranger baseball club streams out onto the field with baseball bats looking for vengeance. They're met by a flood of angry Cleveland fans who starts streaming onto the field and they have more than baseball bats. Bleacher Reports says that they had knives, chains, and portions of the stadium seats that they had ripped off. This is like the Simpsons rumbling or something like that. It's cartoonish, but this is what happened in Cleveland on this night. Uh that's right. I saw that there were um fifty security guards in the whole stadium with twenty thousand fans, so they did not adequately prepare for. Uh you know what was ended up basically being a riot. Uh. They ripped they stole the bases, not like, hey, he stole second base, nice job, they ripped the bases out. Apparently those bases are still not recovered, so like in garages in Ohio, like someone has these bases still like guaranteed, and I'm sure there's a tap k right next to it. Oh I hope so so, um, we we should definitely point out that, to their credit, the Indians streamed out on the field with bats there of their own to defend the Rangers because they're like, these people might actually kill some of the Texas Rangers. So baseball players are getting in fights with rioters on the field, baseball players from both teams. UM. The the guy who is actually the head official of the game, Nestor Chailac, suffered a head injury because he was hit by one of those stadium seats that have been ripped off. UM. He also had cut on his hand because he had been hit by a rock. And finally he calls the game and says, this game is over. The Indians forfeit and the Rangers are the winners. I guess, yeah, it's um. There are a bunch of videos on YouTube that they don't show it live, but they show photos. It is just it's hard to believe when you see this this happened. I mean it was a street brawl between professional athletes. It showed people like bleeding from the head and being carried off on stretchers. And you know, today like an NBA player, you know, if he gets into a like a yelling at a fan in the stands and there's a confrontation, it's a really big deal. This was a street fight on a baseball field during a baseball game. Yeah, it was like that scene an anchorman. There was a guy on horseback with a trident. You know, it's like that but in Cleveland, and it was because everybody had drank so much beer. So the Indians very wisely went back to the drawing board and they said, we've got three more of these beer and nights scheduled, and we've already been publicizing him, so we can't really take them back because they'll probably riot again. So we're going to change it from unlimited beer to just four beers per person. And that was that for ten cent beer and night. Yeah, so instead of six at time for total. Yeah, I saw and you know, again, who knows what these YouTube videos if these are accurate, But I saw sixty thousand beers consumed, and uh, how many people are there? Twenty six thousand, you know, a lot of which were probably underage, So you do the math um. And he said that there were nineteen streakers total, So who knows? Man, isn't that just nuts? Yes, it is crazy to think about. And boy, if you were there, please please email us. I would love to hear a story. Yeah, definitely, and spara thought for those poor two teenage girls who were chased off of the beer trucks for their lives. Yeah, and anyone that got legitimately hurt. I mean, we're kind of laughing at all this, but I didn't see that anyone was like seriously seriously injured, right, blood streaking down their face, and they're just like stitches and light stitches. They were in handcuffs being led away. Had to call in late for work the next day. I hope we find another good Cleveland topic. This is turning out to be by a series. Yeah, it's it's a rich vein, isn't it. It is? You got anything else? I got nothing else? All right? Everybody? Then, like beer Night in June four, Short Stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows

Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and this is short stuff. And this is yet another chapter in our ongoing coverage of Cleveland, Ohio history, because when you dive into all of the stuff we've talked about, Cleveland has come up a surprising amount of times it has. And we got great listeners in Cleveland. Shout out to our buddy Gayle Coonson her husband Mark and uh they we sold out there and we love our Cleveland or so we're not making fun of you, but we can't not talk about ten cent beer Knight. Yeah, yeah, so, um, ten cent beer Knight is a legendary night in Cleveland. Uh, if you live in Cleveland, you know all about this. And it took place in June. And it wasn't that that the Cleveland at the time they were called the Indians now they're called the Guardians. It wasn't that the baseball stadium was giving away beer for ten cents that made it so remarkable. That was actually like a fairly routine promotion. Um, if you do the inflation math, that's equal to about fifty seven cents today. Yeah, all over baseball, not just Cleveland, right, exactly. And if you went to the stadium, they weren't keeping track of how many you had or how many you bought at one time. It was basically an open invitation to come get very drunk at the baseball stadium. That was the promotion, right. So it wasn't just that they had a ten cent beer knight. It was this particular night underscored how bad an idea ten cent beer nights at the baseball stadium actually were. That's right, Uh. And it had to do with, in particular a lot of things. I watched a little video about this, and they did point out that the the mood in Cleveland at the time, given the pollution and laid off factory workers and the Indians not being very good, it just it all sort of culminated on this night that they played the Texas Rangers, who a week prior their ten cent beer knights. This is just crazy, uh to think about now, if they had fifty seven cent beer knight, you know, I would be down there unlimited fifty seven cent beer night during nine innings at least. Yeah, And I did see for the Cleveland one um they had a limit of six cups per person at a time. So they did. Okay, well, they did have some rules then, all right, that's respectful. I figured that's just they figured that's as many as you can carry at once. I don't know, probably they didn't want you to strain yourself. So a week before at in Dallas uh Fort Worth at their stadium, they had tencent beer Knight and there there's a there was a brawl on the field. There was a hard slide by the Rangers, retaliation by Cleveland's picture, which is what usually happens in baseball, and they charged the mountain and a fight breaks out and it was, you know, it was a pretty good baseball brawl. And Billy Martin was coaching Texas at the time, and he said that he wasn't worried about the next week in Cleveland because they were asking about retaliation. He said, they don't have enough fans to worry about, which did not help the matter. Now, and if you know Billy Martin, that's a total Billy Martin thing to say, right, So Billy Martin says this just off handedly. Um. And also, by the way, during that brawler, after the brawl, the fans at the Rangers stadium through trash and all sorts of stuff be dump beer onto the Indians as they went back to their dugout. So there was a lot of ire about this in in Cleveland, not the least of which was Billy Martin's little quip. And there was at the time a sports talk radio personality named Pete Franklin. And if you're familiar with sports talk radio, they um, they talk a lot of trash. They don't, you know, suffer a lot of um of idiots. I guess you could put it um. And this Pete Franklin seems to have, if not been the origin of the modern sports talk radio personality. He was definitely one of the early people who was doing this, that's right. So I think he just sort of riled people up, be the more on the radio, right, and that would happened over the following week. He spent most of his sports line show on w w W e UM just getting everybody riled up to get to this game, and too to show the Rangers what we thought about them. All right, I think that's a great time for a break, and we'll get to what happened on June six right after this. Alright, So I said June six, you said June six. It was really June four, Please don't We just got it wrong and didn't feel like re recording whole episode. Right, So it was June four that this game started, and it was the beginning of a three game homestand and by the time that um, this this game rolled around twenty thousand, Clevelander showed up at the game for ten cent Beer Night, angry at the Texas Rangers, who the Indians were about to play. That's right, uh, And to say things got out of hand is again a pretty big understatement. Um. The video I watched that told me about the six cups at a time said that at one point people were buying so much beer the vendors couldn't keep up, so they just pulled the beer trucks in just outside the outfield walls. And there were two teenage girls working the station that got so overwhelmed they left. They just ran away, and all of a sudden, there were beer trucks they flipped over the table. And I don't know if this is true or not, but there were reports that some of them literally carried tapped kegs of beer into the stands. Okay, from everything that I've read about this, night. That is a percent believable, totally is so. In addition to stuff like that happening, there was a lot of like foreshadowing that this was not a normal game. A lot of people were running out onto the field more than normal. I mean, in the seventies, streaking on a baseball field wasn't like just totally unheard of. But they think there was a song about streaking. Yeah, the ones put me in coach, I'm read give me um so, Uh, there were two streakers at this game in the third and the sixth innings, and then there was another I guess you could call them streakers that came out at I'm not sure what inning, but it was a father and son duo who ran into the outfield and mooned everybody in the bleachers. Yeah, the one one of the streakers. Uh, this completely naked man and this is not advisable, went in and ran and slid while the game was going on, slid into second base but naked. So this is happening like during this game, and this is this is while a lid is being kept on everything like that's that's how how this is like a simmering kettle at this point, And so you can make a case that all that's kind of in good fund, even though it's pretty rivaled and a little unruly to say the least. But um, it kind of started to turn ugly. Uh at one specific point when Laren Lee, who was a Cleveland player, hit a line drive back to the picture for the Rangers Ferguson Jenkins, and it hit him in the stomach and dropped Ferguson Jenkins like a sack of potatoes. And rather than you know, show any kind of concern or anything like that, that set off the fans to chant hit him again, hit him again, which kind of tick the Rangers off a little bit. Yes, so that rolls people up even more. Uh, they start throwing stuff. They start throwing hot dogs, batteries, beer, the usual stuff. Billy Martin comes out and starts blowing kisses into the crowd. Apparently there's a picture of them doing so this is like classic Billy Martin. Again. That railed up people even more, and they started shooting. They brought fireworks and started shooting fireworks into the Rangers. Dugout, this is during a baseball game. That's going on everybody. Yeah, they were still trying to play the game. Yeah, So as this game is going on, UM, the UM Rangers are winning most of the time. I think by the UM I think the sixth they had a five to one lead, but then the Indians scored two runs in the sixth made it five to five to three UM, and then they scored two more runs in the ninth, so it was five to five and they actually had the winning run on second base. And we're at bat when the incident that proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back and and let all hell break clues happened. That's right, Uh, And it was well, it shouldn't have happened, but it was a bit of a miss understanding, and that a fan ran out and tried to grab Jeff burrows hat off his head. Uh. Burrows tripped and fell on the ground. But all the range or saw was Burrows on the ground with a fan right there, and they thought he was attacked. And Billy Martin basically says, go get them guys and take your bats with you. So the Texas Ranger baseball club streams out onto the field with baseball bats looking for vengeance. They're met by a flood of angry Cleveland fans who starts streaming onto the field and they have more than baseball bats. Bleacher Reports says that they had knives, chains, and portions of the stadium seats that they had ripped off. This is like the Simpsons rumbling or something like that. It's cartoonish, but this is what happened in Cleveland on this night. Uh that's right. I saw that there were um fifty security guards in the whole stadium with twenty thousand fans, so they did not adequately prepare for. Uh you know what was ended up basically being a riot. Uh. They ripped they stole the bases, not like, hey, he stole second base, nice job, they ripped the bases out. Apparently those bases are still not recovered, so like in garages in Ohio, like someone has these bases still like guaranteed, and I'm sure there's a tap k right next to it. Oh I hope so so, um, we we should definitely point out that, to their credit, the Indians streamed out on the field with bats there of their own to defend the Rangers because they're like, these people might actually kill some of the Texas Rangers. So baseball players are getting in fights with rioters on the field, baseball players from both teams. UM. The the guy who is actually the head official of the game, Nestor Chailac, suffered a head injury because he was hit by one of those stadium seats that have been ripped off. UM. He also had cut on his hand because he had been hit by a rock. And finally he calls the game and says, this game is over. The Indians forfeit and the Rangers are the winners. I guess, yeah, it's um. There are a bunch of videos on YouTube that they don't show it live, but they show photos. It is just it's hard to believe when you see this this happened. I mean it was a street brawl between professional athletes. It showed people like bleeding from the head and being carried off on stretchers. And you know, today like an NBA player, you know, if he gets into a like a yelling at a fan in the stands and there's a confrontation, it's a really big deal. This was a street fight on a baseball field during a baseball game. Yeah, it was like that scene an anchorman. There was a guy on horseback with a trident. You know, it's like that but in Cleveland, and it was because everybody had drank so much beer. So the Indians very wisely went back to the drawing board and they said, we've got three more of these beer and nights scheduled, and we've already been publicizing him, so we can't really take them back because they'll probably riot again. So we're going to change it from unlimited beer to just four beers per person. And that was that for ten cent beer and night. Yeah, so instead of six at time for total. Yeah, I saw and you know, again, who knows what these YouTube videos if these are accurate, But I saw sixty thousand beers consumed, and uh, how many people are there? Twenty six thousand, you know, a lot of which were probably underage, So you do the math um. And he said that there were nineteen streakers total, So who knows? Man, isn't that just nuts? Yes, it is crazy to think about. And boy, if you were there, please please email us. I would love to hear a story. Yeah, definitely, and spara thought for those poor two teenage girls who were chased off of the beer trucks for their lives. Yeah, and anyone that got legitimately hurt. I mean, we're kind of laughing at all this, but I didn't see that anyone was like seriously seriously injured, right, blood streaking down their face, and they're just like stitches and light stitches. They were in handcuffs being led away. Had to call in late for work the next day. I hope we find another good Cleveland topic. This is turning out to be by a series. Yeah, it's it's a rich vein, isn't it. It is? You got anything else? I got nothing else? All right? Everybody? Then, like beer Night in June four, Short Stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows