Not to get all Werner Herzog on you, but there are some situations that are just destined to come out all wrong.
Sometimes it’s misfortune, cruel fate, or the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But more often somebody has a bad idea that they really should’ve thought through more.
Like the time a baseball game came to an abrupt conclusion thanks to a drunken riot on – what else – Ten Cent Beer Night.
To be exact, it was Ten Cent Beer Night in 1974, the time of Watergate scandals and high inflation and people telling each other to mellow out.
And this was in Cleveland, where the manufacturing base was leaving town just as industrial byproducts were causing the river to catch fire over and over.
The owners of the local baseball team tried to bring a ray of sunshine into this gloomy scene: a night at the ballpark where a beer cost just a dime.
Just as they’d hoped, this brought fans to the game, twice the attendance of an average home game.
But there were a few flaws in the plan.
First, Cleveland was playing the Texas Rangers, a team they’d brawled with just a week or so before.
Second, the team had set a limit of six beers per purchase, but you could make as many purchases as you like.
So people got bombed, and revenge fantasies + essentially limitless beer does not equal a quiet night of baseball.
One lady ran onto the field, flashed the audience and then tried to kiss the home plate umpire.
Another fan took off all his clothes, ran onto the field and slid into second base.
People threw huge numbers of empty beer cups onto the field, plus batteries, rocks and lit firecrackers; eventually the two teams evacuated their bullpens to keep their relief pitchers safe.
The grounds crew couldn’t clean much of this litter up because they were busy trying to stop fans from ripping the padding off the left field wall.
In the ninth inning a Rangers outfielder tripped while trying to stop a fan from stealing his hat.
His teammates in the dugout thought he’d been attacked and ran out onto the field with bats to protect him.
Hundreds of drunken fans decided to rush onto the field too, which convinced the Cleveland dugout that they had to go defend the Rangers players – the ones they’d recently fought themselves – lest they be injured or killed by the mob.
The two teams made and/or fought their way to the dugouts, fans wrecked whatever they could, a few people literally stole the bases, the home plate umpire called the game a forfeit and ran for it as the cops rolled in to restore order.
Truer words were never spoken than those from the president of the American League after the game: “There was no question that beer played a part in the riot.”
One last story until next summer, and a very fitting one.
Near the end of his life, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie reportedly hand-wrote a letter to his former friend and right hand man, Henry Clay Frick.
The two had made massive fortunes together, then fell out and were estranged for about two decades.
Carnegie wrote that he was 83 and quite ill and that the two men should end their feud before it was too late.
An assistant brought the note to Frick, who read it, thought about it, and answered, “Tell him I’ll see him in Hell, where we both are going.”
The night beer and violence bubbled over in Cleveland (ESPN)
