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.The November 1, 2004, World Series issueof Sports Illustrated was dominated by beer advertising, including a backcover and a special insert from Miller.But there was a frothy presence inDESPERATION IS THE CRADLE OF BAD IDEAS 141the editorial material as well, including a full-page photo of Boston s Da-vid Ortiz swinging for Fenway s right-field fence, beyond which a gargan-tuan Budweiser sign glowed like a neon sunrise above the upper deck.But those are just modern examples of baseball s beery culture.How intertwined are baseball and beer sales in the history of the sport?Go back, way back.When Christopher Von der Ahe, owner of the St.Louis Browns, bought the city s Sportsman s Park in 1880, he objected toa plan to cover the grandstands to protect the crowd from the hot sun. Chris kicked like a mule about that project, recalled one sportswriter. He argued that the fans wouldn t get as thirsty in the covered stands.Buthe finally compromised.with the understanding that there would besizeable bleachers where the sun could get in its thirst-producing licks.In 1881, a group of renegade team owners started their own leagueafter getting fed up with the National League s efforts to screen out the common element by forbidding Sunday games, keeping prices high,and banning alcohol in the grandstands.The renegade owners started theAmerican Association, though detractors (and some proponents) referredto it as  the Beer and Whiskey League because of the owners willing-ness to mix baseball and alcohol.The new league, which lasted from 1882until 1891, ushered in what baseball historian David Nemec called  themost vibrant and freewheeling time in baseball history, and it s no won-der.The league had more than its share of teams fielded by beer makers,including brewers Henry von der Horts of Baltimore, Frank Fehr of Lou-isville, and John Hauck of Cincinnati.The American Association s mottomight well have been  Don t hit the stands without a lager in yourhand. The formula was simple, borrowed from an 1870s Burke s Beer adfeaturing ballplayers Cap Anson and Buck Ewing, wrote Patrick Hrubyin a 2003 story in the Washington Times. Men like baseball.Men likebeer.Wouldn t they stand to enjoy and pay for some combination ofthe two?The new league lasted only a decade, but its popularity was not lostOOPS 142on the National League.The surviving league absorbed some of theAmerican Association s clubs and concluded that, as long as beer flowedlike a revenue stream, maybe having the common element in the grand-stands wasn t such a bad thing.Big-league beer drinking resumed, andexcept for a few dicey years during Prohibition, the stadium taps haveremained open ever since in synergistic splendor, mostly without incident.By the year 2000, experts estimated that the average major-league teamwas grossing more than $5 million per year on beer sales alone.Even so, beer and baseball usually aren t enough to ensure largecrowds, especially for the less talented teams.Team owners have long re-lied on giveaways and promotional gimmicks to put butts in seats.Fire-works Nights are usually a good draw.Ladies Day was an early favorite,followed by cap, poster, and bobble-head doll giveaways.(Ball and batgiveaways proved problematic, as fans sometimes turned those into pro-jectiles and weapons when things got ugly.) The hopeless WashingtonSenators once staged  Pantyhose Night, offering free pantyhose to everywoman who bought a ticket, prompting the authors of one trivia compen-dium to declare that promotion  the ultimate degradation of the nationalpastime.The notion of using cheap beer as a lure ten ounces for a dimeseemed, at the time, just a natural extension of that tried-and-true promo-tional formula. The media didn t seem the least bit put off by theprospect, noted Bob Dyer in his 2003 book Cleveland Sports Legends:The 20 Most Glorious and Gut-Wrenching Moments of All Time. In hispre-game story in the Cleveland Press, baseball writer Jim Braham glee-fully proclaimed,  Rinse your stein and get in line.Billy the Kid [thenRangers manager Billy Martin] and his Texas gang are in town and it sten-cent beer night at the ballpark.  Indians management s only conces-sion to the evening s potential volatility was its decision to increase thesize of the thirty-two-member stadium security force to forty-eight.It sjust a guess, but that security force probably was not trained for tacticalresponse.DESPERATION IS THE CRADLE OF BAD IDEAS 143Some say cheap-beer night was the brainchild of then Indianspresident Alva  Teddy Bonda, who believed cutting-edge promotionwas the key to building attendance.He was, after all, the visionary whoorchestrated stunts for opening day in 1974 that involved a human can-nonball and a tightrope walker traversing the field from one of the stadi-um s roofs to the other [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]