Ah, that was a grand and glorious night.. The beer cost 10 cents, but since this was 32 years ago, who cares? :)
"How'd Cleveland get such notoriety? Ten Cent Beer Night. It was June 4, 1974, and the Cleveland Indians were a perennial last-place baseball team. They needed to boost attendance. So when the Texas Rangers--another awful team--came to Municipal Stadium for a series, the Cleveland management came up with this bright idea: They'd give away beers for a dime each.
There were three problems with this.
The first problem was that it was the 1970s, and the streaking fad was reaching its peak. So at least four fans got taken off the field in various states of undress before the fifth inning was even over. (A big ol' ouch to the dude who slid into second with no clothes on.)
The second problem was that Cleveland and Texas had just been in a huge brawl the week before, and so the Indians' fans came to Muni ready for a war between the two teams. But the battle never happened. Turns out that the Rangers and the Indians had gotten all their aggression out the week before, so the only pent-up, unreleased aggression was in the crowd.
And then, of course, there's the third reason, which is that cheap beer makes people act like idiots. Tons of fans were running onto the field by the seventh inning, and some less-than-intelligent folks decided that they might as well throw batteries and rocks and golf balls onto the field.
Cleveland was down 5-3 in the bottom of the ninth inning, but the team came back to tie the game, and was threatening to win...only they never got the chance. That's because someone came down onto the field and stole Texas outfielder Jeff Burroughs's mitt. Burroughs chased the moron back up into the stands, his team went to go help him, and all you-know-what broke loose.
Projectiles of all sorts (torn-out chairs, more rocks, bottles) were hurled onto the field. Fans and players got into fights; Texas manager Billy Martin claimed to have broken a bat over someone's head. A Texas pitcher named Tom Hilgendorf was pretty badly messed up when someone took a metal chair to his skull. Finally, when umpire Nestor Chylak got hit by a chair, he forfeited the game to Texas and hauled down to the dressing room. Game over. Reputation made. Thank you Cleveland."