Roll your eyes back in your head and dream with me, back to a time when America was young. The year is 1974, fifty years ago. The place is Cleveland, a city in Ohio. There's a professional baseball team there, the Indians. They wouldn’t get rid of that offensive team name until 2021. At the time of this tale, they were playing against the Texas Rangers. To gin up attendance, the Indians hosted a promotion, as teams often do. It wasn’t even the cheapest promotion they’d held, but it stands out in the halls of sports history as a bad idea of epic proportions—Ten Cent Beer Night. 

At the time, cups of sudsy, 3.2 percent ABV beer fueling the drifting attention of a person watching a midseason baseball game in the midwestern United States retailed around sixty-five cents (around $4.17 in today’s money). But on this fateful evening, the stadium lowered the price to a handsome dime. 

The crowd reacted poorly, devolving into stripping, streaking, and—in a mood turn that caught many off guard—storming the field to start fights with players. It got so wild that the umps called the game for Texas in the ninth inning, despite the Indians’ late-game comeback.

Ten Cent Beer Night has lived on in the legendary imagination, a nostalgic piece of infamy about the good ol’ bad ol’ days, before everyone was a square—and when it was really very easy to get fucking loaded at a baseball stadium. Would that we could return, and yet we cannot. 

Unless. 

Ten cent beer distribution was limited to one stand, situated in the back of the park. CORBIN SMITH

The Portland Pickles’ Ten Cent Beer Night revival, last Thursday, didn’t devolve into a riotous Lents-wide bacchanalia. As a citizen, I was thankful; as a journalist, I was disappointed. Unlike the 1974 event, which has also been blamed on Ohioan despair and a remarkable disregard for any kind of guardrails, this was a controlled event, and turned out as more of a "fun night out at the ballpark with family and friends" than a "world historic bad idea."

Ten cent beer distribution at Thursday’s game was limited to one stand, situated in the back of the park. Instead of distributing whole pints, cans of Pub Beer were divided up into little shot glasses and only available two at a time, as per OLCC rules about ballpark beer distribution. 

Instead of distributing whole pints, cans of Pub Beer were divided up into little shot glasses. CORBIN SMITH

If you came to the park to get railed on cheap beers or to witness a fire in Lents that pierced the dark Portland sky, foretelling a bleak and brutal future that would consume every last particle of light in the collective heart of man, you had been conned. But if you wanted to, like, go to a baseball game with your friends, you probably had a great time. 

Here’s the thing about going to a big professional sporting event nowadays: It kind of sucks. There’s security everywhere and you have to carry your keys and wallet in a clear bag. Tickets are both expensive and laden with Ticketmaster fees, the seats are mostly not very good, food is insanely expensive, and the in-arena experience is a little much. (In most places, getting to the arena sucks ass, but Portland actually has decent transit options to stadiums. So go us, I guess.) 

The Pickles are not a pro team; they’re a college wood bat team. And their whole enterprise feels like an attempt to capture that probably-fake feeling of what going to a game used to be like. The seats are pretty much all good, the food and beer aren’t priced like they’re made out of endangered rhino glands, and Walker Stadium is a brief MAX ride away at any given time. 

It was a pure sports experience. CORBIN SMITH

The baseball has a way of fading in and out of one’s attention—bring a friend to chat with—but sitting next to the Ridgefield Raptors’ dugout and hearing their team let out a collective masculine bark when their closer kept a Pickles’ player from getting back to a loaded base in the eighth inning was a pure sports experience, even if the stakes were lower than attending the World Series or whatever. 

Ten Cent Beer night is over, the world of the rowdy, Delilloian collective mass feels over. Live sports are captured by petit bourgeois respectability, and unless the economy gets turned into something WAY different, these stanchions of humanity are probably not coming back. But Pickles games remain a lower-stakes, highly-pleasant experience that tries, night after night, to have fun out there, and that’s something good. That’s something that strives to create joy from the detritus the end of that world has left behind. Check it out sometime, even if the ten cent beers aren’t big enough.