VIDEO: 1976 beer box stacking contest

Saw this recently on the GameOps.com blog.
From the Chicago White Sox, August 22, 1976.

Photo: The most expensive regular hot dog in Major League Baseball

Darren Rovell posted this photo of a $5.50 hot dog at Citi Field, home of the New York Mets.  Apparantly it's the most you'll pay for a hotdog at any MLB ballpark.

Related: What MLB Teams are Charging for Tickets, Beer, Hot Dogs & Parking:

• The most expensive beers are sold by the Boston Red Sox (60.4 cents an oz.), New York Yankees (50 cents an ounce) and the St. Louis Cardinals (54.1 cents an oz.)
• The cheapest beers are sold by the Arizona Diamondbacks (28.6 cents an oz.), Pittsburgh Pirates (31.2 cents an oz.), Texas Rangers (31.2 cents an oz.), Philadelphia Phillies (32.1 cents an oz.) and Los Angeles Angels (32.1 cents an oz.)
• The most expensive hot dogs are sold by the New York Mets ($5.50), Toronto Blue Jays ($5.11).
• The cheapest hot dogs are sold by the Cincinnati Reds ($1), Baltimore Orioles ($2).

Follow up on Beer Cup Snakes (video)

Video: Beer Snake Charmer (via Hamilton Tiger-Cats)

(Thanks to for the link)

Get Your Preak On: All-you-can-drink beer promo

Cleveland tried something like this at a baseball game back in 1974 with legendary results. Now a jockey club is trying a similar promo. From NESN.com:

Having unlimited beer for a day for only $20 sounds like a good deal to a lot of people, but for some, the deal that the Maryland Jockey Club is offering at Saturday's Preakness Stakes is not a good idea.

For $20 dollars, patrons to the Pimlico Race Course will receive a 16-ounce beer mug that entitles them to unlimited free refills for the entire course of the Preakness Stakes, The Washington Post reports. The promotion is part of a new advertisement campaign for the event headlined by the catchphrase "Get Your Preak On."

Some people feel the catchphrase bemoans the storied event and the free-flowing booze is asking for trouble.

"[It is] reducing a great, historic thoroughbred horse race to an event with sleazy overtones," New York Post racing columnist Ray Kerrison told the Washington Post.

The promotion campaign follows a stark drop in attendance to the Preakness Stakes -- from 112,222 in 2008 to 77,850 last year, according to The Washington Post. It was the biggest single-year drop in the event's history.

Read more...

How much does beer cost around the NHL?

A must read for hockey and beer fans: Puck Daddy's 2010 NHL Beer Cost Matrix, Version 1.0.

Since the start of the season, we've been commissioning fans in every NHL city to seek out label and price information for the beer in their arenas. This is because (a) we wanted something more in-depth than the information in Team Marketing Report's Fan Cost Index and (b) some NHL teams actually refused to provide concession price information when it was requested.

(And by "some NHL teams," we mean the Montreal Canadiens, who told us they don't "give out" information that's posted on signs inside their arena for 20,000 fans to see 41 times a year.)

The readers were told to report back with the beer types, sizes and prices for the largest brews available at their games. As you'll see, some provided a bit more than that and some provided a tad less.

See the matrix / chart here...

All about the "Beer Man"

Brian Gainor has an informative and entertaining look at "The Beer Man". A couple of interesting findings from his research:

• Wally the Beer Man is a local legend in the Minneapolis-St. Paul vicinity; famous you might say. Wally has his own baseball cards and has been a focal point of national media coverage on multiple occasions...Wally has been selling beer at almost every beer-friendly sporting event in the Twin Cities since 1970.
  
  
• Japanese beer men strap a keg onto their backs (with a portable cup dispenser) to serve fans at local baseball games. The Japanese also offer "beer women" that roam the stands and serve beers to fans in attendance... Even these women carry a keg on their back to serve fans!
  

Check out the post, complete with videos.

Who has the cheapest beer in baseball?

Darren Rovell reports on Sports Biz that the Pittsburgh Pirates have the cheapest beer in MLB.

...that great honor goes to the Pittsburgh Pirates, who not only have the second-lowest average ticket price in the league ($15.39), but also have the lowest beer price.

This season, the Pirates will be charging $4.75 for a 21-ounce beer, according to Team Marketing Report. That means they are doing it for a cent per ounce cheaper than the Phillies did it last year.

The most expensive brew goes to the Boston Red Sox, who are charging $7.25 for a 12-ounce cold one. That's 60 cents an ounce. I don't think that's Sam Adams either.

Read the full article...

Beer and violence in Cleveland

Here's a great article from ESPN about a Cleveland Indians game on June 4, 1974, featuring a "10-Cent Beer Night" promotion that ended in a riot. Some highlights:

The '74 Indians were a smorgasbord of mediocre and forgettable talent playing in an open-air mausoleum. That year, in a city that fielded one of the founding professional teams (the Forest Citys, incorporated there in 1869), 85 percent of the seats at home games went unsold. All those empty seats meant a balance sheet written in red. The team's executive vice president, Ted Bonda, could put up with losing teams and an ugly stadium (he had inherited both in 1972), but he would not tolerate insolvency. Bonda called a meeting to discuss options for improving attendance, which must have felt a little like trying to figure out how to get people excited about a trip to the orthodontist. Someone, apparently a team employee likely acting out of desperation, suggested copying the Texas Rangers, who had recently hosted a successful "10-Cent Beer Night." We can imagine the grim silence in the boardroom as the group considered this obviously dangerous remedy. How interested would Cleveland be in such a promotion?
...

Accounts vary as to the volume proffered -- 8 ounces? 10? 12? -- but the price was certain enough: 10 cents per cup. Fans -- and we shall use this term for lack of a better one -- could buy up to six cups at a time, with no system in place to prevent a designated mule from purchasing a full complement, handing them off to underage clients, and returning for more.

Even though the Indians offered copious amounts of beer at cut-rate prices, a great many attendees opted to play with a handicap, arriving at their seats drunk, stoned or both. The June 4 promotion turned out to be quite popular, drawing 25,134 people, more than double the average crowd that season.

...

Through deliberate coordination or spontaneous groupthink, hundreds of fans showed up with pockets full of firecrackers. Anonymous explosions peppered the stands from the first pitch, lending the game a war-zone ambiance that would seem increasingly appropriate. Though it is not clear whether this impromptu celebration cost anyone a finger or hand, an uneasy je ne sais quoi settled into the stadium along with clouds of exploded gunpowder and marijuana smoke.

...

As the night wore on, the crowds grew bolder, and packs of fans frequently scurried across the outfield. One man tossed a tennis ball into center field, then scrambled after it. After throwing the ball back into the seats, he led park security on a little jog, pausing at one point to hug another fan, perhaps a long-lost relative, who had jumped out to greet him. Ushers dragged away one of the two, while the other leaped into the stands and was borne away by dozens of gleeful, anonymous hands. The rain of beer became a hail of rocks, batteries, golf balls and anything not bolted down.

...

In 1974, it did not occur to the Indians organization to request an additional police presence at the ballpark for their beer-fueled promotion. If any municipal police were in the stadium that night, they were off duty and quite possibly as drunk as anyone else.

Early on, the demand for beer surpassed the Indians' capacity to ferry it to concession stands, and a luminary, perhaps the same person who suggested the promotion in the first place, decided to allow fans to line up behind the outfield fences and have their cups filled directly from Stroh's company trucks. The promotion achieved critical mass at that moment, as weaving, hooting queues of people refilled via industrial spigot.

The public address announcer reminded spectators not to litter onto the field, and refuse rained down harder. The grounds crew had not sat down since the second inning, and outfield fans used them as moving targets...

Read on ... it gets much worse...