On April 6, 1933, FDR hosted Washington Senators proprietor Clark Griffith and National League President John Heydler at the eve of the baseball season and requested them if beer can be to be had on the market at their ballparks.
“Griffith cast a malevolent parch over the throats of local fandom by stating that inasmuch as beer never had been sold in his park, it would not now,” The Washington Post reported, unfortunately.
The paper famous that “the pertinent and timely question of beer came up at the White House conference and was brought up by the man who kept his campaign promises and made the amber nectar possible.” Heydler stated National League parks had permission to have bars, however that wasn’t a lot comfort for Washingtonians.
Griffith and Heydler had been at the White House to give FDR with season passes to each leagues and invite the president to throw out the primary pitch at the Senators’ April 12 opener. So six days later — 90 years in the past Wednesday — Roosevelt was at bone-dry Griffith Stadium.
As Westbrook Pegler seen within the Chicago Tribune: “They were selling none of that wicked brew in the Washington ballyard, because, for one thing, old Clark Griffith, the local proprietor, looked upon his last beer many years ago and decided that there was nothing but grief and repining in the ale-crock.”
Prohibition was nonetheless at the books, however the brand new legislation allowed other people to at least experience a lovely tame drink — with much less alcohol than as of late’s usual home mild lagers.
Griffith’s teetotaling tactics may had been mainstream within the Twenties, however following Prohibition’s repeal in December 1933, they made him an anachronism amongst baseball house owners. That yr would even be the ultimate time the Senators made the World Series and just about marked the top of contending Washington baseball groups within the twentieth century (with the exception of 1945, when lots of the recreation’s highest gamers had been combating in World War II).
Griffith was already at a monetary downside in opposition to rich house owners who had massive companies to subsidize their groups — together with the game’s maximum a success staff, the New York Yankees, who had been owned by way of brewery inheritor and United States Brewers Association President Jacob Ruppert, no much less. The Senators proprietor, a prohibitionist via and thru, made issues tougher on himself by way of subsisting with out a income that different groups availed themselves of.
“Beer and baseball don’t go together,” Griffith regularly stated, which might strike as of late’s enthusiasts as sacrilege. By the early Nineteen Thirties, enthusiasts had been already bristling at that philosophy. At the 1931 World Series, the group in Philadelphia booed President Herbert Hoover and chanted, “We want beer!” Six years later, at the 1937 All-Star Game at Griffith Stadium, pissed off Senators enthusiasts reprised the slogan. As The Post reported at the time, “someone cried ‘We want beer!’ and the cry was taken up in all sections and became a mighty roar.”
But they didn’t get any. Prohibition would stay the Senators’ coverage till Griffith’s dying in 1955.
‘All pennant winners drink beer and smoke’
From the earliest days of arranged skilled baseball, the game has long past cold and warm relating to enthusiasts chugging a chilly one. In 1880, the National League kicked out the Cincinnati team for violating rules banning beer and Sunday baseball. That staff joined with others to shape the American Association, which NL house owners and enthusiasts mocked because the “Beer and Whiskey League.”
But by way of the early twentieth century, beer was entrenched within the nationwide passion. “All Pennant Winners Drink Beer and Smoke” blared a Los Angeles Times headline previewing the 1912 World Series. At the time, Griffith, a former pitcher, was wrapping up his first season as supervisor of the Senators, and his anti-beer angle hadn’t but taken form. During spring coaching, he had informed his gamers that when a recreation, “one beer is a grand institution, two beers, if you want them, but that’s the limit,” consistent with the Los Angeles Times tale.
When Prohibition became the faucets off in 1920, some enthusiasts asserted that the loss of alcohol was turning gamers comfortable. A letter to the editor in The Post captured the “back-in-my-day” vibe, headlined, “Does Prohibition Make Mollycoddles of Baseball Players? Old Fan Deplores the Loss of Stamina.”
“The baseball heroes of the beerful pre-Volstead days were seldom missing from the line-up, as any old-time fan will tell you, while the fans of these piping times of prohibition are often disappointed by the absence of some ailing star,” wrote the 1930 letter signed by way of “OLD FAN.”
“Going away back to the days when there was a flourishing bar next door to the box office or under the grandstand itself, who ever heard of Charlie Comiskey, or old Pop Anson or Dan Brouthers laying off to have his arm rubbed or toenails extracted?” The fan ended the letter by way of checklist nice gamers of yore, similar to Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner and, sure, Clark Griffith: “They never needed chiropractors in the good old wet days.”
Griffith’s objection to promoting alcohol didn’t save you him from accepting cash from beer firms, resulting in a giant National Bohemian beer bottle that protruded from the scoreboard at Griffith Stadium. In 1951, he inked a TV sponsorship deal with Heurich Brewing Company, which had The Post’s Shirley Povich shaking his head in grudging admiration at the landlord’s chutzpah.
“Clark Griffith is about to pull the century’s neatest trick in salesmanship,” Povich wrote in a while prior to the contract was introduced. “This week he will sell the television rights to 21 of the Nats’ home games to a beer firm for $50,000 despite the stipulation that the sponsor’s product cannot be sold in his ballpark.”
And when the Browns moved to Baltimore from St. Louis prior to the 1954 season, they helped convince Griffith to waive his territorial rights to the area by way of agreeing to have National Brewing Co., owned by way of one of the most new possession’s companions, sponsor Senators TV and radio video games.
Calvin Griffith didn’t percentage Clark Griffith’s perspectives on alcohol, and he installed a beer garden at the ballpark that bore their name in August 1956. “We did it for revenue,” he informed biographer Jon Kerr. “We wanted to sell beer out there to stay in baseball. We had to do something different.” The exchange left stadiums in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh as the main league parks abstaining from beer.
As The Post wrote in a beer lawn curtain-raiser Aug. 10, “Griffith Stadium, an island of prohibition for more than half a century, tonight enters a new phase as a licensed beer garden, Washington’s largest.” Beer gross sales had been restricted to the brand new segment.
But there have been some laws. A neighborhood legislation at the books at the time required enthusiasts to be sitting when eating beer, and the staff offered it in paper cups “in deference to the proximity of the athletes to field-side imbibers who might be tempted to throw bottles,” The Post reported.
“The paper cup rule made a lot of sense. The bottles were missiles,” recalled longtime Senators fan Kevin Dowd, who was round 11 when the beer lawn opened.
“It certainly made the stadium look different,” he added. “Griffith Stadium was all bleachers in left field, wooden seats. The beer garden looked like a picnic area. It seated around 150 to 170 people.
“In those days if you had a coupon from the back of a cereal box, you could get in for 50 cents to the bleachers. And we always sat in the bleachers, looking down on the beer garden starting in late 1956. We saw people wandering around there. It was like standing at the door of a bar and looking in — you were always fascinated by forbidden fruit.”
Young enthusiasts weren’t the one ones captivated by way of that scene, consistent with Yankees nice Mickey Mantle.
“There were so many good fights in the left field bleachers in the beer garden — or women sunbathing about naked — that several times I was watching that when I’d hear the crack of the bat and I’d have to spin around to see which direction everybody was runnin’,” he wrote in his memoir, “The Mick.”
Three years after the lawn opened, the Senators prolonged beer gross sales right through the stadium, beginning with a May 7, 1959, recreation, and enthusiasts spoke back by way of eating 600 to 700 circumstances. As the Washington Evening Star reported, “the Senators drove them to drink” in a 10-1 shellacking at the arms of the Orioles. After the 1960 season, the Senators relocated to Minnesota to change into the Twins. A brand new Senators franchise took their position and got rid of the beer lawn for the 1961 season.
A decade later, that ballclub left the town to change into the Texas Rangers. And when staff proprietor Bob Short returned to the area for a Rangers recreation in Baltimore in 1972, beer was the weapon of selection for an indignant Senators fan to extract revenge. The younger lady poured a beer on his head.