Episode Two: Detroit Drinks Baseball History Part 1

This week, once again, we’re talking ball: baseball history, part 2. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out part 1, where we cover the early days of baseball in Detroit, including the formation of the American League and the Detroit Tigers, and Ty Cobb’s somewhat deserved infamous reputation as a drunken brute.

We ended right at national Prohibition, so let’s pick back up in 1933, shall we? Beer and baseball go together like...well, beer and baseball. And breweries in Detroit, like elsewhere, were major early sponsors of Tigers baseball. They also drove ad sales national, which was partially responsible for the death of hyper-local beer in the 60s and 70s. We’re also covering two iconic Detroit baseball bars: Hoot Robinson’s and the Lindell AC. I talk with Tom Derry of the Historic Hamtramck Stadium about their renovation efforts and about the famous Babe Ruth Birthday Party’s origins. 

Once Prohibition ended, in 1933 beer came back to baseball and hasn’t left since. A 1933 Free Press article worries that 3.2% ABV beer, about to become legal again right at the same time as 1933’s opening day, would prove ruinous to the game and its fans. It told of the horrific Olden Days when drunkards rampaged and rioted all over the sport.

 The patrons of the ball yards, after standing to the bar for a few innings, drinking the rye and bourbon which were then offered under official auspices, sometimes found themselves swept away on an irresistible tide of emotion, as the lady defendants say, and took to throwing all sorts of loose objects at the umpires and visiting athletes in critical moments.

These objects were of great variety, being decanters, beer bottles, beer crocks and the arms of chairs, as well as an occasional walking cane. The decanters and bottles sometimes shattered and left fragments of glass lying about the field, multiplying the problems of the ground keepers and causing the ball to take bad hops.

April 2, 1933 Detroit Free Press

Well, we managed to survive Opening Day 1933, although it wasn’t the first or last time random objects were chucked onto the field by fans who had over-celebrated. Baseball in Detroit took a brief hit from World War Two, like it did everywhere else, but it was inextricably intertwined with cheap beer and hot dogs.

Baseball had always had a close connection to local breweries. By the 1950s and 60s, baseball and beer were so intertwined that many of the major league teams had beer sponsors and players were hucking beer. Minnesota had Hamm’s, Boston had Narragansett, the Milwaukee Brewers were the Brewers, already, and Detroit had Stroh’s. It also had Goebel, and Altes, and loads of unofficial non-sponsor beers. Through the 1950s and 1960s, baseball and brewing meant big money. So how did they get from “Beer and Baseball Don’t Mix” to having an Official Beer of Major League Baseball (which is Anheuser-Busch, by the by)?

Enter Player Number 3: Television. Breweries were already sponsoring minor league teams, and the earliest days of baseball had seen teams put together from brewery and tap room employees, as we heard in the previous Episode. And in the early days of TV, stations were desperate to find cheap programming to fill the air without bankrupting themselves on risky ventures like sitcoms or dramas. Baseball was the perfect fit: it already had a large audience all over the country, and showing the games live with already-established play-by-play announcers was a logical next step. In 1945, Narragansett Lager became TV baseball’s first sponsor, sponsoring the Boston Red Sox’s first televised games.

 Baseball and TV ads, by the way, have a long and storied history of their own: the first TV commercial ever aired popped up in a 10-second spot for Bulova watches on a local New York broadcast of a Dodgers-Phillies game in 1941.

 Detroit’s Goebel Beer joined the beer advertising bandwagon in 1947, sponsoring Tuesday and Thursday Tigers game broadcasts in exchange for ad time in between innings. Goebel was a longtime sponsor of Tigers baseball. In 1911 (the year he moved to his still-standing Woodbridge duplex, by the way), Goebel printed a “Facts for Fans” booklet with stats and anecdotes, prominently featuring the one and only Ty Cobb on the cover.

In 1947, Goebel revamped an earlier gimmick: a large-scale, easily viewed wooden stand with summaries of the action from each inning, including runs, hits and errors, followed by a brief update of other major league games in progress. In other words, the giant scorecard we’re all used to seeing. A version of this was common in baseball even at the turn of the century, but Goebel added more stats and spiffed it up for broadcast so it’d show well.

 From a 1947 article in Television Magazine:

Two separate surveys have shown that viewers do not regard any of these between inning activities as commercial — this, in spite of the fact that the word Goebel appears twice on cards each time and the bottle and glass are always in full view.

Since baseball broadcasting was such a boon, you can imagine that gathering at your local to watch the game was a must for many Detroiters. Especially in the earlier days of television. For most families and businesses, a TV set was a major investment. Not everyone jumped on the home TV bandwagon, but bar owners were quick to spot a money maker. Again, in 1947, a seminal year for beer, baseball and broadcast TV, the World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees packed bars across the country as folks crowded in to watch. In Chicago in 1947, fully half of all TV sales were to bars and taverns.

National advertising for sports also, sadly, ushered in the demise of local brewers. Because advertising rates weren’t especially localized, advertising for, say, a Tigers vs Yankees game was costly. A hyper-local beer like Goebel’s would have to pay a lot of money in order to only reach a small number of Detroit viewers who might buy Goebel’s. On a larger scale, they just couldn’t compete with the Buds and Millers of the world. Advertising expenditure per barrel of beer doubled between 1950 and 1960, largely driven by the big-dog breweries, from about $100 to $200 or so per barrel. This was the same decade that TV ownership leaped from about 10% of households to 90%, so the effect on local breweries was devastating.

 Of course, it’s tough to prove correlation equals causation here, as Johan Swinnen and Devin Briski admit in their book, Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World, from which I’ve taken the last few statistics. But economist William James Anderson, at the University of Michigan, makes a compelling argument that TV advertising in the US, as opposed to in Europe where beer is both more local and less advertised on a large scale, played a massive role in the overwhelming consolidation of beer markets that took place in the decades between 1960 and 2000. So Goebel’s innovative advertising strategy would, in the end, lead to its demise at the hands of mega-breweries.

The Tigers switched beer sponsors from the familiar and beloved Goebel Bantam to Stroh’s in 1960. This was back when Stroh’s was making a play to be one of those national mega-breweries; they bought Goebel in 1964. Stroh’s continued to gobble up smaller beer makers in town until they ran out of cash and had to sell to the bigger dogs, Pabst.  

From the 1870s on, breweries sponsored club teams and bar teams in amateur baseball. Still do, for that matter. Detroit’s baseball bars are legendary and numerous. But we’re going to focus on a couple of Detroit bars that stand out in the annals of Detroit baseball drinks history.

First off: Hoot Robinson’s. Hoot Robinson was an avid baseball fan. He opened his first joint at Michigan and Trumbull in the late 30s. While he was serving up drinks in the Checker Cab building, reportedly Babe Ruth visited and at least one Tigers pitcher insisted on a beer and a hot meal before games. Tigers pitcher Dizzy Trout once had a rough go with some Hoot Robinson pork chops he’d consumed immediately pre-game. During the game, he bent over, regurgitated his meal, and declared that “Hoot’s pork chops sure taste better the second time around.”

Hoot operated his popular bar in that location, then right next door, in what is now the UFO Factory, up until 1994. The building remained shuttered for quite a few years, but now that UFO Factory has opened up (and retained a lot of the exterior features) you can once again get a damn good hot dog.

 Hoot Robinson’s was a great spot before and after games for players and fans. Another? The famous — or infamous — Lindell AC. The “first sports bar in America.” Many Detroiters over the age of 50 have stories to tell about the Lindell. It was one of those unlikely and uniquely Detroit success stories. Run by two Greek-American brothers, Jimmy and Jonny Butsicarus at the ground floor of the Lindell Hotel on Cass and Michigan, the Lindell AC does have a stake to claim as the first sports bar in America.

 But this was a real actual sports bar. In the early and mid 60s, the Lindell was a ground floor bar in a hotel with a few rather iffy regulars. But Jimmy and Johnny were geniuses at what they did, and they soon had baseball, basketball and football players frequenting the bar. Players knew they could count on the Lindell for cheap beer and no frills.

 One of the Lindell’s most infamous regulars was Billy Martin. He was an infielder for the New York Yankees and a staple at the bar whenever he was in town. One night, Martin was chatting with the Butsicarus brothers and looked around at the dingy, dirty walls and drab décor. “This place is a dump, it needs something,” he said. He recommended that they attach some player photos and autographed items to the walls to cover the imperfections.

I’m not saying there’s a straight line from that to every TGIFriday’s and Ruby Tuesday’s slapping random yard sale trombones to the wall…but I sort of am, and history backs be up.

Billy later worked with the Tigers, the Twins and more infamously, the Yankees. By then he was a regular at the Lindell AC. Detroit sports writer Doc Greene, responsible for many of the Lindell legends, also re-named the bar. It had been the Lindell Bar. After Doc Greene got booted from the Detroit Athletic Club for wildly inappropriate behavior, he nursed his wounds and some whiskey at the Lindell, which he suggested in an article should be re-named. And so it was.

 This was way before baseball contracts in the millions of dollars. Anonymity was the rule, unless it was a Saturday afternoon and the ballplayers were signing baseballs from the Lindell for kids, who lined up around the block with their dads to meet the players. Doc Greene and Billy Martin spread the word and the reputation of the Lindell. In 1994, Mickey Mantle himself reminisced to Sports Illustrated. Mantle talked about his drinking days and about his own “Breakfast of Champions” in those years: Brandy, Kahlua and cream. Here’s what he said

With Billy [Martin] and me, drinking was a competitive thing. We'd see who could drink the other under the table. I'd get a kick out of seeing him get loaded before me. Alcohol made him so aggressive. He's the only person I knew who could hear a guy give him the finger from the back of a barroom. We had some wild times.

“One night in Detroit after quite a few drinks, we went back to our hotel room, and Billy said, "Let's climb out on the ledge and see what's going on in the other rooms." We happened to be staying on the 22nd floor. He climbed out the window, and I was right behind him. Well, the stunt got old pretty fast because nobody's lights were on—and I'm afraid of heights. But the ledge was so narrow that we couldn't turn around, so we had to crawl all the way around the building to get back to our room.

There’s an absolutely fantastic documentary that was produced a few years ago called “Meet Me at the Lindell.” It tells the story of the Lindell AC. The filmmakers interviewed loads of former employees, regulars and owners.

 The Lindell AC poured its last beer in June of 2002. On that final night, a few members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra played a quartet, fans came out of the woodwork, and in general the last hoorah was fantastic.

Bartender Terry Foster, as quoted in the “Meet Me at the Lindell” documentary, had this to say about the Lindell:

It was old and stinky and the chairs kind of creaked and nothing worked but it was the place to be because it was like a movie theater. Maybe it was Stella [the owner’s wife] yelling at somebody as she was cooking. Maybe it was Jimmy threatening to break somebody’s arms if they weren’t acting right. Maybe it was Johnny cracking jokes and trying to steal kisses from the waitresses. It was just fun to go there and be part of the scene.

All good sports bars, and, I’d argue, especially baseball bars, foster a unique sense of camaraderie. It’s born of love of sport, frivolity, argument, friendship, joy, passion…and something else. If you’ve been in a good sports bar, you know it.

I spent many formative afternoons playing under that corner table at Nemo’s Bar, a block away from the storied corner at Michigan and Trumbull. That 19th century building, with its tin walls and its Stroh’s and its photos of players and regulars on the walls, shaped my earliest curiosity and love of old bars and old buildings and old Detroit. My uncle Bill’s picture still hangs there, and my sister and I post a new shamrock sticker on it every time we’re there.

 Bars are important. Sports bars are important. The banter and the passion and the friendships that spring from sports and bars aren’t insignificant. Sometimes folks aren’t comfortable talking to a stranger about anything BUT sports and drinks. They’re a semi-universal language, whether you’re actually drinking alcoholic beverages or not.

 To finish out our episode, I talked to Tom Derry. Quite a few years ago, he made some friends at a bar, talking about sports. That blossomed, as Detroit stories tend to do, into one of the strangest and most memorable of Detroit bar events: the annual Babe Ruth Birthday Party. Babe Ruth never played for Detroit. He played IN Detroit, yes. He drank in Detroit. Tom Derry has spent decades hosting an even that grows bigger every year, that was never meant to be anything other than a private joke. But he’s parlayed that into a darned good side project advocating for historic preservation in baseball. He’s been the driving force behind the old Navin Field Grounds Crew and the incredibly important Historic Hamtramck Stadium renovation project, where historians and advocates are restoring one of the only remaining Negro League baseball stadiums.

References:
Vintage Stroh’s commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5bwOl-Ig94

 Miller, Carl. “Beer and Television: Perfectly Tuned In.” Reprinted from All About Beer Magazine.

 Reichard, Kevin. “The Glory Days of Baseball and Beer Marketing.” Ballpark Digest. htps://ballparkdigest.com/2017/02/02/the-glory-days-of-baseball-and-beer-marketing/

 Swinnen, Johan and Devin Briski. Beeronomics: How Beer Explains the World. 2017. Oxford University Press.