Published May 14, 2026
Anniversaries do it for me. Always have. Probably always will. So I waited for May 14 to roll around before posting this, even though I wrote it during the first weekend of the 2026 baseball season.
The date this happened was easy enough to figure out. Baseball Reference tells us the Philadelphia Phillies defeated the Houston Astros on May 14, 1976, and further details confirm for me that I was at this game.
And because Astros pitcher Mike Cosgrove struck out Phillies slugger Mike Schmidt while the clock was on an even-numbered minute, my chaperone and I — along with many of the 14,264 in attendance — enjoyed free beer for a few innings.
Is it possible that was 50 years ago today? The calendar says yes.
This story deserves a better storyteller. I’m still damaged, and typing remains a painful chore, but I’m the only person who knows any of this. So you’re stuck with me. Please be kind.
Foamer Night
The Astros (called the Houston Colts at first) joined the New York Mets as the National League expansion teams in 1962. Houston’s first winning season came 10 years later.
Its win-loss records in the 1970s were mostly the definition of average: one loss for every win, give or take a few. That attendance figure I put up above for a Friday night game in 1976 against the eventual NL East champion tells you the Astros weren’t exactly a hot ticket. MLB itself was in a bit of a funk that decade, leading to a few ill-advised promotions.
At some point in the ’70s, the Astros announced that certain seats could be had for $1 with enough Frey meat labels. There was something else: something called “Foamer Night.” On such a night, if an Astros player hit a home run with the clock showing an even-numbered minute, beer would be free through the eighth inning!
Others have shared stories about this promotion online.
To enhance the drama, a square orange light would turn on for even minutes, then shut off for odd minutes.
Thing is, the Astrodome was a pitcher-friendly ballpark, hardly a launching pad for home runs. There weren’t many “foamers,” er, homers flying over the fence anyway, but especially not during half the minutes of a given game. So the team tweaked the promotion. There would be a designated strikeout victim from the other team, and if he struck out with the orange light on, guess what? Free beer!
On May 14, 1976, Schmidt was the player picked to be the designated strikeout victim. Yes, one of the best power hitters in baseball history. Yes, the batter who once hit a ball that might have landed on the moon had it not hit a speaker suspended from the Astrodome roof.
By rule, it went in the books as a single.
But I believed! The Astros could strike him out! And I wanted to be there to see it.
Somehow, I got my wish
Don’t ask me how I convinced all of the adults involved to let me go, but my plan came together. With just a couple of weeks left of the school year, teachers were fine with letting me have a Friday after lunch off from classes — especially when a local priest stopped by to say he’d be taking me to Houston for a fun evening.
The drive took about 2 1/2 hours, not counting when we stopped for a pregame meal. It wasn’t my first game at the Astrodome, and it was far from my last, but it was still a fun experience. That would have been true even if it hadn’t been Foamer Night at the Dome.
The Astros scored the game’s first run in the first inning, and the offense was basically done for the night. A Greg Gross triple to set up that run was Houston’s only extra-base hit. The Astros wasted leadoff singles in the fifth, sixth and seventh innings and lost 5-1.
Schmidt was 3-for-4, scored two runs, drove in a run and walked. But one of his at-bats resulted in an out, and it’s the reason I have this story to tell.
The Phillies led 2-1 in the top of the fifth inning when Schmidt came to bat with one out and a runner on second base. Cosgrove, a left-handed pitcher, got two strikes on Schmidt, a right-handed batter, and was set to throw his next pitch.
But the orange light was off. It was an odd-numbered minute, and someone let Cosgrove know. He stepped off the rubber, waiting, and the crowd caught on to the reason for his delay tactics. Once the light came back on, pretty much everyone in the stands was yelling and hoping for a strikeout.
And they got it. We got it.
The exodus from the seating area to the aisles and on to the concession stands was a sight unlike any I’d ever seen. Woooosh.
Two, please
Did my chaperone want a beer? Yes. Could I get one too? Sure. Want me to go get them? Sure.
No one asked for my ID. They were swamped with customers, and anyway, I’d been told that even at 14 I looked older. The drinking age at the time in Texas (and in Louisiana) was 18, so I suppose it was plausible I was old enough based on the eye test.
I can’t remember if I went back for seconds, though they didn’t cut off the beer until after the eighth inning. Who knows?
Don’t worry — the story doesn’t get more scandalous.
My chaperone died a few years ago, and the beer (“coldest foam in the Dome!”) is the only thing I can recall connected to him that anyone might find inappropriate. It felt normal to me for Southeast Texas and Southwest Louisiana fiftysomething years ago. And I’d been in the neighborhood bar with my dad a number of times at much younger ages.
A few weeks later, I understood
We listened to music on the way there and back. “Piano Man” came on the radio, and although it was only a few years old, hearing it again caught me by surprise.
“It’s weird how songs come and go, and then you forget about them,” I said.
“People are like that too,” he said, looking straight ahead as he drove us home.
Not long after that night, he moved on to another city and the next phase of his life. I was grateful he chose to spend some time with me before he left.
“Misty Blue” was just becoming a hit in the South in May 1976, and we both loved that song.
“Dorothy Moore,” he said. “From Jackson, Mississippi.”
I didn’t know how he knew that, but he was a big fan of gospel music, and as I got older and learned more, I got it.
Nothing struck me as strange about May 14, 1976. But then again, I lived in the Deep South for half a century and later worked with a columnist who typed on his laptop next to me that Baton Rouge was a drinking town with a football problem. A football town with a drinking problem, you ask? No. Read that again. Sports and beer were like baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet (that commercial wasn’t two years old yet!).
Almost everything about 1976, including the bicentennial spirit, seems a million miles away here in 2026. Two-hundred fifty years old? Yeah, and I’m feeling every bit of it.
Not many people seem to remember or believe there was such a thing as a Foamer Night, but I am here to tell you it was real.
Sending love. Protect your peace.
Photo of the Phillies’ Mike Schmidt statue by Marcus E Jones via Shutterstock.
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