Last Call: A Farewell to Suds
Schulz, Max
.AST CAI A Farewell to Suds by Max Schulz BEER MAY HA\,~E _~L~DE MIL\\AUKEE Eu but Count, Stadium made Milwaukee great. So, as one might expect of all good things, they're ~earing it down....
...g 94 November 2000 . The American Spectator...
...ld while this may mean a sort of progress, the sad flipside is that the team's home for the last three decades is being razed...
...It has constructed a brand new home for its baseball Brewers to ply their trade in for seasons to come...
...THE BRE\*,,%RS \\%RE SCHEDULED TO move into Miller Park on Opening Day zooo...
...THE ATMOSPHERE SUGGESTED DECADES of baseball had been played there...
...Not that I disagree with the sentiments--I don't--but the self-serious pontificating borders on nauseating...
...I side with legenda~ newspaperman and conservative Godfather M. Stanton Evans, who jokes, "Baseball is a metaphor...for softball...
...THE GREEN CA~FHEDRALS AT VVEIICH THE pompous worship will be missed when they go-- Fenway surely within the next ten years, Wrigley probably not long after...
...Covered in aluminum siding, it resembled a hulking tin battleship, moored down in a valley minutes from downtown...
...In the outfield bleachers was a house where mascot Bernie Brewer "lived," waiting for a Brewer honre run so he could slide down into a giant mug of beer...
...Not exactly a reprieve from the governor, but it did buy a little more time at doomed County Stadium...
...FEN~\~Y P~d<K ~\D WRIGLEY FIELD HA\% been overly romanticized by the baseball-as-a-metaphor-for-life crowd, the pointyheaded types like Doris Keams Goodwin, George Will, and poet Donald Hall who drone on and on about the hallowed places with their expanses of green grass and being taken to their first game by their fathers when they: were four...
...But a crane accident in 1999 which cost three workers their lives (and gave rise to the macabre nickname "Killer Park") delayed construction, and the club decided late last year to play one more season at the old barn...
...It has been a constant reminder that the future of Brewers baseball lies in upscale red brick and shiny glass and the marvels of modern engineering, fairly indistinguishable from tire new stadiums in Seattle and a host of other places...
...But moving out of Detroit's Tiger Stadium, Boston's Femvay Park, Chicago's Wrigley Field, and, yes, Milwaukee's Coun> Stadium will serve to harm tire game, no matter the degree to which it serves to enrich those teams' owners...
...Ruth, Cobb, Musial, and Aaron played at the Fenways and Wrigleys and County Stadiums, notat Safeco and PacBell...
...THERE IS PLENTY UPSIDE TO THIS--TEaRING down Seattle's abysmal Kingdome or consigning Pittsburgh's abominable Three Rivers Stadium to the wrecker's ball can have onh beneficial consequences...
...County Stadium has skirted under the radar of the blathering idiots, and we thankfully have been spared their extolling the fact that it was simply a wonderful place to watch a game, giving a parochial chan-n to a parochial little city...
...And the cities and teams involved stand to lose much of what makes up their identities as well--perhaps none more so than Milwaukee and its Brewers, even if County's passing has hardly.' been remarked upon...
...IT \\AS NOT TttE MOST ATTI~-~CTIWE PLACE, at least from the outside...
...But inside, County was majestic with its rundown charm, cramped walkways sticky with beer, dark overhangs, faded yellow bricks, grubby pillars, and crowds never too large to make things uncomfortable...
...Hank Aaron, on a return visit with the Brewers, hit the last of his 755 home runs at County...
...Baseball is in danger of losing its most tangible connection to its past...
...The story hasn't been the balls flying out of stadiums but the stadiums out of which they've been flying...
...Sparked largely by the successful retro design of the Baltimore Orioles' Camden Yards ten years ago, there has been a wholesale revolution throughout the majors for ne~ digs...
...And doomed it was...
...County Stadium was quintessential Milwaukee, just like beer and bratwurst...
...Miller Park, despite the sudsy sobriquet, heralds the generic future of baseball...
...Pittsburgh's Harvey Haddix pitched his infamous perfect game at County in 1959 . The Brewers arrived in 197o , playing their opening day game just one week after a judge permitted the Seattle Pilots to move operations to the Midwest...
...THOSE \\qqO THINK THE GLUT OF HOME RUNS has been the big story in baseball have it wrong...
...The field, a glorious green, was almost an afterthought in these immensely comfortable surroundings...
...Miller Park, with its retractable roof, has loomed like a skyscraper just a long fly ball beyond County's outfield bleachers for nearly two years...
...With ve~' few exceptions, virtually e\ep,, team in major league baseball has built or has seriously considered building a new stadium in recent years...
...Ro]l Out the Barrel" was sung during the seventh-inning stretch...
...The town has gotten swept up in the mania for new stadimns that has infected most major league cities...
...Indeed, the Milwaukee Braves, with Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, and Warren Spahn, won a championship there in 1957 before shipping offto Atlanta in 1966...
...But Milwaukee, a shabby second-rate city' grown up in the shadows of the Second Gig, inspires no such treacle...
Vol. 33 • November 2000 • No. 9
