Laturalis, if a Tool fan? A bat is a tool, and a lat swung by a lad, like Yount. A series of ladders with their series of steps up could reflect all of our struggles as being a stepping stone, classical and opera, to blues and country, to disco and folk, to metal and grunge, to the heyday of pop … Baseball as a concerto! For all the seasons! And it’s not go boo anymore for Brewers fans.
For our (soon to clean ’em with a possible clean sweep?) Milwaukee in the World Series, it certainly has been step by step. More on that in a bit. But it looks, for example, like all that merchandising and retooling of facilities just for the (four?) games has been worth the hype. Hey, the new duds will continue on to serve, forthwith, like throwback uniforms.
Anyway, to lay a backdrop, even though it’s like the back of the lineup order, and say hey, even the Brewers kinda backed into it: The initial of several impromptu ladders set up downtown near the sports bar district, near the checkout counter, just off the edge, at the local library as they were getting ready for their frightening, or am I reading something into it, Halloween trail through which would traipse hundreds of tiny tots, read about baseball history in a special section and then go to view the games and not Little League, what could have been, count ’em, the first ladder, the step variety, to begin to fuel a full-on decorating frenzy. It’s no doubt been spurred by both Halloween and something less scary for diehard fans who have waiting since late-in-the-Series-1982 — and how many genres have passed since then — but now, an appearance by the Brew Crew in The Big Show.
The Brewer gift shop was even overwhelmed early in October, with volume, and thus temporarily shut down; a microcosm of what was seen with business and its preparation around the state. Tickets for the first two games would go for thousands, not hundreds of dollars, and it would cost even more than a fistfull to buy a seat for remote viewing in Game Three, an away contest played in a stadium far from here, a full continent afield down in Tampa Bay. All this made my brother wish he’d had a crystal ball, and more than a hunch, and bought season tickets back in March.
To start locally, baseball books aside, outside of the library, and down the block, there was a tall cool ladder higher than the tap drinks inside at The Smilin’ Moose, a cleanup bar for the Brew, up to basically a third story, with one Mexican painter (see my art exhibit post soon) way up top, two others holding sides of the ladder and a few others doing, well … Hey, why not do some multitasking and have them use their free hand to also do some computer work at the very same time. Use of how many fingers? That one savant had six on one hand. Would that be, backup, Five Finger Death Punch? A requirement would be either computer or guitar literacy. Not suggesting a stereotype, mind you.
What colors were they concocting? Like an old style shades mixer at the Sherwin Williams store? Way up on top, the rims and trims of windows had now been painted orange, and the lodge, oh its logs with a darker shade of brown, probably again, in Brewer-Halloween prep. Worth the money? Take a lesson, Max. If you can see both improvements from across the street …
My mom had her own story, of a long line both in and outside McDonalds, to get a simple senior coffee (better price then Starbucks) and sausage-with-cheese-muffin (not a full Egg McMuffin.) The order in the drive-through got screwed up, but she caught it right away and then went back, they fixed it but messed it up again! Another guy had the same experience. A third got a free meaty sandwich and not an American Family Field brat! And mom had an apple pie, befitting the season, but not the value of a meaty breakfast sandwich.
It was much the same at Walgreens, where the few understaffed pharmacists (seems to be a thing these days) were clamoring to give out flu shots too. They said there had been scant training given for this, so how’d you like them sticking a needle in your arm?
The correlation, and thanks for sticking with, as baseball is life: Everybody seemed to be racing to get to either a Brewer promo or the game itself, or very early tailgating. Coffee, check. Flu shot, since I’ll be in a massive crowd of people soon, hopefully, check. Now get on-sale brats, flash pricing, check. And even more a truism: The various businesses seemed to be rolling out the now-they’re-there-and-were-thinking-of-it specials before they had the chops and the workers to get ‘er gone right!
So when the Games began, they showed two straight, close games where the Brew Crew hung in there for a frantic finish of a one-run win. Then there was The Blowout in Game Three, 10-1 in favor of the Brew Crew, and that consolation and token run was very late in coming. So step by step. The Brew will go for the 22nd sweep in the far more than century-long history of the Fall Classic, and those are clean sweeps, so for a bit of trivia this stat was discombobulated and maybe tainted by a couple of ties — way back more than a century ago. The biggest margin of victory ever was 14 runs, a don’t think there was ever a 13-run-win, and the Brewers almost made the triumph come by ten.
Downtown:
The crowds downtown were moderate on Friday night, (the opener), dependent on the venue, and a little bigger on Saturday, (as a server predicted), but the applause broke out, in largest form like a Brew pitcher fastball coming at you, come The Ninth in Game One. Though they erupted once prior, with a one-run-scored-hit to tip a tight game.
I jokingly shouted to the guy next to me, Tampa Bay rules! He turned to me, spun around actually, in surprise and exclamation. I said I was only kidding. He responded that he hadn’t heard what I’d said, but he knew it wasn’t good. Serendipity. This Series in baseball will do that to you. Then as a good Wisconsin farmer, he introduced me to his daughter …
Over at the next bar over, attendance was more moderate, and some people, many of them coming from The Twin Cities, had other than baseball on their minds. In The Ninth, when the Brewer closer got a first out, the woman at the table next to me, in a group of four, as even women love baseball, stood up on her stool and shouted. I said hey, it’s only the first one. She looked a bit chagrined. Then there was that whole rarity, the double play challenged and reversed on the front end, not at first base, to keep the drive alive, so to speak. I felt like I had put on the curse of The Bambino!
Then came the last and final out and we all took a breath. A woman dressed as a flapper for Halloween, (theme comes up again), kissed the guy she just started dating. I walked past the woman I cursed, no more than a throw-to-first away, and we clinked glasses. I said, Brewers in Four!, and we clinked glasses again.
For game two, one show of applause stood out over all. A woman who is a new server, spun around in a quick tight spin with her hands over her head, then continued it to double high five one person, then two. I would have done the same, but she was looking the other way for her third. She then did much the same for the final out.
A bit of Brewer trivia, going back to the library, but well known to longtime fans: Bud Selig, notably a Ukrainian, and for once they finally win, and his many-years-shit-upon-but-finally-successful effort to bring Major League Baseball to Milwaukee, shows how MLB has very long dissed the Beer City, John Madden (see coming post about Nicholas Cage playing him on screen and also filming in Stillwater) and his love of Wisconsin aside.
The ways the umpire calls go show it’s still a thing. And there were a few in the series, but that last pitch of Game Two was a noticeable makeup call.
I dive into Dodger devotion. A known-for-New York team Milwaukee recently also beat up on, to get where they got.