Read Ultimate Baseball Road Trip Online
Authors: Josh Pahigian,Kevin O’Connell
Josh:
I think I smell brats. Is that one of the famous smells?
Kevin:
That might be a burp backing up on you.
If you’re like Josh and you’re too timid to mooch from fellow tailgaters like Kevin happily did, the sausage barn that stands between the Gantner and Yount lots is the best bet in walking distance of your parking space. We got a kick out of the electronic sausage races and found the Italian a delightfully spicy variation. The brat was also a winner. We should mention, however, that by the time the busy summer months roll around, the Haus is often reserved for private parties,
so you’d be wise to bring your own meat for your primary course and to stop by the Haus just to check out its decor on the way into the game.
1101 N. Water St.
www.waterstreetbrewery.com/home.htm
This is your standard microbrewery, with reasonably priced food. The Honey Light Lager and Old World Oktoberfest have won medals at the Great American Beer Festival. But what we really liked was the huge collection of suds-related memorabilia. Some of this stuff would fetch quite a price on Antique Road Show.
1019 Third St.
Buck Bradley’s dates back to the 1800s. It offers a decently priced lunch menu, but by dinnertime the prices were a bit rich for our blood.
Josh:
This is the longest bar I’ve ever seen.
Kevin:
Same here, my wide-eyed friend.
1872 N. Commerce St.
www.lakefrontbrewery.com/lakefront-brewery-home-page.html
This off-the-beaten-track micro-haus offers a terrific selection of homemade beers. They have about any flavor you can think of. We tried the Big Easy, Cream City, and Golden Mapleroot. The Milwaukee Brewer ambiance is enhanced by Bernie’s old Chalet and Slide from County Stadium. The only thing we suggest: Let patrons slide down into a huge stein of beer.
1731 N. Arlington Place
www.thebeyondlevel.com/thurmans15/
If you’re tired of all the yuppies at the microbreweries why not hang out with hippies? This is the kind of joint where you might find yourself talking to a beautiful local hippie chick, or to some old booze-hound. Probably the latter. But how can you go wrong at a joint named after Thurman Munson.
Kevin:
What was Munson’s Yankee uniform number?
Josh:
Do you really have to ask?
1836 N. Pulaski
This is a place to drink a PBR in true Milwaukee fashion. Stick around until closing and the bartender will hand you an “I Closed Wolski’s” bumper sticker for your road trip car. After we got ours we started seeing them everywhere. Unfortunately, when we turned the car back in to Hertz, they were not happy. And we lost the sticker forever.
2200 N. Farwell Ave.
This pool hall, brew pub, and bowling alley is an East Side landmark that we fondly describe as disgustingly fabulous. Incidentally, Miller Park weighs 500,000 tons, which is roughly equivalent to 62.5 million bowling balls (sixteen-pounders, not those little candlestick balls that Josh and other lightweights used to roll beneath Fenway Park).
2235 N. Farwell Ave.
Just down the road from Landmark you’ll find a true German beer garden, and a hell of a place to sing “Beer Barrel Polka.” There was no music when we visited, but Kevin sang anyway, while Josh slowly inched away from him and scanned the crowd for “new friends.” The beer-garden owners are still waiting for the Brewers to get back to the World Series so they can hold the biggest Oktoberfest since 1982.
2017 E. North
Head to historic Hooligan’s for tasty grub, or great Bloody Marys. If you’re lucky, you just might get booted.
102 North Water St.
Not only does Brewers slugger Ryan Braun have his own line of bats, his own clothing line, and his own energy drink, but he’s part-owner of a trendy restaurant in Milwaukee’s Third Ward that specializes in Italian cuisine with a baseball twist. The menu is a tad pricey, and there isn’t much in the way of the baseball décor you might expect, but according to a few locals with whom we spoke, the food is very good.
When we entered Miller Park on the first level and walked around the concourse we thought we might have found Baseball Heaven. When the roof is open, the park really feels like an open-air ballpark. The glass wall beyond the outfield
remains bright and cheery at all times, and when the roof is open, from some angles it’s like there’s no roof at all. As you sit in different seats around the park you do begin to notice the fanned-out segments and design of the roof, which is a featured part of the ballpark. Sitting behind home plate it looks all wedged up like the gills of some beast from
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
and is clearly the most interesting of all the retractable roofs built to date. The roof is also quite functional on those snowy April days when the wind whips off Lake Michigan. Though we had a fantastic experience at Miller, we began to notice many of the flaws and inadequacies that make a book like ours useful when we left the first level for higher ground. The first level is the only level where you can walk around the entire park, but even on this ground floor much of the concourse is stuck behind the seating, offering no view of the field. This dismantles the outdoor feel and leaves one feeling as though walking in a domed stadium or cookie-cutter. Kevin even had a flashback that he was in the Kingdome during his grunge days. This was bad on many levels.
A League of Their Own
In order to keep baseball alive during World War II, fast-pitch softball evolved into overhand hardball. The movie
A League of Their Own
pays tribute to this version of the game, which lasted from 1943 to 1954. Ten teams played in the AAGPBL, which drew 910,000 patrons at its height in 1948. The local gals were called the Milwaukee Chicks, and starred Thelma Eisen and Connie Wisniewski. The 1992 cinematic treatment of the league starred Tom Hanks and Madonna, among others.
Another movie filmed in Milwaukee was the 1989 comedy
Major League.
Even though the ballpark in the film is supposed to be Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, all the stadium interiors were shot at County Stadium. Brewers’ announcer Bob Uecker, who had previously starred as “George” on television’s
Mr. Belvedere,
has much more than a cameo in the story of the underdog Indians.
Josh:
I always thought that Wesley was a rascal.
Kevin:
You mean Wesley Snipes who played Willie Mays Hayes in
Major League?
Josh:
No, mischievous son Wesley, who was played by Brice Beckham on
Mr. Belvedere.
Kevin:
You really had your finger on the pulse of pop culture back in the 1980s, didn’t you?
Josh:
Mr. Belvedere’s nickname was “Brocktoon,” in case you’re interested.
Kevin:
Trust me, I’m not.
Josh:
Did you just rip a hole in the knee of your jeans?
Kevin:
Umm … maybe.
The concourse down the third-base line offers a collection of shops, restaurants and memorials. While we like the historic nods, the shops made us feel like we were in a mall. There were even a few preppy teens blocking the walkway as they frantically thumbed out messages on their smartphones.
Friday’s Front Grille in the Hot Corner features darts, billiards, bowling, soccer, and lacrosse. You can sit in the restaurant with a window-view of the action. But there are many more seats with no view of the field, so be careful what you get yourself into. The placement of the restaurant forces the concourse to run behind it so fans walking on the concourse can’t see a thing. Not impressive at all, as far as design goes. We would have liked the ballpark designers to prioritize the fans walking around ahead of a chain restaurant.
Autograph Alley is one cool area in the Hot Corner. Fans can find zillions of autographs here of current and former players, as well as notable Brew Crew fans. These aren’t just famous Brewer signatures. You’ll find the penmanship of such immortals as Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, Satchel Paige and Joe DiMaggio on display too.
The Walls of Honor pay homage to Wisconsin’s MLB alums, Negro Leaguers, and members of the All American Girls’ Professional Baseball League. Display cases offer a nice collection of balls, caps, uniforms, and bats, as well as photographs and stats. The Negro Leagues display honors all players of the Negro Leagues nationwide, not just the Wisconsin Bears.
The retired numbers hang high above the field on either side of the massive video board in center. They are mounted
on baseball placards to honor: Aaron (44), Molitor (4), Fingers (34), Yount (19), Uecker (50), and Jackie Robinson (42).
As for that oversized video board: At the time of its debut in 2011 it ranked third-largest among baseball’s stadium screens. It offers 1080p high-def resolution, which means it could play any Blu-Ray in Kevin’s collection and look pretty damn good.
The bullpens do not have grass in them. Rather they are covered with artificial turf with a little grate in the middle for drainage. How cheesy is this? We suggest, respectfully, that the Brewers fix this in future years. We hear geneticists are working on some great shade-loving grass.
Miller Park hosted the 2002 All-Star Game. While the extravaganza was a success on some levels, it will go down in history as one of the biggest flops of Bud Selig’s reign as baseball commish because he allowed the game to end in a 7–7 tie. In order to ensure every player got into the game, there were no pitchers left when the game went into extra innings. So Selig decided not to penalize teams in playoff contention whose hurlers would have to remain on the mound indefinitely. Strangely, Kevin sides with Bud on this one. Well, perhaps not so strangely, as the last remaining AL pitcher was Freddy Garcia, of his beloved Mariners.
Not long after the game that never ended, the St. Paul Saints rose to the comedic challenge and sponsored “Tie one on for Bud” night. On July 10, 2002, the independent league team gave away Allan H. Selig memorial neckties, complete with a picture of “Bud” himself in the center. We suppose this promotion was in better taste than one sponsored by the Saints later that year that presented fans seat cushions featuring pictures of the faces of Selig and then players association chief Donald Fehr.
Incidentally the only previous All-Star Game to end in a deadlock was the 1961 affair at Fenway Park. Because of heavy rains, that game was called after nine innings with the score tied 1-1.
“Home to Heroes” murals can be found all over the park. These intertwine the region’s heritage of brewing, manufacturing, tourism, papermaking, and agriculture with baseball players from all eras. They are very well done.
If you haven’t had your fill of brats, Italians and Polish sausages in the parking lot, fear not. This is the land of spicy encased meats, and the offerings inside Miller Park do not disappoint. The remaining fare is just that, fair. So enjoy the brat and sausage Mecca that is Milwaukee.
Leave the chicken, pizza, and nachos to other parks, and enjoy the best brats baseball has to offer. While it’s true that there is no substitute for a home (or parking lot) grilled brat of your own design, these ballpark beauties come awfully close. And whether you get your brat inside the park or out, they come with the trademark Secret Sauce, which we thought was a lot like Arby’s Sauce. It tasted ketchupy and vinegary, with perhaps a dash of horseradish for good measure. According to local legend the Sauce was invented in the 1970s when a bulk-order ketchup delivery delivered to County Stadium accidentally arrived as a mismarked bulk-order of barbecue sauce. The industrious food-service workers at County mixed the small quantity of ketchup on hand with the freshly delivered barbecue and passed it off to fans as a new top-secret culinary creation. They served “dipped” brats all homestand and the fans just ate them up. Now they sell jars of the stuff by the dozen at every game.
Just be sure to bite down all the way through the natural casing of your brat, or you might get Secret Sauce all over your brand new Ryan Braun jersey like poor Kevin did.
We also loved the Italian, Polish and Chorizo. Kevin recommends getting a 24-ounce cup of suds to wash down all of the cased meat you can eat.
The Klement’s dog was squishy, rather than firm. This dog isn’t worth a whistle—especially when so many other great cased-meats are grilling nearby.
After you try the brats, Italians, and beef brisket, your tummy might need a little cooling. Ours did and we used some
Home Sweet Home
ice-cream to cool us down. The Home features soft serve in a dish or waffle cone, in a root beer float, or in a chocolate or strawberry sundae. We’re not sure if after weeks on the road we were simply in need of some dairy or what, but it hit the spot.