Brew Town Buzz: Milwaukee's Rocking With Brewer Mania

(Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

Diiiiing....Diiiiing....the bells were ringing profoundly, declaring prominence and striking intimidation into the opponents' core.

Blasting out of Miller Park's speaker system, the bells, ensued by a guitar solo, left no doubt of who was in to pitch.

The crowd rose and cheered as No. 51 came of the leftcenter bullpen and a mystifying rush fell across the stadium.

Trevor Time has come to Miller Park.

For nearly two decades, the Brewers were the joke of the American League, then, along with the Pirates, the joke of the National League Central for nearly a decade.

You would go to a game (if you even chose to go) and see mostly a group of no name kids and a few familiar faces lose. For the optimists out there, the sausages were good and the stadium served famous Milwaukee beer.

The Brewers and Milwaukee began to build a reputation, as what happened at County Stadium transcended into Milwaukee—lots of drinking, violence, losing, hard work, etc. Was it a heavenly calling or just common sense that the Crew's new retractable-roof stadium was named Miller Park after the Milwaukee-based Miller Brewing Company?

Take your opinion on that matter, but America and Milwaukee considered the naming a perfect fit for Brew Town. Milwaukee was becoming stereotyped as "the beer capital of the US with a losing baseball team," as I read in a newspaper as an elementary schooler.

As a hometown native and die-hard, I have "been a witness" by seeing the Brewers miraculously change from terrible to their current state of success (no, I don't need a t-shirt that reads 'WITNESS' with a Nike swoosh underneath). Attendance was pitiful and it must have been painstaking for the front office to play "Wisconsin Lottery Guess the Attendance" at Miller Park. On Saturdays in summer, the attendance could be found at a mere 20,000, with a few thousand of that total being added on to make the number appear decent, as if to tell the world that Milwaukee still loves its baseball.

While Milwaukee has always loved baseball but, besides five or so good seasons, has not been blessed by the baseball gods. Therefore, the people didn't go to the games, and some even considered it an embarrassment. Milwaukeeans supported the Brewers but willingly admitted that their team sucked by mid-June or May. By July, Brewers' talk had been side-washed and Packers Mania was popping up everywhere, like weeds in my backyard.

One of the best ways to personify how bad the Brewers were was how everything involving the Brewers got hit hard; attendance, pitching, even the Klement's Racing Sausages.

On a muggy Milwaukee night in 2003, I was on-hand as the Brew Crew battled the Pirates. Though the Brewers won the game in extra innings, the highlight in the game between the two cellar dwellers was when the Italian Sausage was "whacked" by Bucs player Randall Simon and fell down.

Despite the Brewers lackluster record that year, the worst thing that happened to the team was the sausage whacking. Sad.

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