End of Brewers' drought renews interest in baseball

I was only 7 years old when the Milwaukee Brewers played their last playoff game, a loss in the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1982. Since I didn’t care about baseball then, the only thing I remember about it was being bored at my uncle’s house while the grown ups watched the game on television. Twenty-six years later, with an acquired love for the sport, I’m pumped and hopeful the Brewers can win their first title.
I was 10 before I acquired a taste for Major League Baseball (MLB). A number of students in my class collected baseball stickers and put them in a yearbook that featured the starting line-ups of all the teams. I may not have liked baseball at the time, but I loved stickers, especially the kind you could scratch and sniff. While baseball stickers didn’t come with an accompanying odor, the idea of collecting something like this was appealing to me.
As I collected more stickers, and my yearbook filled up, I started learning more about the sport and the players who played it. I learned about batting averages, earned run averages, runs batted in and on-base percentage, and discovering Rollie Fingers’ mustache was the ultimate joy.
I never filled up the yearbook, mainly because I didn’t earn any money to purchase the amount of sticker packages you needed to get everyone, but I paged through it so many times it eventually fell apart.
Going to a MLB game never seemed like a possibility to me. I had only been to Milwaukee a few times in my life, and it seemed like an exotic location a rural boy would never get to again. But one Sunday, as I skipped Sunday School because I felt “sick,” my Sunday School teacher called me at home and asked if I would like to go to that game with the rest of the class. Miraculously, my sickness quickly disappeared, proving God uses motivation in healing ways.
It was in the 1987 season, after the Brewers had won 13 games in a row, and they were taking on Detroit, Oakland or Kansas City – the actual team has long been lost in my memory. Seeing County Stadium for the first time was a thrilling experience, as it seemed so large. Inside the atmosphere was electrifying, well at least it was for a 12-year-old boy whose most exciting experience in life to that point was traveling out West in second grade.
We sat on the right-field side, and I felt like I got to know Rob Deer personally since he was so close to us. I’m sure he struck out several times that day, but he remained my favorite Brewers’ player for years because I thought he was my buddy.
I think the Brewers lost that day, but I didn’t care. I got to see legends like Deer, Robin Yount, Paul Molitor and Jim Gantner. I even saw current manager Dale Sveum when he was a player.
Since then, I’ve seen a number of Brewers’ games and even been at a game at Miller Park in which I got a press pass that gave me full access to the field prior to a game. I saw baseball’s all-time best playcaller, the legendary Bob Uecker, and took photos of Mark McGwire as he crushed some balls out of the park during batting practice in the midst of his record home run season, although that doesn’t seem as special now given the mark alleged-steroid use has left on baseball.
My love of baseball included an entire summer playing Baseball All-Stars on the original Nintendo Entertainment System with my best friend. We played entire leagues, sometimes staying up all night to do so. He usually beat me, but it didn’t matter to me because I had a lot of fun.
I even collected baseball cards for awhile, during the 1989 and 1990 seasons when I had a paper route in which I made some spending money. I have since sold all the cards at a rummage sale, but I kept the good ones. I’ll give them to my son someday.
I’ll also take him to a game when he’s old enough to appreciate it. I’ll probably take him to a Wisconsin Timer Rattlers’ game next year when he’s 4, and then to a Brewers’ game the following season when he’s 5.
I just hope he doesn’t have to wait 26 years for the Brewers to win enough games to make the playoffs when he’s old enough to actually appreciate it. As we all know, that’s a long wait.