Playing the Fields

In an era when live major-league baseball has retreated to pleasure palaces packed with flashing videos, blaring music, and gut-busting food courts, has the old-fashioned game lost something? Across seven ballparks in seven days, one fan goes looking for an answer

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Raise high the roof: Milwaukee's Miller Park

GAME 1
San Francisco Giants vs. Milwaukee Brewers
Miller Park, Milwaukee
July 20, 2007

"Is that the art museum?" I ask, half kidding, when we spy the ballpark in the distance. Miller Park has little in common with Santiago Calatrava's remarkable addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum beyond the fact that both were completed in 2001. But the striking ballpark, with its 12,000-ton metallic retractable seven-panel roof, turns heads with the same frequency.

The long walk from our car to the stadium is torture. Wisconsinites have turned tailgating into an American art form; the whole parking lot may as well be paved with kielbasa. Dad and I brought no provisions, an error that few locals make, and by the time we pass Klement's Sausage Haus and a sudsy beer garden rocking to the sounds of Lil' Mel & the TKO Band, we're ready to devour anything not nailed down. And we're still in the parking lot.

Once inside the park, our eyes are drawn, again, to that soaring roof. It's been the source of much talk in Milwaukee, very little of it good: It costs too much. It leaks during rainstorms. It casts shadows on the field. They've fixed it now, but for a time, the noise of it closing was unbearable. "Imagine the sound of 10,000 fingernails being dragged across a giant chalkboard, and you have an idea of how bad it sounded," quipped Kevin Reichard of ballparkdigest.com. But the park has become a symbol of how Wisconsinites zig where others zag. In an era when American cities bent on urban renewal unveil charming retro ballparks downtown, Milwaukee built a giant airplane hangar in the Menomonee River valley, nearly five miles from downtown—all the better for tailgating.

"What's with the carnival music everywhere?" asks my dad, who notices music wherever he goes even when you didn't realize there was any playing. People have likened new stadiums to theme parks and Miller even sounds like one, a vibe that the Brewers' Web site manages to capture in two sentences: "There's more to a game at Miller Park than just the baseball. It is a total entertainment experience." The spacious field level is full of gift shops, exhibits, a bat factory, a batting cage, and a place to create your own baseball card; there is a picnic-like area in the right-field loge bleachers called The Beerpen. And, of course, enough Leinenkugel taps to get half the county drunk.

Our seats are behind home plate, up high—though not as high as the $1 "Uecker Seats," partially obstructed spots named for the Brewers' announcer Bob Uecker. The field looks pristine, and the people in our section are nice, though not terribly into the game. For amusement, a group of teenage girls behind us count on the ballpark's constant contests, trivia quizzes, and the "kiss cam." They're particularly obsessed with Bernie Brewer, the mascot who loiters in "Bernie's Dugout," beyond left field, waiting for a Brewer to hit a home run so he can fulfill his destiny and skid down a slide onto a platform near the foul pole. (In the old stadium, Bernie resided in some kind of chalet with his own keg and slid into a beer stein, but times are tough.)

During the sixth inning, the crowd awakens. In one of baseball's funniest (new) traditions, five giant sausages with oversize heads—a bratwurst, Polish, Italian sausage, hot dog, and chorizo—race around the field. The ritual has spawned copycats around the league, from Pittsburgh's pierogis to Washington's four Mount Rushmore presidents.

In Milwaukee, Chorizo is victorious tonight. Around the park, bets are paid off in beers.

The Brewers, who are behind all evening, can't inspire the same enthusiasm. By the seventh inning the teenage girls are gone, and no one homers tonight, so Bernie stands for most of the game, looking embarrassed. So do the Brewers, who lose 8-4.

Photography: (Images 1 & 2) Scott Paulus; (Image 3) AP Photo/Morry Gash

This article appears in the July 2008 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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