The roof was closed on this beautiful September Sunday afternoon, but it should have been open. The roof splits in two and the big glass outfield windows slide apart sideways.
The top deck was open, but had few fans in it. It’s nowhere near as steep as the top deck at Yankee Stadium or Minute Maid Park.
Former Red Sox 3rd baseman Shea Hillenbrand was playing 1st for the Giants that day.
At Miller Park the “Bob Eucker front row” seats are closer than at any other major league park I’ve been to…and this was #27.
They have a live hot dog vs. brat vs. Polish sausage vs. Italian sausage race at the end of the 6th inning. A few years ago Randall Simon, a backup 1st baseman for the Pirates, hit the sausage with a bat as a joke. She (the 19-year old female in the sausage costume) fell down, and the girl in the hot dog costume tripped over her. No one thought it was funny. Milwaukee police took Simon away in handcuffs.
Fireworks go off indoors when a Brewer hits a home run and Bernie the Brewmeister comes down the curved slide you see in front of the left field glass below. At the old park the Brewmeister would appear in the center field bleachers. When the Braves played in Milwaukee, it was Chief Knock-a-homa coming down the slide.
At the 7th inning stretch they play “Beer Barrel Polka” and people dance on the dugout.
An usher took this shot of me. I’m wearing a Milwaukee throwback t-shirt.
The 2006 NAB was in Dallas, and I was able to book a flight on Midwest that had a four-hour layover in Milwaukee that exactly coincided with an afternoon game, so it was another ballpark trip that I didn’t have to pay for. Midwest, later taken over by Southwest, had four seats across all the way back. Leather seats, no less. They served a hot meal (bratwurst – it was a Milwaukee-based airline) and gave you an actual metal fork. And warm chocolate chip cookies for dessert.
Game: Sunday, September 24th, 2006. Cabbed it from the airport and got there in time for the first pitch. San Francisco Giants at Milwaukee Brewers. Miller Park was the fourth ballpark I’d been to that has a roof: Montreal, Houston and Toronto were the first three. The roof on this one splits down the middle and opens like a huge pizza pie. None of the other 8 enclosed ballparks I’ve been to are designed that way. It’s also one of only five that, for obvious reasons, does not have a big Budweiser sign. The other four being Coors Field, Busch Stadium (Bud and Busch signs), Rogers Centre (Labatt’s sign) and Fenway Park (Sam Adams sign).
Like all the new ballparks, it’s roomy, with comfortable seats, plenty of concessions and local character. There’s big curved slide in the outfield and when a Brewer hits a home run fireworks go off (even with the roof closed) and Bernie the Brewmeister slides down it. I got to see that when Milwaukee 3b David Bell hit a 2-run bomb off the Giants starter Matt Cain in the 2nd inning. They do have a race in the middle of the 6th. Being Milwaukee, it’s a hot dog, a brat and a Polish sausage running around the warning track. The brat won. During the 7th inning stretch they have dancers on the dugout roof grooving to The Beer Barrel Polka.
It was the final home game for Milwaukee and they won, 5-3. The Brewers finished in 4th place, 8-1/2 games behind the Cardinals, who went on to win the World Series that year. The Giants finished 3rd, 11-1/2 games behind the Padres. Speaking of the Padres, it was on this same day, September 24th, 2006, that Trevor Hoffman set the all-time record for saves. The following year I saw Hoffman blow a save against these same Giants. Barry Bonds, who lead the NL in walks and OBP (mostly due to intentional walks) that year, did not play. He was winding down by 2006 and only hit 26 home runs, struck out 51 times and walked 115 times. Steve Finley, who I had watched as a Baltimore Oriole rookie in 1989, played in center. At 1st base was former Red Sox 3b Shea Hillenbrand. Shea was traded to the Diamondbacks in 2003 for Byun-Hyun Kim, who had helped lead Arizona to a World Series win over the Yankees in 2001, ending their quest for a 4th straight championship.
I was chatting with a couple of fans who thought it was cool that the Red Sox had broken the 86-year curse a couple of years before. They also mentioned that Milwaukee had been in the World Series back in 1982. They were an American League team then and lost to the Cardinals. At that time that was 24 years prior. Now it will become at least 39 years before they get another chance. Hope springs eternal.
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