A Brewers Game

September 12, 2006

It was not too long ago (OK, twenty-years) that out of all the cities hosting professional baseball or football teams, the two I would have had the most difficulty finding on a map were Milwaukee and Green Bay. I just never figured out where those two were. No mystery now.. Green Bay is the large city to the north and Milwaukee to the south. One Sunday we headed out to our first exploration of the southern city.. Milwaukee.

Miller Park in Milwaukee.. the home of the Brewers.. from a distance looks like an outsized trilobite. Its external ribs like some impervious exoskeleton. It is set into an industrial landscape.. which included a large Miller Beer brewery within sight of the stadium.

A baseball game. It was a perfect family outing.. Baseball has such a calm and almost meditative pace that it is perfect for a small close group. I think of football games as being more hardcore-fan oriented.. ditto for basketball.

This game was free hat night.. The first thousand or so fans through the turnstiles got a free hat. Thus we were confronted with a large group of people with brown Brewers caps. The crowd itself was quite friendly.. I didn't get the feeling that the people up front were yelling nasty things or that there was a rowdy group anywhere.

My biggest surprise was how young all these ball players looked! The pitchers and batters looked much younger than me.. like kids almost. How did that change? When I was younger and went to ball games these professionals looked like grown-ups.. and now someone my age would be a veteran.

I video-taped the game, and I hope to put up a compilation of my images and comments soon.. In fact, that partially explains my lack of a blog for a few days.. I thought I could finish this video.

After the game we took a drive through the city.. thinking about where to stop next time. I would not call the downtown particularly vibrant. We saw some much more lively streets in other sections of the city.. such as that in which UW Milwaukee is located.

Milwaukee sits right up against Lake Michigan. An impressive stretch of green park runs along the lakeside, complete with sandy beaches. The main attraction of this lakeside is the Milwaukee Art Museum.. designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened in 2001. It is one of the many show-stopper museums that have opened since Frank Gehry's Bilbao. This museum and the extensive lakeside will be our next Milwaukee destination.

The temptation in travel writing is to portray a city or region as a done deal.. something experienced and seen.. known once and for all. One advantage of the blog format is the ability to capture the small steps by which a region enters the consciousness.. its routes and points of interest becoming mapped upon the mind.. becoming an assumption.