Fall Essential

I stopped liking baseball in the third grade, when I came off right field with a shiner from a fly ball my glove forgot to catch. I’m not a Wisconsin native or a baseball fan, either, which is why I’m surprised at how much fun I’ve been having watching everybody cheer wildly for the Brewers this season. And now that I’ve read Tom Haudricourt’s book, Brewers Essential: Everything You Need To Know To Be A Real Fan, I can hold a semi-intelligent conversation on a barstool. With so much human drama in the dugout, on the field and behind the scenes, I can see why it was dubbed America’s favorite pastime. That’s not to say there’s never a dull moment—baseball will always have a hard time keeping my attention—but now that I’m a “real fan” I’ll pay more attention to the notable ones.

Brewers Essential is packed with more than a half-century of highlights and lowlights, club facts and trivia, intimate conversations and memorable moments among players and management—the kind of stuff only a talented and trusted reporter like Haudricourt could capture. If you’re a true-blue Brewers fan, the book is a wonderful trip down memory lane, from the early years as the Milwaukee Braves, to the dark days in the sixties when baseball was dead in the city, to the thrilling moment when Bud Selig brought the Seattle Pilots to the Midwest and the Milwaukee Brewers were born. Haudricourt of course spends some time on the famous/infamous 1982 season, the only World Series run the team ever had. It’s where you really get a feel for what the game was like before free agents and monster salaries take over.

From start to finish, the book is written with such authority and compassion for the team that even the lean years—which apparently was most of them—were fun to read about. After all, it led us to now, where the Brewers are back in contention for the pennant.

Between the Brewers' busy August schedule, Tom kindly answered a few questions about the language of baseball, 2008 season highlights and more from the team’s newest fan.

The book is such a great mixture of your play-by-play storytelling style, which is so much fun, and recollections from all the greats. Can you explain how you gathered the material? A lot of the material I pulled out of past stories from the old Sentinel and Journal, then the Journal Sentinel (after the merger in 1995). A lot of those stories were written by me, which shows how long I’ve been around. I then went around and interviewed many of the players and club officials involved, and asked them to tell me stories I might not have heard before. I wanted to provide insight from their viewpoint, including conversations and occurrences that might not have been publicly documented. Basically, I wanted to give the readers an “inside” look at memorable moments in Brewers history that might tell them things they hadn’t heard previously.

I love all the nicknames in baseball—Harvey’s Wallbangers, Bambi’s Bombers, Stormin’ Gorman, The Kid—Are they a product of a bygone era? Baseball writers talk all the time about the nicknames going away, and how unfortunate that is. Perhaps it’s our fault. Perhaps we should give more players nicknames, whether they want them or not. But a lot of the color has gone from the game, as it has become more of a business. Maybe the players don’t want nicknames because they’ll get razzed by teammates. Who knows? That, along with men wearing hats, are two things I’d like to bring back to the game.

I noticed you didn’t interview pitcher Teddy Higuera, who broke some impressive club records in the eighties. How come? Teddy's difficult to get hold of, and to be honest with you, his English is not good enough to come over that well in a book. He does OK, and he tries, but it’s still limited. Thus, I thought it would be better to talk to others about him. Former catcher Bill Schroeder gave me some real insights on Higuera.

As I was reading the book, it dawned on me that there are no coaches in baseball, only managers. Can you help a newbie out on this one? Well, there are coaches. Each manager has a staff of coaches. There are pitching coaches, hitting coaches, third base coaches, first base coaches, bullpen coaches. But the ringleader is the manager. Just the way the game was developed. The manager in essence is the equivalent of “head coaches” in other sports.

The sports world is all about numbers and statistics, but I was astonished at how often one record or another was being broken. It feels like a bigger deal in baseball … is it? I think records are more revered in baseball because there are more of them, with such legendary names as Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Cy Young associated with them. That’s why there was such a big stink about the so-called “Steroids Era” and the offensive records that were shattered during that time in baseball. Many purists believe those records shouldn’t count, that they are tainted. But because we’ll never know exactly who was cheating and who wasn’t, it’s virtually impossible to place asterisks by all records during that time.

I was a summer intern at the Journal Sentinel in 1999. I had just finished a day shift when the crane collapsed at Miller Park. Later that night, I logged onto the newspaper’s website for an update and couldn’t believe how many stories–good, solid, well-reported stories—had been filed. I had so much respect for the hard work and dedication that newspaper reporters and editors devote to the craft day in and day out. Where were you when “Big Blue” went down? I had just returned from the All-Star Game in Boston. That was such a tremendous experience, with the appearance of Ted Williams and all that. Then to come back and see the horror of the crane collapse. Ironically, I had done a story on Big Blue a few weeks prior to the collapse as part of a series I did on the building of Miller Park. That story was used as reference by our other reporters that day and I believe was put back on our website so readers could see what that crane was all about. It is days such as that, whether the subject matter be horrifying or uplifting, that show what newspaper staffs are made of. The next day, I followed commissioner Bud Selig to the opening of Safeco Field in Seattle. I’ve never seen a man with such mixed emotions. He was so happy for the people of Seattle, but so sad and heartbroken about what had happened at Miller Park, especially the loss of life.

A few weeks after the accident, I covered the hard-hat game with the families of the ironworkers who lost their lives in the accident as well as all the construction workers. It was amazing to me the sense of pride these people had in that project. Did you find the same thing? Those ironworkers were immensely proud of that project, and deservedly so. They were building a landmark for the city. After the accident and deaths of their co-workers, they became even more determined to see the project through and build a memorial, if you will, to those who died. I thought it was great the way the Brewers honored those ironworkers, including wearing patches on their uniforms for the remainder of the ’99 season.

Has the book—or the one you published last year called Where Have You Gone, ’82 Brewers?—gotten a bump in publicity or sales with the kind of season the Brewers are having? It’s always beneficial when a team plays well when you’re writing a book about its history. Originally, Brewers Essential was supposed to be published in the spring of 2007. But the Brewers didn’t play that well in ’06 and the publisher, Triumph Books, decided to delay publication for a year. The Brewers fought for the division title right down to the wire in ’07 and I added a chapter about that season. The book then came out this year with hopes higher for the team than in many years, which turned out to be a nice bit of timing.

You’re a great sportswriter. I got the biggest kick out of your creative turns of phrase. A “gimpy-kneed Gorman Thomas” is my personal favorite. Another fun one is in the chapter, “The Big Tease,” which is about the team’s almost-comeback 2007 season. On Prince Fielder’s inside-the-park home run against the Twins, you write: “He did a few chopsteps at the bag and emptied his gas tank.” Where do you come up with this stuff?! Baseball, and sports in general, provides the leeway for using descriptive phrases you might not be able to use in pure news stories. And every night there seems to be something different to write about. I try to be as descriptive as possible so that the reader can picture in his mind what I’m writing about. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, a few well-crafted words can paint a pretty vivid picture.

If you were writing the next chapter of your book on the ’08 season right now, what would be one highlight? If I were writing a chapter on the 2008 season right now, one of the highlights would be the four-game sweep of St. Louis on the road just after the all-star break that was part of a 7-0 trip. Two late home runs by Bill Hall and another by Ryan Braun snatched victories away from the Cardinals in dramatic fashion. Had those games been in the post-season, folks would have talked about them for years.

The situation is obviously completely different, but I still couldn’t help thinking about Favre and the Packers’ fallout when I read about Paul Molitor’s rocky departure from the Brewers. What’s your take on it—and on Favre if you care to comment? I heard a lot of comparisons to Paul Molitor’s departure when the Brett Favre saga was playing out. One of the main differences was that the Brewers were stripping down their payroll at the time and jettisoning a lot of players. Many Packer fans consider the team a Super Bowl contender with Favre, which raises the stakes. Plus, a quarterback is so much more high profile than any baseball player is. I think the story of Favre’s departure will have much longer legs than the exodus of Molitor.