I was born in the mid 90s so my earliest Brewers memories only date back to the early years of Miller Park. The post-Yount years fascinate me with the rebrand, stadium saga, on-field struggles, move from the AL to NL, etc. What was it like experiencing all of that in real time as a fan?
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It was horrible
Terrible. We had a bad team, a bad stadium, a bad farm system. I mean it was just a mess. It was tough to be a fan, but we powered through it.
Oh and the logo was shit.
Anyone that complains about how the team is now or recently wasn’t a fan during the 90s
Won just as many world series championships back then.
Seriously, was still fun, but playoffs and competitiveness were unheard of and expectations were low.
Really the only positive is that it was a lot cheaper to go to a game.
It was still entertaining and they still had some fun players. You just knew they had no shot at the playoffs most seasons. The 92 team was a lot of fun. The worst stretch was probably the early 2000s. They had 4 straight 94+ loss seasons even though they had some young talent that gave hope for the future.
You appreciated the wins when they came but never really had expectations of success. You just followed the individual players and the team every day because what else were you going to do in the summer? Not like there were any competing pro sports.
I saw the team’s National League home opener in person at County Stadium. It was a win over the Expos. After the game we exited out of a chicken-wire right-field gate, and that’s when it hit home how important it was to replace that rattly old pile.
Of note, we all hated the 1994 logo you posted. Generic cheap half-assed attempt to meet the then-current retro aesthetic baseball adopted en masse after Camden Yards opened.
Jeff D’amico
Chuckie hacks on 2-0.
Bob Uecker made for an enjoyable broadcast. Often better when the team was getting absolutely destroyed.
You learned to love a player and ignore W-L.
I remember I was in 3rd or 4th grade when they changed the logo to this from the ball and glove (ugh). At school, my teacher asked the class what everyone thought of the new Brewers logo, and one kid immediately blurted out “it looks like it says B-M!” So then after rolling his eyes and letting out an exasperated sigh, the teacher had to explain to those who didn’t know what a bowel movement is. Consequently, the class had an uncontrollable giggling fit. This moment basically encapsulated the 1990s Milwaukee Brewers experience.
Hopeless.
The team on the field was bad. Like the current Rockies. They couldn’t develop good players and the guys they spent money on sucked. They let Paul Molitor walk without even offering him. They traded Greg Vaughn for peanuts. Someone named Rafael Roque, honest to God, I swear I’m not making this up, started opening fucking day one year because the prior year he had made like 6 reasonably competent starts.
But that’s just why things were bad. They were hopeless because the organization was a stagnant swamp. Bud Selig becoming commissioner elevated his daughter Wendy and her husband Laurel into running the team. They didn’t know what they were doing. Sal Bando was the GM forever because he was an old favorite player of the owners, after he left he admitted that he never wanted the job and just took it because he couldn’t say no to them. We drafted busts, and in the rare cases that we drafted well – usually with pitchers – we’d destroy the guy’s arm before he could even establish himself. We got excited for Ben Sheets when he was picked because he was can’t-miss enough and close enough to MLB ready that the org couldn’t screw him up.
Every August/September I’d pick a contender to adopt as my rooting interest through the postseason because there was otherwise no real point to keep going.
You were a Packers fan and marveled at Michael Jordan. Baseball didn’t exist.
If it wasn’t for their games on TV, I never would have watch a single game.
Pain. So much pain.
It was rough. After Yount retired and Molitor left — and especially after Bando tried to get Molitor to accept a hometown discount coming off a year in which he’d batted .320 and driven in 89 runs — it was all too clear that either there was no money to go after top talent, or a refusal to spend available money on it.
We were also faced, in the runup to the 1995 Miller Park funding vote in the state Legislature, with the seemingly real possibility of the team leaving town. Charlotte was rumored to be the destination.
There were power hitters like Greg Vaughn and John Jaha to provide some excitement, but you didn’t go out to County Stadium expecting to see a team that could compete with the Blue Jays, Indians, Orioles or Yankees.
Jenkins was fun to hangout with on Water Street.
Not very good, the Notre Lame era
It was grim, but my favorite part of being a Brewers supporter in that era is how the fans could rally around our mediocre players. Nothing like hearing the stadium erupt in cheering for the likes of Dave Nillson and Kevin Seitzer.
going to a game was dirt cheap but we sucked real bad
Going from one of the greatest logos of all time, to one of the worst ever. Yuck.
Terrible. Little to no hope of making the playoffs or even finishing at or above .500. The “highlight” was 1992, when Phil Garner led the team to a 92-70 finish, 4 games out of first in the AL East.
County Stadium was a dump by then – I think they stopped doing any maintenance after Gorman Thomas was traded. Paint peeling everywhere, disgusting bathrooms, uncomfortable metal seats, a “state-of-the-art” matrix scoreboard that was already obsolete by the time it was finished, and the only speakers were on a large tower in center field making it very difficult to understand announcements, music, etc. Even the sausage race wasn’t there except for a crappy cartoon version on the scoreboard on Sundays.
Best part of the experience is that it was cheap. You could get a bleacher ticket, a brat, and a couple few beers with a $20 and still get change back.
The Selig family refused to put any money into the team or farm system, so we signed overpriced free agents here and there, and got lucky with a few prospects. There was almost no hope that anything would improve for more than a year.
You youngsters have no idea what we went through to get to the amazingly competitive teams we have now.
I kept forgetting how to spell Graeme and thought the vowels were a prank. Finally getting it right felt like leveling up in childhood.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about: [Graeme Lloyd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Lloyd)
It wasn’t pretty. The team could always hit pretty well but the pitching was atrocious. County Stadium was a decent place to watch a game. No frills but it was spectacular on a nice summer night. The Upper Box seats had the best view.
There were no expectations for the team to be good but there was also no excitement. No one wore Brewers gear, no one talked Brewers. They were just there. Far behind the Packers in attention, mostly because at that time the Packers were good for the first time in 25 years
Also, only about half the games were televised
“If Wendy Selig was still in charge, she would’ve traded Ben Sheets for prospects by now” sums it up
Our first baseman was name John Jaha. I don’t remember much as a young kid except that my mom would always say, JOHN JAHA…HAHA!
Solid childhood memory.
As brutal as it was, as a kid, games were incredibly cheap and accessible and they still did tons of cool stuff with fans. I went to more games from the ages of 5-10 (pre miller park days) than i have since.
Loved the players, loved going to games, just assumed we’d never be good. Something nostalgic about it…
First thing I think of when I see that logo is Burnitz’s sideburns
We had season tickets back then, starting with the ‘96 season. Some good players like Vína, Cirillo, Vaughn, Listach, Seitzer, Ben McDonald, Scott Karl, and Cal Eldred. Fun to watch just not contenders by any stretch of the imagination.
As others have said, tickets were dirt cheap. Field level seats (red seats) could be had for about $14, which adjusted for inflation is about $28.
Players were very accessible though. I remember having a conversation with Scott Karl about his Acura Integra. Cal Eldred would sign for about 20 minutes before every game too.
After coming in second to the Blue Jays in ’92 it was downhill in the 90s. Paul Molitor left and they didn’t play 0.500 ball until the 2000s.
Plus side, we would go to games and with every inning move further and further down the seats closer to the field. The ushers didn’t care most of the time. By the 7th inning of a weeknight game there’d be like 5,000 people left in the stands. We were teenagers, so long as we were watching baseball it mattered less if they won or lost. It was still baseball. I have a jersey with this logo on it still today.
County Stadium has much less going on than Miller Park, you went to watch baseball. The rest was really there to make sure you had food and drink options. There wasn’t much in the way of other entertainment. No museums, driving ranges, kids play areas, etc.
Oh, and if you got bleacher seats, all you got were bleacher seats. There was no connection from the bleachers to the rest of the stadium that I recall.