How did you become a Brewers fan

[brewerjamie15]

Became a fan when my dad took me to my first game in the late 70's. Got totally into it right off the bat, a rabid fan throughout.

[CheezWizHed]

Ahhh the memories. Listening to Ueck call the game while doing something outside is one of the best ways to listen to the game. I actually remember wondering why that strange guy from Mr. Belvidere got a job calling Brewer games! I've learned much since then.

 

Then there was the early spring games at County Stadium. Being a poor student at MSOE, we would go to the Kool-Aid free game, which was always on a freezing cold day. Watching the Brewers while huddled under blankets....

 

Since I grew up in Northern WI, starting baseball practice (or Brewers starting ST) was always the first sign of spring. Robins weren't the first sign of spring, Yount was. My Freshman year of HS, we actually shovelled off the field so we could play our first home game.

[jhart05]

I was born in Wisconsin. We cheer for just about all the state teams.

 

Don't like NBA ball (can't wait for the Bucks to leave town), and I am a UWM alumnus, so I only cheer for the Panthers in college sports.

 

So it's Brewers, Packers, and Panthers for me. I've also been a Steelers fan for 30 years now, since I was 7 years old.

[TracyThom]

I don't really have too many positive memories of my father while I was growing up, but the best memories involve riding in the car with him with the Brewers game on the radio. I guess that's how it started. Plus I met Charlie Moore when I was 4 or 5.

[lodiness]

My great uncle gave me a Sheffield Rookie Card (I know there are a lot of haters, but I always liked him) when I was about 8-9. One of my fondest memories of him, he used to own a baseball card shop, my mom would drop me off while she ran errands, so when I went to visit him, he would always tell me the stories behind the card. Said Sheffield would be a great player, so I followed him. The strike kind of turned me off of baseball for a bit, but now I'm back in action. Being from Wisconsin, being a fan of the Crew is in the blood.

[Tbadder]

JHart said: Don't like NBA ball (can't wait for the Bucks to leave town)

 

I know the feeling, can't wait for the Packers to pack it in.

 

That's basically how I became a Brewer fan. I couldn't stand the rabid sheep-like adulation of the Packers, so I took a liking to her uglier but more mindful sister.

[Gobias Industries]

Right after the Jeffrey Hammonds signing.

[Boy Jeenius]

I was a Braves fan as a little guy. Henry Aaron was my favorite player to an extreme. When the White Sox played here for a couple of summers, I went to almost every game, but never became much of a Sox fan at all (but I did see Mickey Mantle play - that was cool).

 

Brewers came junior year in HS. I was a fan since day one. Many skipped high school and went to the first opening day, and the next day at school it was the buzz all around Arrowhead. (I was too much of a sissy to skip). I went to the first Saturday home game and then went to a dozen games that summer. Steve Hovely started out hot, Danny Walton had a good first couple of months and Tommy Harper was a legit MLB player. Marty Pattin was the only pitcher on the team who resembled someone who be called an MLB pitcher. Man alive did they suck - for a long time. But it was baseball, and that was all that mattered.

[JimH5]

I turned 8 years old in the summer of 1970, and my dad took me to County Stadium to see the Brewers. It seemed that whenever we went to the game, Lew Krausse pitched. They often lost, but I thought it was the coolest thing to see such a huge patch of green, and to eat hotdogs served out of a metal box.

 

In 1971, my mom was pregnant with my youngest sister, and she went to the same OB/GYN as Marty Pattin's wife. They both gave birth at West Allis Memorial Hospital around the same time, and one day, my mom came back from a doctor's appointment with an autographed picture of Marty Pattin. That was really cool.

 

It was tough that the team was so bad during those early years, but it was still great fun to go to a game. Brewers, Bucks or Packers, it was a thrill to see when my dad had game tickets on top of his dresser.

[dvoiss]

I started following baseball in 1968. That was the year of Denny McClain's 30 wins. At that time I was a Twin and Cub fan because the Twins were on TV here in Madison on Saturday afternoon and the Cubs were televised on Sunday afternoons. Both those teams were pretty good back then. The Twins had Killebrew, Oliva and Carew while the Cubs had Ernie Banks, Billy Williams and Ron Santo. Yes it broke my heart when the Cubs blew it in 69.

 

I remember the winter and sping of 1970 when the rumors of a move from Seattle for the Pilots began to take hold. I would read the sports pages every day to keep updated. When the move became final I immediately dropprd the Cubs and Twins and haven't looked back since.

[bucksbeat]

No exotic story.

 

Grew up with the understanding that you root fall in love for with your hometown teams. Period.

[DougJones43]

It's my dad's fault. He got me into all things Wisconsin sports, including the Brewers.

[sbrylski]

I had been a casual fan in the 90's, raised to root for the Brewers. In either 2000 or 2001 (I distinctly remember this was during a radio broadcast of a Henry Blanco AB), I remarked that I would never become a big baseball fan. (I wonder if Henry Blanco had anything to do with that...) A few years later, after basically taking a break from baseball, for some reason I became excited to hear the Brewers were going to call up J.J. Hardy for opening day. I went online to learn more about him, and got in somewhat of an argument on the ESPN forums about Hardy. I kept researching more and more, found Brewerfan, and more and more learning, and here I am now - a diehard for the foreseeable future.

[TheCrew07]

I grew a huge brewer fan, on the farm we always had the radio going with the game on. However in the late 80s and early 90s as I was in High School and College I got away from the Brewers as my true sports love, UW, began to take off. Going to school and then living/working in MN didn't help either, in the mid 90s it was tough to follow your teams if you weren't in state, especially baseball with no radio or tv coverage at the time.

 

In '97 I moved back to WI, and one day during the summer of '98 I was driving back from an account up in the sticks and stumbled across a day game on the radio, I had totally forgotten WDOR in even existed, I was messing around seeing what was out there as my rock stations weren't coming in that far north. Well it took about 5 minutes and I was laughing along with the banter on the radio, and that sort of hooked me back. I gradually got more and more into the team and in 2002 I was totally frustrated with the team (we now had games on FSN yay!) and I thought to myself that I hoped the Brewers had something going on in the minors, something to be excited about and look forward to. Much to my dismay I couldn't find anything intelligent about the Brewer minors except for the spin blurbs on the MLB site about how JM Gold was going to make it back and so on. I changed my search a bit and somehow got a site article from Brewerfan.net at the top of my list. I was thoroughly impressed with the interview, started bouncing around the main page, clicked the forum link, and I was literally "wow'd", which doesn't happen often. I was able to find exactly the information I was looking for, including a ranking of minor league players, I was in heaven. I lurked for a long time, almost a year, then started posting.

 

Brewerfan has pulled my love of the Crew right up and along side of the Packers and all things Badger, and I've found that I enjoy following the minor league side as much as the MLB side. In fact, MiLB is probably more intriguing, I find myself researching other teams minor league system and following the top prospects in all leagues, which is something I never intended getting hooked on. I'd say thank you, but I'm not sure all of the time I spend on bf.net is a good thing...

[mls4]

I went to my first game with my grandpa as a 7-year-old in 1981 and got Jim Slaton's autograph. I think I was mostly hooked at that point, but the 1982 playoffs and World Series made me a fan for life.

[Glennron]

My dad was born in Milwaukee and grew up there so it was pretty much inherited. I was always a pretty big fan but never really a die-hard or anything. I always followed Badger basketball more than any other team, but after the 2007 heartbreak to UNLV I was so mad I decided I'd pay more attention to the Brewers since the season was about to start, to forget about the Badgers. Since then they've been the team I've followed the most out of all Wisconsin sports teams.

[ShinyaSS]

I moved from Japan to Madison last year.

All I had known about Brewers then was that there's a son of Cecil Filder.

Now I have 2 uniforms of Prince and 1 of Ryan. Go Brewers!

[Brian the Automator]

Well, I've lived in the metro-milwaukee area all my life, except for college, so proximity was my primary reason.

 

More specifically though, my parents got my signed up for the Brewers Pepsi Fan club, where you'd get like 6 tickets, a subscription to What's Brewin' magazine and a gift... I liked to read as a kid, so the magazine got me interested, and 6 games a year (plus whatever other scattered ones I ended up going to because someone had tickets) reeled me in, probably starting in 1985 or so. I've been hooked ever since, of course.

[danzig6767]

I was born and lived in California as a kid for awhile, but for some insane reason, my folks moved back to Milwaukee.

 

As a kid i loved baseball and played in little league starting at age eight. The Brewers were my hometown team and i became a fan. Then the late 70's and early 80's came, with guys like Yount, Cooper, Molitor, and G. Thomas. I was hooked and adored Yount, i even tried to emulate his batting stance in little league.

 

Somehow i survived the following 25 years of mostly futility without wanting to bail on the Brewers. The only upside to all that futility was that the recent winning made it feel that much sweeter.

[Bring Back the Stein]

The first memory is of my buszia weeping to the newsman's face after the Fall of Saigon. She had sent three sons to Vietnam so, later, that made sense.

 

My second memory as a breathing human was yet more searing: Waking in the fat of my other grandmother's arms beneath the klieg lights of left field and amid the sounds of the murmuring sea of Milwaukee County Stadium's bleacher creatures and the grind of the organ. Eddie Romero was at bat. That supreme sense of safety will never be duplicated.

 

But the whole of my childhood is populated by memories at County and worshiping the Brewers that come very close (I had virtually a permanent cleft on my right ear where I would fall asleep to Uecker's voice on top of the transistor radio).

 

Both my grandfathers, and my dad, worked at Ladish and had big families and so money was tight. But they all loved baseball and the bleachers were cheap (and, somehow, we'd get free tickets from their union stewards). Milwaukee's manufacturing heart was getting ripped out in those days and the bleachers reflected much of the city's rough-and-tumble. For my grandfathers, who spoke different languages, save for baseball, it was a place for the families to come together over shared regional hatreds and Robin Yount's swing.

 

To be a Brewers fan has always been to suffer gloriously in an attitude of defiance, something at which the peoples from our ethnic stew seem particularly adept. More purely and honestly than the ersatz posturing of Cubs fans. I've written here before about this, but I recall when, playing the wretched Yankees, I was seated in view of their leftfielder when dad gave me a handful of pennies and the drunken commandment, "Side-skip one into (expletive deleted) (Lou Piniella's) eye."

 

I buried my dad a few weeks before the Brewers won the Pennant in 1982, and, without that team, I don't know how I would have endured those nightmare days.

[Brian the Automator]

The first memory is of my buszia weeping to the newsman's face after the Fall of Saigon. She had sent three sons to Vietnam so, later, that made sense.

 

My second memory as a breathing human was yet more searing: Waking in the fat of my other grandmother's arms beneath the klieg lights of left field and amid the sounds of the murmuring sea of Milwaukee County Stadium's bleacher creatures and the grind of the organ. Eddie Romero was at bat. That supreme sense of safety will never be duplicated.

 

But the whole of my childhood is populated by memories at County and worshiping the Brewers that come very close (I had virtually a permanent cleft on my right ear where I would fall asleep to Uecker's voice on top of the transistor radio).

 

Both my grandfathers, and my dad, worked at Ladish and had big families and so money was tight. But they all loved baseball and the bleachers were cheap (and, somehow, we'd get free tickets from their union stewards). Milwaukee's manufacturing heart was getting ripped out in those days and the bleachers reflected much of the city's rough-and-tumble. For my grandfathers, who spoke different languages, save for baseball, it was a place for the families to come together over shared regional hatreds and Robin Yount's swing.

 

To be a Brewers fan has always been to suffer gloriously in an attitude of defiance, something at which the peoples from our ethnic stew seem particularly adept. More purely and honestly than the ersatz posturing of Cubs fans. I've written here before about this, but I recall when, playing the wretched Yankees, I was seated in view of their leftfielder when dad gave me a handful of pennies and the drunken commandment, "Side-skip one into (expletive deleted) (Lou Piniella's) eye."

 

I buried my dad a few weeks before the Brewers won the Pennant in 1982, and, without that team, I don't know how I would have endured those nightmare days.

Just wanted to say, that was some great writing.

[hawing]

Brian beat me to the punch in this case. Bring Back the Stein, I enjoy many of your posts, and the one above especially.

 

Reading through the experiences shared in this thread - which, by the way, has been a great antidote to the relatively dour mood around the board this week - I'm struck by how many of us had our Brewers interest sparked by the team's (relatively few) past successful seasons, or one or more talented players. Some of us got lured in simply because the Brewers happened to win the first game we saw. For at least one poster here, it was little more than the luck of the draw for baseball cards and stickers.

Imagine how many more fans there could have been with a little more success, or a little less Sal Bando, or any of a series of random incidents going a different way.

 

Along these lines, I think it's more exciting to imagine how many young fans entered the fold recently because of the 2008 wild card berth, seeing the Brewers on TBS, the final-week heroics, the brief Sabathia era, maybe even the fans' final vote to get Corey into the all-star game. Or just a random first game a kid attended this year that the Brewers happened to win, or that had a cool giveaway item.

[Crew2323]

I was born in Milwaukee to a family that had always lived in Milwaukee. In 1986, when I was six years old, my family moved from Milwaukee to a town of 200 in North Dakota. There wasn't a whole lot to do there, other than to go to the playground and shoot hoops, or go to the baseball diamond and play ball. The only sports on TV were Chicago Bulls basketball (which is where my affinity for Michael Jordan grew), Minnesota Vikings football (thank goodness my dad is an avid Packers fan), and Atlanta Braves baseball. I watched the Braves occasionally in the late 80's. I liked baseball, but didn't really understand it.

 

In 1989 my family moved back to the Milwaukee area. I remained a Braves fan and followed them, and my love for baseball grew when they went from worst to first in 1991. I was hooked and cheered for the Braves as if they were my hometown team. Little did I know that they somewhat were. But from that point on I began to follow the Brewers, as my dad seemed to do on a more regular basis. I would occasionally be taken to a game or two with my dad or people we got to know. It was in 1992 that my love for the Brewers bloomed. I was enamored with Pat Listach. I wanted him to win the Rookie of the Year badly. I thought Kenny Lofton was a scrub. In English class in 6th grade I wrote why Pat Listach should be ROY over Kenny Lofton and gave stats to back up my claim. (On a side note, some of you are killing my childhood picture of Pat Listach when you talk about how he shouldn't have won ROY http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/laugh.gif)

 

But even after his dissapointing sophomore season I was hooked on baseball, and specifically, the Brewers. I was devastated when Molitor left, but was excited about a guy named Cirillo. I liked Greg Vaughn and "Vaughn's Valley". I liked Dante Bichette because he had a funny name. Silly things like that got me hooked on the Brewers.

 

The summers during my high school years would always include Brewer games in the left field bleachers, even though the team wasn't very good. It was still nice to see baseball. Some of my best childhood memories are of times at County Stadium. And then, in 1998, when they made the switch to the NL, I was excited that I'd have a chance to see the Brewers play the Braves. I got to attend Cubs/Brewer games in the right field bleachers when Sosa was injecting and using corked bats at his prime.

 

My story may sound the same as others, but its unique to me and I wouldn't trade it for the world. I wouldn't trade being a Brewer fan for being a fan of any other team.

[Fatter than Joey]

I got a clock-radio for a gift back in 1977. I remember listening to my first game on the radio, Brewers v. Blue Jays. I think though, the thing that really sparked my attention in baseball was Mark Fydrich -- him, and Oscar Gamble's afro.

[sauveb]

Growing up in Northwest WI in the 60's my favorite team was the Mets. Actually, they were my dad's favorite team. Gil Hodges was the man in my father's eyes. 1969 was an extremely magical year for a 7th grader who loved baseball. In the spring of 1970 I read in the St. Paul Poineer Press that the Seattle Pilots were moving to Milwaukee. My eyes lit up, I was going to get a team of my own. From day one I was a Brewers fan. I lived and died with Steve Hovley, Tommy Harper, Gus Gil, and the rest of their teammates. Even though being a Brewers fan can be very frustrating, I have loved every minute of it. Many times a year I think of Bud Selig and silently thank him for giving me my team. While they will probably frustrate me for the rest of my life, I will be a Brewers fan until the day that I die.