An '82 Game To Remember: HOF's Everywhere, and a Bat to Boot!

After making the playoffs for the first time in franchise history the prior season, expectations were high going into the ’82 season.  However, things did not start the way many had hoped.  Maybe the pressure to excel had gotten to them, or maybe it was something else, but they were sub-.500 on June 1st when Manager Buck Rodgers was let go.

He was replaced with Milwaukee native Harvey Kuenn.  It seemed to be just what the team needed, and they responded to the tune of 72 wins after the change, and won the American League East title on the last day of the season.

There was one game in particular that season that I will always remember, and that was July 3rd against the Red Sox at County Stadium.  This was the game that our family chose to go to for our one-game-a-year tradition in our family, as we didn’t live all that close to Milwaukee.  

This game was perhaps the greatest confluence of events in Brewers promotional history: a Saturday night, a holiday weekend, a team with high expectations that has come alive and is playing amazing baseball, and…it was Mountain Dew replica bat night!  That’s right, an actual, full-size (if you were seven, like I was), usable bat.  I vividly remember seeing the ad for this game on TV, and immediately went running and telling my parents that we NEED to go to this game!  

The Brewers marketing department sure knew how to take advantage of the beneficial calendar, as the paid attendance of 55,716, the second highest in County Stadium history at the time, proved.  To go along with an amazing promotional item on a holiday weekend, the Brewers also were playing a Red Sox team that had three future Hall of Famers (Jim Rice, Carl Yastrzemski, and a young Wade Boggs) on it, matching our own three future HOF’s in Paul Molitor, Robin Yount, and Ted Simmons. Add to that the fact that the Crew had a soon-to-be Cy Young award winner in Pete Vuckovich as the starting pitcher that night, and it’s no wonder that every seat in the house was filled with cheering fans.

Fortunately for all of us fans in attendance, the pressure of playing in front of a packed house didn’t get to the Crew, as they dominated from the word “Go”, and won easily 7-0.  Molitor led the game of with a home run, and Cecil Cooper hit the first of his two on the night two batters later.  Coop also hit an RBI double, giving him 10 total bases and three ribbies on the night.  If you were ever at County Stadium whenever he came up to bat, you know how loud the chants of “COOOOOOP” could be.  Needless to say, more than fifty-five thousand yelling it after that performance was almost deafening.  

Not to be outdone, Yount also got in on the action with a three-run shot in the fourth.  It was performances like that that led Yount to winning the first of his two AL MVP awards after that season.  The icing on the cake (or mud in the eye, if you were the Red Sox) was that Vuckovich pitched perhaps the best game of the season for the Brewers, a complete game three-hit shutout.  Hindsight being what it is, Vuck probably shouldn’t have won the Cy Young award that year, but for that night, he definitely looked the part.  

As we near the 40-year anniversary of that game, as well as (sigh) of the Brewers only trip to the World Series, it has made me think a lot about that team, and the July 3rd game that was the most special to me of my entire childhood.  I will always remember not only the action on the field, but just the overall feeling inside the stadium that night. 

I may have only been seven years old, and I think it was probably only my fourth or fifth baseball game I had ever been to in person, but even I could sense there was something different happening.  That team, and that game, were both special, and both would only become even more special over time. 

For most of my life, I have always kept the ticket stub of any baseball game I went to as a souvenir.  Unfortunately, I didn’t keep the stub to that game. 

I do, however, still have the bat.