Baseball and barley: Go Brewers Go!
I’m very glad the Milwaukee Brewers have just swept the bad ol’ Los Angeles Dodgers for the MLB National League pennant, a reversal of last year’s broom. And the Brewers did it with nearly half the payroll (about 43%) of LA! It was a great result for a small-market team.
What’s cool about the Brewers, besides the way they play baseball, is their name and some of the beverage iconography that goes with it (though, granted, the Dodgers have a community-based history in their name that goes back to the team’s days in Brooklyn).
Otherwise, though, look around the league, and other sports leagues, and there are some pretty lame — and meaningless — names. For instance, there aren’t an unusual number of blue jays, orioles or cardinals in Toronto, Baltimore and St. Louis, respectively: those are just dumb names attached to the teams for no real reason. They are cute birds, sure, but that’s it. There is no inherent connection. The Jays, especially given this past season, could just as easily have been named the Toronto Grackles.
The Brewers, however, have a perfect connection with their city: beer. Besides an obvious link in the name itself, their uniform over the years has captured that spirit of suds. (The intertwined “MB” on their cap that forms a glove and ball was designed by a Wisconsin art student.) At one point in the team’s history, the letter “M” appeared overlaid on a barley stalk. And they once had a cartoon character, “barrelman,” swinging a bat — it was goofy, but he was wearing a wooden oak-stave beer barrel.
Currently, depending on the particular uniform, the Brewers’ jerseys might feature an arm patch emblematic of their defining “baseball-and-barley” heritage, with the two literally intertwined: the baseball’s stitched red seams are replaced by what’s known as “two-row barley,” an important grain that is used extensively in brewing and malting and which has two rows of kernels along the length of its stalk.
The blend of baseball and barley immediately links the team to their community in the most relevant way — with a strong, assertive nod to the city’s brewing history and the great historical beer names like Miller, Schlitz, Pabst and the wonderfully fun named, Blatz (Valentin Blatz brought brewing bottom-fermentation knowledge from Bavaria in the 19th century that benefitted the entire U.S. brewing industry). Each of these original beer producers based historically in Wisconsin helped define especially lager brewing in America and the cities in which thousands were employed.
When it’s a question of what’s in a name, a Toronto Blue Jay is, well, meh and says nothing about Canada’s largest city. But in a midwestern city known for its brewing history? What could be more perfect? A beer and a hotdog at the ball park. Go Brewers Go!
