The Day it Rained Baseballs: The Infamous 'Ball Day'

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1997 Brewers Opening Day Journal-Sentinel clipping

The Journal-Sentinel's headline summed up the rollicking and rowdy 1997 Brewers opening day.

Opening Day in Milwaukee was once quite a bit different than it is today. If current openers are a night out on Water Street, opening day at County Stadium was a post-shift knock-around at a corner bar in West Allis. The hulking old freighter of a ballpark always seemed to be about ten degrees cooler than the rest of the neighborhood and the concrete walkways and aisles were permanently coated in a thin layer of spilled beer and peanut shell dust. There always seemed to be a little danger in the air during those 1990s openers, with a fistfight or a drunken fan sprinting towards the infield ready to appear at any time. Opening day rarely sold out in those days, meaning that a five dollar bleacher admission was the only excuse someone needed to get very drunk and rowdy on a weekday afternoon. Still, these openers hold a very special place in my heart. Since 1992, I have been there for every home opener – always with my dad and sometimes with my mom or sister – and County Stadium at the first burst of spring was always a dizzying and strange place for a young kid on a phony illness absence from school. But none of these openers were quite as bizarre or raucous as the 1997 lid-lifter against the Rangers – forever to be known as “Ball Day.”

There was a kind of naïve optimism surrounding the Brewers as the 1997 opener approached. The 1996 team had won 80 games – and were among the AL’s best teams over the final month-plus of the season. Ground had been broken for Miller Park! Ben McDonald was healthy! Jeff Cirillo had broken out! And, in the week leading up to the game, unseasonably high temperatures had teased fans with the prospect of summertime weather.

But when April 7 rolled around, temperatures lingered in the low 30s. As fans began to file into County Stadium, a biting 30 mph wind dropped the wind chill to zero. As a part of a national opening day promotion that season, every fan – no matter how rich the stench of Miller Lite on their breath – was handed a free souvenir baseball sponsored by TrueValue Hardware as they entered the park. “It’s always a risk to give away balls,” acting team president Wendy Selig-Prieb said after the game. “But we knew we have the greatest fans in America here in Milwaukee and we wanted to do something nice for them.”

The Brewers were one of twenty teams participating in the baseball give-away. Just days earlier, the Kansas City Royals opener had been delayed in-game when fans began tossing their baseballs into the playing field. The souvenirs had also been thrown on the field in Houston and Texas. In Milwaukee, the problem with the baseballs was evident from the outset. The game was delayed by several minutes when a few dozens balls were heaved onto the field during the pregame activities. Armed with five-gallon pails, members of the Brewers grounds crew picked up the balls and the players took the field.

 A stadium employee picks up souvenir baseballs thrown onto the County Stadium field.

Shortly after the first pitch, a pipe burst above a section of box seats on the first base side of the lower deck and team officials scrambled to find seats for the 80-plus displaced fans. As the water froze solid around section 17 and the Brewers fell behind 1-0, the game already felt like kind of a bummer. Attendance was expected to be under 44,000, the third straight opening day crowd of less than 50,000 since the baseball strike. The number of arrests for public drunkenness and urination, and for trying to sneak booze into the stadium was already up over previous years.

Things began to look up in the bottom of the second inning. After a Jeromy Burnitz walk and a Jose Valentine single, outfielder Gerald Williams came to bat with two on and one out. As he dug in against pitcher Ken Hill, a stray white object spring from the bleachers and dropped into the outfield. Then another. Then one from the lower seating bowl. Then two more. Then four more. After a ball buzzed the ear of Rangers leftfielder Rusty Greer, Texas manager Johnny Oates strode briskly from the dugout and waved his players off the field. As baseballs were flung from all parts of the stadium, the removal of the Rangers seemed to bring upon a wave of “protest” balls and the Brewers also abandoned the field as the crowd roared in disapproval of the tossers. The public address announcers asked the fans to stop and the more level-headed in the seats held out accusatory fingers as people who thrown their balls, hoping that stadium officials or law enforcement would see. Many who did the deed hurriedly left their seats to avoid trouble.

As the ball-tossing calmed, the bucket brigade returned to the field to scoop up the several dozen baseballs and the Rangers resumed their positions. Williams went back to the plate and promptly laced a single to left, loading the bases for the young Brewers catcher Mike Matheny. With the crowd finally into the game, Matheny worked Hill for a 2-2 count before crushing a flailing forkball into the leftfield seats for a grand slam. The home crowd went bananas and, once more, a few stray baseball flew onto the field in celebration. Then a few more. Then a few dozen. As the cheer for Matheny soured to boos, the umpires waved the Rangers off the field. Visibly angered by the actions of the fans, Brewers managers Phil Garner fired his hat onto the dugout floor. “Please do not throw balls on this playing field,” A message on the scoreboard flashed, “If this behavior continues, the Brewers will forfeit this game.”

As boos and baseballs rained down, umpire McKean was handed a microphone and stood behind home plate to address the crowd. “Please folks, we have a beautiful day here. There are kids here. Let us play.” Garner took the mic, too, but only after he calmed himself down. “On behalf of the players, the umpires, and your fellow fans, don’t throw the balls,” he begged. In the radio booth, as Bob Uecker sat idle during the delay, he told his listeners, “This is a bad day in baseball for Milwaukee, I’ll guarantee you that… This has been a friendly ballpark, but that is not true today.”

As order was again restored and the Rangers returned to the field, McKean and the umpiring crew had agreed that one more delay would result in the Brewers forfeiting the game. Major League forfeits were exceedingly rare events and most seemed to possess a kind of weird folklore of their own: ten-cent beer night in Cleveland, Disco Demolition night in Chicago, the final game of the soon-to-be-moving-to-Texas Washington Senators. There had been only five forfeits since 1954, the most recent of which was also caused by a barrage of (what else?) give-away baseballs when Dodgers fans pelted the field in 1995 after a disputed third strike call. “I was scared to death that was going to happen,” Garner said of the forfeit warning. “It was damn frightening.”

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 The opening day antics even made the Journal-Sentinel’s editorial page.

Luckily for the Brewers, just about anyone who wanted to throw a ball on the field had already done so after the three delays. Aside from a few scattered tosses, the rest of the game was played without incident. One casualty of the ball-tossing was the seventh-inning sausage race. The team later gave the sheepish excuse that they were worried the high winds might knock one of the foam racers over. The umpires, however, said they had ordered the race to be canceled, lest the giant costumed wieners prove too temping a target.

Despite the Brewers holding on for a 5-2 win, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel declared it the “Worst Opening Day” in a front page headline the following day. A total of 119 people had been arrested at the game (although just 14 for throwing balls), with violations running from drunkenness to battery to drug possession. Before the game had even ended, acting commissioner and Brewers president Bud Selig decreed that teams could now only hand out giveaway baseballs to fans as they left the stadium.

And, yes, somewhere in a box at my parents’ house, I still have my TrueValue baseball.