Milwaukee Historian Looks Back on ‘Opening Day in Milwaukee’

Expand

'Opening Day in Milwaukee' by Matthew J. Prigge

While the Brewers’ 2023 home opener is still a few weeks away, fans have an opportunity this spring to relive and revisit the memory of past celebrations of baseball’s return to Milwaukee.

Matthew J. Prigge is an author and historian from Milwaukee whose previous efforts include perhaps the definitive works on topics like Gary Sheffield’s polarizing Brewers tenure, Robin Yount’s near departure via free agency in 1989 and the unlikely way Cecil Cooper’s MLB career ended in 1987. His fifth book, but his first about the Brewers, is Opening Day in Milwaukee: The Brewers’ Season-Starters, 1970-2022, and it’s out this spring.

Recently we talked with Prigge about the inspiration and process of collecting the history of the Brewers into his new book.

KL: I know you’ve done a lot of deep dives into Brewers history over the years, but what made you interested in writing a book?

MP: Well, I’ve always wanted to write about baseball, and it kind of felt like the right time. It’s been a couple of years since my last book, and I’ve started and stopped a few things. Nothing was really grabbing me. But personally, I went to 28 home openers in a row, that’s something my dad and I did every year, so it just kind of seemed like a natural entry point to taking a new approach to something about the Brewers.

KL: What does the process look like of digging up the history of so many different starts to the season?

MP: Well, the book is set up so that each segment, each year, half of it is about the offseason and the run-up to the game and the other half is about the game itself. So it was a lot of offseason research. I kind of expanded to that scope as I was working on it, but in the end I think that’s a really interesting way to look at it, the “hot stove” history of a franchise. Half the year, as a baseball fan, is when they’re not playing. So that’s part of the story that usually gets ignored.

KL: So, we’re really looking at more than just the stories of Opening Day, we’re looking at the buildup to 50-plus years of Brewers baseball?

MP: Sure, yeah. The initial idea was to just kind of write a story about each game and try to flesh out some of the storylines from the game, talk about players and things like that, but when I got into it I realized pretty quickly that a lot of these games themselves aren’t very interesting. A lot of them aren’t that good. 

One of my memories as a kid, going to the opener--I went to my first one in 1992 when I was ten years old--I got to skip school, it was a big deal for a kid. And just driving down, I grew up in Manitowoc so it was about an hour and a half drive, listening to the radio when WTMJ would do their four-hour pregame show, and reading the newspaper on the way down just kind of catching up on everything that had happened and coming back to baseball. I wanted to sort of recreate that experience of everything that runs up to actually getting in your seat and watching that first game.

KL: Obviously you’ve got a deep knowledge of Brewers history, both through the books and some of the other stuff you’ve produced over the years. How much of what you learned in the process of researching and writing this book surprised you?

MP: Quite a bit, really. I’ve been to more than half of the games in the book, but there was new stuff that I learned and stuff that I knew about but took a new look at. One of the things that really surprised me was just how long the stadium issue was around. They were talking about building a new stadium already in the late 1980’s, and it took ten-plus years to get that done and so there’s that stretch in the 90’s where every year there’s this hand-wringing about “are we going to be able to keep the team in Milwaukee?” That was something I knew about, but when you stack up all of those run-ups to the opener and you put them all together you really get the idea of the scope of the thing.

Otherwise, one of the things that struck me was the tailgating aspect of everything. It’s famous now, but they were talking about Milwaukee’s tailgating culture already in the early 70’s when the franchise wasn’t even that old.

KL: One of the things I enjoy about writing about Brewers history is getting the opportunity to look back on events in a modern light and maybe change your opinion on something or realize somebody wasn’t exactly what you thought they were at the time, either in a positive or negative way. Is there anybody that, over the course of this book, your opinion changed on?

MP: That’s a good question. I don’t know if it really changed my opinion, but I’ve written maybe the only article from a Brewers fan point of view defending Gary Sheffield. He was a big part of these Opening Day stories for a few years too, when he was coming up. In 1989 he was kind of the runaway favorite to be Rookie of the Year that season, he was going to be the next big star, and then the few years after that was kind of the degrading of how the press and the Brewers saw him. 

But again, just looking at it in that context, he was really the greatest prospect the Brewers ever had, and how quickly that soured. Then by the 1992 season they traded him. The feeling in the clubhouse seemed like it was more mixed than I would have anticipated. Paul Molitor said something about “there’s fault on both sides. We weren’t able to keep this guy around, we weren’t able to keep him happy.” So I guess that real re-evaluation, a reader might not expect to find coming into it.

KL: What’s the biggest thing you’re hoping people will take away from reading this book?

MP: When I first came to this I wanted to write the stories of these individual games, but once I got into it, and I hope people will take this away from it, I really wanted this to function as a history of the franchise as told through the home openers. And if I have a goal for that, it’s that the 1995 season was just as long as the 1982 season, they still played every day and went out there. 

The Brewers’ history as it’s often told jumps from Hank Aaron coming to town and the team getting good, then skips ahead to Robin Yount’s 3000th hit and everything, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff, a lot of interesting characters along the way. So forcing myself to devote no more time to the ’82 team than the ’73 team, it’s a more balanced approach to the story of the team.

For example, my experience growing up being ten in 1992, when they had their last winning season for, what was it, 15 years? You really had to appreciate things other than winning to maintain your fandom. I wanted to take that approach to the team history, that it’s not just the big moments, the division titles and playoffs and things like that, but there’s a lot of little moments along the way that make fandom interesting. I think Opening Day is a big part of that.

Opening Day in Milwaukee: The Brewers’ Season-Starters, 1970-2022 is available now through Prigge’s website, where every copy will come with a set of nine Opening Day in Milwaukee trading cards. Prigge’s website also includes a list of his upcoming speaking engagements on this book and other topics across Milwaukee history.