Viva Cerveceros

You’re totally going to fall in love with Ryan Braun.

… as if I had to tell you that.

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Paulie and I were at a Badger football game that same year, 2003, shortly after the Red Sox blew it in a tremendous series with the Yankees, which included a personal favorite Pedro Martínez tossing 72-year-old Yankee bench coach Don Zimmer aside when Zimmer tried to charge him.

“Omg, that was awesome.”

“Yeah, I fucking love Pedro.”

Unfortunately, we were sitting in front of a girl who we soon found out, very loudly and very often, grew up in Brooklyn.

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You’ve got to give the people what they want. And what they want is pictures of Gabe Kapler.

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The Brewers are in Beantown this weekend, and it’s time to tell you about the last time I saw a Brewers-Red Sox series. It was in Milwaukee in 2003, and I was home for the summer, working at the old Water Street location of Brew City BBQ. (Our beloved Gabe Kapler was a Red Sock at the time).

Brew City was a huge blues, bikers and pulled pork sandwich type of joint inside an ancient building which was once a flower warehouse. At the time it had just been bought by R.C. Schmidt, a prominent Milwaukee restaurateur and total douche bag. He moved the Brew City concept to a new location, and sold the gigantic property — with its bar, enclosed patio bar, and patio right on the city’s biggest party street — to a chain which turned it into the tolerable Bar Louie.

But before the sanitization process was complete, Brew City still had a little of that gritty flair which made it the epicenter of Harley Davidson Motorcycle’s 95th anniversary in 1998, when middle-aged biker chicks went topless, pet cobras were set loose and beer bongs were hung from the fourth story roof.

It was also the kind of place hungover Red Sox fans to would like to grab lunch.

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I remember watching the Brewers play the Red Sox on television in 1992 (it was Tuesday, Sept. 15 to be exact. I have a very good memory). I knew Fenway Park was an old-timey stadium and was where the Boston team played, but the announcers were talking about something I did not know.

“Apparently, there’s this wall… in left field, for some reason… and they call it the Green Monster.”

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When I think about nearly decade-long battle to get Miller Park rolling into construction and the bickering of taxpayers about the one-tenth sales tax that will continue until it’s all paid for, I ask myself: “Was it worth it?” When I bought my first new car, the stadium tax cost me about $7.50.

And then I answer myself: “Abso-fucking-lutely.”

As I’ve said before, Miller Park is the Jay-Z’s Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé of baseball stadiums (“kick back in the ’bach / get the Phantom to drop / bass blaring out of my system, that’s how I detox.” … Other lyrics called to mind are the Clipse’s “When was the last time” when Pusha T comes in with “Top down, chrome spinnin’”). Our stadium is a fucking convertible.

This is one of the reason we love it so much and make tiny functional effigies out of it, like Tim Kaebisch’s series of Lego Miller Parks. But why, after several home stands, nice days and a month and a half of baseball has the roof not been open for a game?

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I have failed you, gentle reader. Last night, I clopped down the hill to Miller Park to catch the final game of the reach-around wrap-around series with the Cardinals. Various Mother’s Day obligations precluded me from attending what is becoming the Brewers’ annual Pink Bat Party on Sunday.

On Monday night, I joined a pretty good crowd of more than 25,000 to watch the Crew beat up on the birds. After their ace pitcher gave up his second home run to Ryan Braun, the home plate umpire called his first pitch to Corey Hart a ball. I didn’t see the pitch, but apparently Cardinals cather Yadier Molina didn’t like the call because he started fuh-reaking out.

The umpire tossed him immediately, because arguing balls and strikes is an automatic ejection (is this a lame rule? Talk amongst yourselves). So Molina is throwing a fit, right up in the ump’s face, and the manager Tony LaRussa comes out and tries to get between them. I honestly though Molina was going to punch the ump. He starts to walk away, then he sort of stops and you can see him thinking..

And then he starts taking off all of his catcher gear and littering it about the plate. “Fuck this!” Here’s the right leg guards! “Fuck that!” Here’s the left leg guards! Then he starts to walk back a little… “Fucking ump!” Here’s the bib chest pad, annnnnd spike the helmet!

It was awesome.

Bravo, sir. Once Molina got back to the dugout, it was apparent LaRussa was going to get tossed as well. So it became just another dust-up, predictable and boring and delaying more baseball until LaRussa got the heave and left. Then a bat boy scurried out and collected Molina’s kit like The Executioner from “Showtime at the Apollo.”

However, I don’t have a photo to show you because I was too busy hooting and hollering.

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When Deadspin editor Will Leitch was out in Milwaukee last week, he somehow brought up how awesome it was to see his St. Louis Cardinals win the 2006 World Series. I seized upon this and mentioned that I’ve been meaning to run a side-by-side comparison of two videos on this site.

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You’re totally going to fall in love with Yovani Gallardo.

And it would have already happened by now, but he got hurt. Gallardo’s season ended shortly after taking a particularly gruesome tumble — and his NL Cy Young Award hopes went with it. Those who watched him during last year and during the few starts he made this year knew that this kid was maybe the best pitcher on the team.

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Last night I went to see Will Leitch, the editor of Deadspin, at a… not quite a reading, more of a chat about his book, God Save the Fan. It was fun, and he did seem like a pretty cool guy. He is who we thought he was.

I didn’t get a picture because my camera ran out of batteries. While he was signing books, he did ask one person: “So is Prince Fielder becoming a vegetarian really that big of a deal?” A couple of people kind of looked around at each other. Uh, let’s not get into it. My book was pre-signed, so he was like, “Oh. Well, I’ll just draw, like, some little hearts around it. This is going to come back to bite me.” He wrote, “Look! An old archaic signing!” with an arrow.

Then we went to the Milwaukee Ale House for drinks, and playing there was the Andrew Gelles Band, a Maxie’s favorite.

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