Brewers Video
I'm a big believer in calling people what they ask to be called. Without wading into unwelcome political or cultural debates, it's a fairly simple bit of courtesy to use, for another person, the name they assign themselves. A name is a thing that matters, and to most people, theirs is sacred.
Imagine, though, that you met a person like the kids in that new commercial for some investment outfit, whose parents sold their naming rights ahead of graduation. Or imagine that you met the obnoxious "Capital One Bank Guy" on the street. In those cases, the above does not apply, because those names were purchased. Once a name is paid for, it's no longer a thing of unassailable integrity. Quite apart from being sacred, it's become a vulgarity. Unless you're one of the parties who agreed to be paid to call that bearded nightmare "Capital One Bank Guy," I exhort you not to. If you meet him on the street, please call him the Discover Dude or Bank One Bobby or something, just to tweak him and the company trying to shove him down our throats.
Now, we come to Milwaukee, and to the place where tens of thousands will gather Sunday to remember and celebrate the life of Bob Uecker, who gave 55 years to the Brewers and is their talisman even now. As they arrive, many fans will pass the statue of Uecker outside the stadium. Once inside, others will flock up to the statue of him inside, up near the rafters. Almost all fans will, at some point before the game starts, pass their eyes over those words out beyond left field: "Get up, Get up, Get Outta Here, Gone!" The place is replete with Uecker, because he's the backbone of this organization—more than Bud Selig ever was, more than Robin Yount, more than Bernie Brewer himself.
Officially, the name of that stadium is American Family Field (changed a few years ago from the more fitting but equally soulless Miller Park), but that's not a name you're obligated to use. The Brewers receive $4 million per year from American Family Insurance (not even that much, by the standards of such deals; the only thing worse than putting your own identity up for sale is selling it cheap) to call their home park that, but you're not getting a penny of that. Thus, I'll renew a call I've made several times now: Brewers fans should simply call that place Uecker Field, or The Ueck.
If names are meant to be sacred, and the home park of a winning team with a strong attachment to its community should be hallowed ground, then why not attach to that park the most sacred name this team has in its annals? Even when the park was named after a beer company, which made such tidy sense and fit the motif better, it was Uecker who defined the place. Now that the team has taken more money to go even more corporate and more anodyne, why not reject the whole framework and embrace the power of a name as one more way to consecrate the park, the man who so enlivened it, and the bridge he formed between the fans and the team itself?
I don't spend much of my baseball-writing time in commentary mode; I prefer analysis and on-field breakdowns. It's the game I love; the rest is ancillary. Precisely because Uecker was the same way, though—because his genius as a comedian at the microphone and as an almost undetectable advertiser laid in the fact that his real reverence was for the game—I want to see a real push to abandon most people's use of the official names (past or present) of the place. The Brewers can call it whatever they want, and will (presumably) continue to call it whatever someone pays them most handsomely to call it. Fans don't have to force an official change; they can just start using a different and better moniker. It should, rightfully, be Uecker Field, forever.
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