hawing

Do you remember Wink Martindale, of various game shows (like Tic Tac Dough and Debt)? He died on April 15, age 91: https://apnews.com/article/wink-martindale-dead-d2f333da86b6efb3b99b36bb7a71a7a4 (1) I hadn't realized he lived that long until I saw his obit yesterday. (2) I hadn't known he was a DJ for so long, nor that he was friends with Elvis. He also has/had a YouTube channel called Wink's Vault, that looks worth a peek to me. YMMV. But this video has Vin Scully in it!

The home opener was definitely a cluster in the Molitor lot (which has been our lot going back to the County Stadium era). About the front/southernmost third of the lot is now fenced off and designated for ride share business. The parking lot map (here) makes it look less disruptive than it is. For fans who park in the lot, besides the hassle of being no closer than about row 10, the only way to walk out of the lot now is the walkway closer to the interstate; and as Outlander pointed out, the only way to exit now is at the rear (northernmost end) of the lot. Additionally, at the home opener, the (lone) walkway to get back to parked cars was also blocked with people waiting for their rideshare rides . Those rides were probably delayed by the overall gridlock around the stadium. The specific gridlock of people standing in the walkway was improved by later in the first homestand when the Brewers moved some of the fencing to make more space for the folks waiting for rides. The single exit for the rest of the lot is not great, and the overall vibe of the Molitor lot has been marred. I realize these are extremely first world problems, but in some ways that was a bigger disappointment to me last Monday than the on-field results. At some point this season we're bound to be placed in a spot closer to Yount Drive and will have to walk around almost the entire rideshare area just to get out of the lot. It's disappointing that they couldn't preserve even a narrower walkway on that side of the lot.

The Brewers just announced that the public celebration of life for Ueck will be before/during the Sunday 8/24 game: https://www.mlb.com/brewers/news/bob-uecker-celebration-of-life-planned-august-2025 Tickets will presumably go quickly. And the prices are as sky high as our collective regard for Bob. This game happens to be in our loge package already, but if it weren't and we had to buy off the Brewers website, they're going for $95-$99 before fees! I hope the extra coin is going toward Bob's charities.

We saw Bill at the home opener. He is going a little more part-time this season. He's 80 now so I'm not going to question it. He told my SO he was planning to be off Tuesday and Thursday this (past) week.

As soon as I saw the word "hamate" I had Rickie Weeks flashbacks. 😐

Okay, I've overhyped this, but it bugs me that UW-Madison athletics places a low value on longevity when it comes to season ticket customers. We've had volleyball season tickets since 2000, and over that time our seats have come to be branded as premium. When it comes to the NCAA tournament, they have seated football ticket holders ahead of us and other volleyball ticket holders because the football tickets + seat license fees bring in more revenue. So we were seeing football and basketball fans who wanted to get in on the now-popular volleyball tournament matches primarily to boost their athletics spending, and maybe get them better football/basketball perks down the road. (Somewhat ironically, we weren't displaced as much for the 2024 tournament matches, likely because they started charging us a seat fee last fall.) Even the Brewers value longevity more. We are not their biggest dollar customer by any means, but we've been at it since 1996 (also 1993 and 1994, but we skipped 1995 because of the strike), and while we are not demanding front row field seats, we generally get our first choice of fan perks and our last few years of postseason ticket locations have been excellent. UW athletics seems like a giant rat race in which we have no interest in competing, and now it's even creeping into women's volleyball. We could empty out our savings and there would always be a deeper pocketed donor with one more dollar. I imagine this will only get worse as NIL continues. Anyway, even the Brewers organization of the 2020s has been more friendly.

Richard Chamberlain, arguable king of the TV mini-series, has died at age 90. Ahh, mini-series. I was a little young for things like Roots and The Thorn Birds when they aired, but I remember a big deal being made of them. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cxe2nv0mdv2o

Mark was born 9/29/1957 (67 at the moment) and Rob was born 9/28/1958 (66).

Freddy will have a Freddy First Inning. That'll bring the negativity.

Forgive the buzzphrase, but I'll have to put a pin in this for whenever I have more time to write what bugs me about Badger athletics' priorities for season ticket holders. Watch this space, someday, for the rare hawing screed.

Both candidates' ads are terrible, for sure. Someone visiting and seeing them would conclude that Wisconsin has child assaulters around every corner in the state.

Is Nelly already coming to MKE for Summerfest? I don't really have a side in this discussion, but as an aside, I will chuckle to myself if it's somehow really chilly on Nelly night and he's trying to pump up the crowd with HOT IN HERRE. 😉

PR/social media interaction with the fan base has been just about nonexistent since Caitlin Moyer was let go. I hope the Brewers made the most of whatever savings they got from that personnel decision. 🤨

Oh, you guys. I just today realized that we can (theoretically, depending on how you define TV treasure or how much you value Mr. Belvedere) add Ueck to this thread now. 🙁 More on the up side (since this thread has languished since September), Dick Van Dyke turned 99 in December.

If the Brewers are savvy, they'll issue Tyler uniform number 41 so they can reuse any remaining Jason Alexander merch. 😉

I like the patch. I hope they make one available to season seat customers like they have done with other commemorative patches in the past.

One year ago today Wisconsin had its first documented tornadoes in February. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/collections/2d9e4699ec314f02b002631b60a2c647?item=2

I'm all the way on board with referring to the Brewers' home ballpark as The Ueck.

May I randomly say that I am randomly enjoying the juxtaposition in this thread of "demise of Party City" and "Superman + kryptonite" posts? ☺️

Plus it's a tough topic. I barely have the words to talk about it yet. Maybe it's just me (I doubt it this time!), but I want my tribute to Bob to be the best words I can string together.

After work on Friday we made a spontaneous trip from Madison to visit the outdoor statue/memorial, and to sign a big banner inside the park just outside the main team store. I’m so glad we went. There were maybe 30 people at the statue around 8:00 PM, yet you could hear a pin drop, it was so quiet. It felt like a visitation. The vibe was so peaceful and respectful. Inside, the banner was pretty full of written messages already, but we found room for ours. I added some for the other two women in my Brewers group text. It was also the calm kind of respectful that you’d expect from a visitation, but also friendly. It has felt good to commiserate online here and elsewhere, but it also felt good to physically be with other respect-payers.

We have been calling it the Uecker Line in the hawing household for decades. It's been a tough day to be in a public facing job when I'd rather be Ueck-grieving with the rest of you. In 2012, then-MLB intern Ryan Kartje wrote a longform story on Bob and was looking for fans to talk about him. I offered and then turned out to be the only fan mentioned in the piece. It disappeared from search engines in the last few years, but Ryan found it for me today. https://www.foxsports.com/stories/other/storytelling-bonds-uecker-to-brewers-fans "He knows everything I know." (about the Brewers) It's mind-boggling to realize that there will now be things about the Brewers that I'll know but he will not.

I got through Christmas Eve with the SO's family without getting sick a few days later! (though I did mask for part of it) This is a legit win for me. Last year it was covid; in 2022 I masked for a terminally ill family member (and didn't get sick); in 2021 I caught something that was not covid. The pattern goes back much farther (including the mid-2010s year when one relative made a point of hugging everyone as they arrived and then told us all how sick she'd been).

If there's ever going to be a mid-offseason fan event again, the Brewers will start promoting it during the preceding season. And to Bikeage's point, the 2024 clubhouse sale authentics area was trying to sell an Andrew Chafin gamer for $350. That's just asking for bad mojo.