The Brewers are on some kind of hot streak right now. They entered Sunday’s game having won nine out of their last 12 games and have outscored opponents 79-45 in that span. The offense is clicking, scoring over seven runs per game, and the pitching has been much improved — particularly rookie Taylor Jungmann, who now has a 2.15 ERA and 2.43 DRA in seven starts.
Fun stuff! I can’t offer any trenchant observations, however, as I’ve missed it all over the past week. I can’t complain — I’ve been in London and Paris with my family before we head to to southern France for my cousin’s wedding. So instead of watching the Brewers play their best baseball of the year, I’ve been touring some of Europe’s finest museums — including The British Museum, England’s National Gallery, the Churchill War Rooms, the Palace of Versailles, and the Musée de Cluny.
These museums were full of amazing things (albeit disturbingly void of baseball items), but in some cases, it is important to remember places like these are presenting only one version of history. The British Museum in particular is as much an ode to empire as it is a collection of historical artifacts. Conspicuously absent from the descriptions of the amazing exhibits, like the Rosetta Stone, is how many of them were stolen from their lands of origin. What we see in these museums is less history and more metahistory — a story of how history is created.
We heard Sir Winston Churchill himself say at the war museum, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” A great deal of Churchill’s power as a leader came from his excellent understanding of the English language and his ability to use it to appeal to his countrymen. He understood the powers of rhetoric and myth and how they could be used both in politics and in war.
I never imagined I would be comparing Winston Churchill to Bud Selig, but one of the few things I respect about Selig is his understanding of baseball’s cultural history. Baseball history from Abner Doubleday to Alex Rodriguez has been full of myths and falsehoods. As John Thorn wrote, baseball’s early mythmakers, like A.G. Spalding and Henry Chadwick, “were trying to create a national mythology from baseball, which they identified as America’s secular religion because it seemed to supply faith for the faithless and unify them.” Selig understood above all else it was the mythical heroes — for example, your McGwires and Sosas — who give baseball its power.
This is why I feared the Selig Experience, the museum celebrating Selig’s time as owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, would be the stuff of pure, uncut myth. The Selig Experience is the Brewers’ organization’s way of writing history, and we know it will be overly kind. It includes such absurdities as a Selig hologram and a replica of his office in Milwaukee, down to a smoking cigar in the ashtray (strikingly similar to the replica of Churchill’s underground office in London). The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Tom Haudricourt called the exhibit, representing Selig’s “long and illustrious history in the game” and “dynamic.”
Featured in the museum is an ode to Selig’s efforts to build Miller Park, a building that has cost (as I detailed a few weeks ago) taxpayers over a billion dollars and was financed with almost zero contributions from the man himself — even the private contributions to Miller Park came largely from Miller and a number of “refundable grants,” a kind of loan, according to the Legislative Audit Board’s review of the park’s costs. And while I have yet to visit the Selig Experience myself, I have a sneaking suspicion there isn’t much discussion of the club’s 2616-2921 (.472 winning percentage), and particularly little mention of the club’s 825-1051 record and 13 losing seasons in his final 13 seasons as owner. And I rather doubt the 1994 strike or the 2002 All-Star Game tie are robustly covered.
Of course, this is just one of the perks of power. That museums will be overly kind to their owners is simply part of the experience. The Selig Experience is no different, an extremely kind history for a man who, in the end, did little more than own an aggressively mediocre baseball team.