Brewers Farm Update

On Context and Happiness as Sports Fans

The @JSComments Twitter account is essential for understanding the true feelings of the Wisconsin Sports Fan™. When you need a hot take like “Jeff Janis is basically Randy Moss” or “the Packers should trade Aaron Rodgers for Jay Cutler” or “baseball uniforms are confusing,” @JSComments is there for you.

It’s a part of the sports world, along with sports talk radio and vapid sports television like Baseball Tonight, that I work hard to separate myself from. It’s all shout and no substance, more or less just raw male rage desperately seeking an outlet.

But Sunday morning, @JSComments posted an interesting excerpt from the print edition, a letter to the editor from a man named Dick Maase from Waukesha who believes the “Brewers will never be consistent winners.” Behold, in all its glory:

To be fair, this is significantly less unhinged or raging than the majority of @JSComments posts. I understand Maase’s increasing discontent with the Major League system and its tiers of haves and have nots; I devoted lots of bytes on BPMilwaukee to my complaints about it over the offseason.

But I think if we want to enjoy ourselves when we watch baseball — and that is what we’re going for, right? — I think we have to be careful not to fall into this totally negative zone Maase has found himself in, by his own admission. And I think to do that, we need to divorce ourselves from this idea that sports are supposed to be a totally equal playing field.

We can implement revenue sharing and salary caps and hard slotting and international spending limits all we want, but we’re dreaming if we think any sort of system is going to create a baseball world where Milwaukee and New York are operating with equal resources, or Milwaukee and Chicago, or Milwaukee and St. Louis. These things aren’t possible; market size, history, and prestige will always be a part of baseball.

It can be frustrating, for sure, but it makes our victories all that much sweeter. Robin Yount playing his entire career for the Brewers was made all the more special by the fact the franchise had never before seen somebody of his level. The Brewers’ 2008 playoff chase and 2011 NLDS win may have been blips in the history of bigger and older franchises, but the energy it brought to Milwaukee was huge. It was a true payoff for the years of losing and waiting.

If you want to maintain your happiness as a sports fan, you need to have an ability to appreciate things in context. Because things aren’t equal, and no matter how much we meddle with the rules and regulations, they never will be. It’s only natural to be frustrated, but if you can’t summon an appreciation for what we do get in Milwaukee — the great players, the awesome environment at the ballpark, the ridiculous swell of excitement when the Brewers do manage to win — your disappointment isn’t ever going to be cured, even if Milwaukee does manage to win a World Series in the near future.

But maybe I’m being unrealistic and the entire state has been spoiled by being Packers fans.

Yeah, forget everything I just said. We’re all lost causes.

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2 comments on “On Context and Happiness as Sports Fans”

Spahnnie

Fan comments are like the million typing monkeys- eventually they’ll produce the works of Shakespeare,or “The Onion”- but usually random noise. The Pack plays in the world’s smallest TV market and were ultra competitive for years before the hard salary cap. Today all NFL teams are on equal footing, although if local TV money and no hard cap was a factor like baseball they might not be. But baseball has come a long way. Draft and IFA $ allotments, FA signing penalties, royalty taxes and limited revenue sharing have evened things up. Arbitration gives 6 years of control but then smart teams use money wisely and compete while rich teams often squander millions on declining stars, whether their own or others. Paying Prince or C.C. wouldn’t have helped, Greinke probably would have, but he seems to like to change scenery anyway. Braun was a good deal and Lucroy will be [he’s affordable] So hang in there, Mr Maase. Stearns has already worked magic and with his astute leadership we’ll be back in contention next year.

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