8 things the Brewers and American Family Field do a little differently than other MLB teams

The Milwaukee Brewers may not be the oldest club in baseball, but they and their fans have some deeply rooted traditions you won’t find anywhere else.

So if you’re a new fan or if you’re visiting American Family Field for the first time or, hey, if you’re an old fan who loves to contemplate how great it is to be a Brewers fan, let’s talk about the things that make AmFam Field and the Brewers different:

We sing ‘The Beer Barrel Polka’ during the seventh-inning stretch

Feel free to sing or dance along.

The polka is the unofficial song of Wisconsin. You’ll hear it at bars, weddings and other sporting events.

The words are up on the jumbotron, so if you don’t know them, just follow along.

We have the Racing Sausages

We have Bernie Brewer, but we also have the Hot Dog, Bratwurst, Polish Sausage, Chorizo and Italian Sausage. The Racing Sausages.

You can find them walking around the parking lot before the game, but the highlight is when they race each other in the seventh inning stretch.

Sometimes, kids dress up in smaller versions of the outfits and the race turns into a relay.

Bernie Brewer has a chalet and a slide

Our mascot doesn’t walk around the stadium during the game. No, he has a very specific job to do.

When the Brewers are batting, he watches from his chalet. When the Brewers get a homer, the fireworks go off, Bernie waves a flag from the chalet and then he slides down the yellow slide.

This isn’t Bernie’s first slide or chalet. In County Stadium, Bernie slid from his chalet, down a slide into a beer stein. That chalet is now at Lakefront Brewery.

We kept the infield of our old stadium

County Stadium was torn down after the 2000 season, but the infield area was transformed into Helfaer Field, a small stadium that’s used for Little League and softball games. Groups also rent it out for functions and tailgates.

Check out it on in the parking lot on your way into the stadium.

We don’t just have beer on tap

We also have brandy old-fashioneds on tap on the field level.

In Wisconsin, we do old-fashioneds differently. They typically have brandy instead of whiskey, and they’re topped with soda. So don’t expect the strong, all-liquor cocktail that you would get elsewhere.

We have a roof

Yes, we know we’re not the only ballpark with a roof. But you’ll want to know if the roof will be open or closed the day of the game. If it’s closed, it can get pretty steamy in Miller Park. You’ll want to dress accordingly.

To find out if the roof is open or closed, you can call the Brewers‘ roof hotline at (414) 902-4636.

We have a lot of mascots

We clearly have a thing for mascots. We’ve already talked about Bernie and the sausages, but there’s a chance that you could run into Barrel Man.

Originally, it was a logo for the American Association Brewers in the 1940s. He was the official logo for the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1970s and was introduced as an actual mascot in 2015.

We have a ‘Uecker seat’

As a tribute to longtime Brewers announcer Bob Uecker, the stadium has a statue of Uecker sitting in a seat in the last row of Section 422.

The obstructed-view seat is an ode to Uecker’s famous Miller Lite “must be in the front roooow” commercial, where he gets kicked out of his lower-level seat and ends up in the nosebleeds.

Uecker died in January, making fans’ frequent visits to the seat especially poignant this season.

(A version of this story was first published in 2018.)

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: 8 things the Brewers and American Family Field do a little differently than other MLB teams

Reporting by Lainey Seyler, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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