Milwaukee (Road trip with the team)

 

An interesting way to travel to a major league baseball game is as a part of a group organized by one of the teams. Kerry and I are doing that for the third time in our lives, this time to Milwaukee.

The Diamondbacks have been organizing two to four trips per year that season-ticket holders can buy into, but this is the first one we've gone on in a decade. We bought this one partly it works well with our quest – our big trip next spring will start and end in Chicago, which isn’t far from Milwaukee, but Milwaukee is in the opposite direction of the other cities on our trip. But we also want to give the idea of a team-organized trip another chance, since we found our last trip, to Denver, a little underwhelming.

One of the things that I’m fascinated to watch unfold about this trip is the hotel stay. We’re staying at the Saint Kate, a boutique “arts hotel,” where every room has “…a record player and vinyl collection, a playful ukelele, and inspiring art supplies.” My initial response was that this sounds like it might be too cute by half. After a few hours here, I take it back. 

The hotel itself is in a beautiful area along the Milwaukee River, which is a good start. It's behind the 19th Century building and next door to the new building in the photo, which was taken from along the Milwaukee Riverwalk, a very pleasant place to stroll.

As for the advertising, the vinyl collection is somewhat limited (I haven’t looked hard, but haven’t seen anything more recent than the 1960s), and the art supplies seem to consist of a standard hotel memo pad and six colored pencils. There is indeed a ukelele, with minimal instructions -- beginners on string instruments are seldom a pretty sound. 

But there is much more than that. You get a guide to the artwork on the walls (most or all by local artists), and the guidebook even gives you information about the artists who designed the sink, the inlaid tile in the shower, and the bar of soap, which shaped and colored like the erasers we had in grade school 60 years ago. Some of it I like, some I’m indifferent to, some I find a little over the top (the bar of soap is in that category), but I guess that’s a likely response to an arts-themed hotel. In general, though, it's intriguing. 

There are also actually several galleries within the hotel, with hours posted. In other words, they do take their art seriously. 

This is the most theme-oriented hotel I’ve been in since I stayed at a Moxy. However, the Saint Kate has bigger rooms and higher prices, and caters to an older crowd, and takes itself more seriously. I’m actually reminded more of a hotel I stayed at in Zurich a number of years ago, where each room was decorated to honor a famous former resident of Zurich. I got a botanist  that week – I suspect the Freud room would have been more interesting.

We’ll see how the baseball part plays out. We’re going as a group to three games, once sitting in the stands, and twice in different all-you-can-eat sections. I can’t resist commenting about there being multiple all-you-can-eat sections in the Milwaukee ballpark, because I noticed a few years ago that I can usually tell when Milwaukee is in town, because the average girth of the fans at the stadium is larger.

Flying with the team

As I mentioned, this is our third trip organized by the team. The first one came in 2005, when the Diamondbacks had an auction for a trip for two to a three-game series in Los Angeles, including flying on the chartered team plane and staying at the team hotel. I don’t know how much Kerry spent on that (I was afraid to ask), but she won it, and gave it to me as my 50^th birthday present. The rules were that the civilians (Kerry and I, and some major advertising sponsors) sat in a different area than the players, but some of them came by. And Mark Grace, then an announcer for the Diamondbacks, also stopped in to chat. It was clear that Grace, who as a first baseman was known to try to strike up a conversation with every baserunner he could, is someone who loved to talk to anyone, and did not consider it a chore to talk to the civilians.

Staying in the team hotel was interesting, too. Kerry walked into the coffee shop one day, and found herself in line with her hero, Craig Counsell – Kerry still wears a Counsell jersey, 20 years later.

But one of my enduring memories is getting onto the elevator with Tony Clark, an amazing individual. The guy just looks like an athlete, good-looking, 6-foot-8, and muscular, enough to intimidate any male. He was, however, very pleasant, which somehow made him even more intimidating.

Clark is very talented, in many ways. He was the second overall pick in the 1990 baseball draft, but was also highly sought after as a basketball player, having averaged 44 points per game as a high school senior. Even while playing minor league baseball, he enrolled at the University of Arizona to play basketball, for a team that had made the Final Four a couple of years before, and would again in what would have been Clark’s senior year. But he injured his back during a fall basketball practice, and even though he ended up playing one year at San Diego State (as the team’s leading scorer), he knew his basketball career was over and switched to baseball. He played in the majors 15 years, and was a very, very good player, making an All-Star team. By the time he was playing for the Diamondbacks, he was near the end of his career, so he was mostly a pinch-hitter, but was the best pinch-hitter in the game at the time. He was an excellent, but not a great, player, good enough to appear on the Hall of Fame ballot, but only once (if you don’t get a minimum number of votes, you’re dropped the next year). 

I wonder how good a basketball player he would have been. According to his biography for the baseball Hall of Fame, basketball was his first love. Would that 1994 Arizona team that lost in the Final Four have won if Tony Clark hadn’t hurt his back? But just as his athletic career didn’t end when an injury forced him away from his first athletic love, his life didn’t end when his playing career ended (as it seems to, at least figuratively, for many athletes both better and worse than Clark). He got involved with the MLB Players Union, and by now, he’s been the Executive Director of the union for a dozen years, a time in which players have done very well, even while the teams have prospered. In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a Tony Clark fan.

Traveling with season ticket holders

Our next trip with a group organized by the team came about a decade later, a trip to Denver. We’d been to Coors Field before, and liked the stadium and the area. The seats weren’t as good as our previous Denver trip, when we’d sat in the owner’s seats in the front row behind the home team dugout (remember, Kerry once worked with the Rockies), but we were looking forward to it.

In many ways, we enjoyed it. I remember a spectacular sunset over the Rockies one evening, we got the official tour of the stadium one day, and the Diamondbacks played well. But there were some jarring things about the experience, as well.

We found that LoDo, Denver’s Lower Downtown, felt a little sketchy, which it hadn’t when we visited several years before. A little history here. LoDo is a very old neighborhood in Denver, essentially the original Denver. But by the late 20^th Century, it was not a pleasant place. Wikipedia refers to it as a “skid row.” I’ve heard others call it a “red-light district.” There was an effort to “revitalize” LoDo that started in the late 1980s. The Wikipedia article I linked says that it had become a destination area by the time Coors Field was built in the early 1990s. I’ve always had the sense that Coors Field was a crucial part of that revitalization, and had thought of the story as one of the best examples of what a publicly-funded baseball stadium can do for an area, if done right, in an accessible area where restaurants and hotels are willing to buy in. But in the mid-2010s, there weren’t many people on the streets of LoDo on the Saturday afternoon we were there, and it felt like it was backsliding. Incidentally, when we went to Denver in 2023, at the start of our stadium quest, the Coors Field area felt more like our first trip. I don’t know whether there had been a re-revitalization, or whether having the local basketball team in the NBA Finals, with the LoDo bars filled during away games, made the difference, but it felt like the vibrant area we’d experienced the first time. I’m sure we’ll get there again, and I’ll be interested to see what LoDo is like.

The other thing we found strange was that many of the people who had bought the trip skipped the Saturday game to go shopping and go out to restaurants. Not that I’m against either of those, but if you’ve spent the money for a baseball ticket with a bunch of fellow baseball fans, why throw it away? If you just like hanging around LoDo (fair enough), why not just buy an airplane ticket on your own? This time, I sense that we’re in a more baseball-oriented crowd. We flew in on a Monday, and the package includes tickets to games Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. There’s actually a game tonight, too. Even though it’s not in the package (a wise move, I thought, given the occasional perils of airline travel), several in the group bought tickets on their own. I’ve got a good feeling about this.