County Stadium is a tall, faded, red brick structure that rises suddenly on the left–seemingly from the very vapors of a nearby brewery–for traffic heading west on Interstate 94 out of downtown Milwaukee. It has a lived-in look about it: not antiquated, but firmly in middle age, poised before an impending decay. In its corners and upper regions it has a darkened, smoky appearance, like the hood of a grill in a greasy spoon. This is entirely appropriate: County Stadium has a reputation as one of the better eateries among major-league ballparks–on both the inside and the outside.
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Quaint and unstudied as this may be, County Stadium, on the inside, remains a well-designed ballpark, a rewarding place to see a game. We have a friend who’s fond of traveling, who’s trying to visit each big-league ballpark one by one over the years, and he calls the stadia of the 50s his favorites, with Baltimore’s soon-to-be-replaced Memorial Stadium his top choice, just above County. These stadia, he feels, offer the perfect medium. They’re provided with all the modern amenities demanded by the nuclear family, and for anyone familiar with squeezing through the crowd for a hot dog beneath the grandstand at Comiskey–especially during a rain delay–the notion of comfort and easy movement to and from the concession stands should have an obvious appeal. Moreover, the seats are close to the action, a priority that was lost as baseball became big industry and owners began moving the seats back to create a wider arc behind home plate, allowing more room for top-price box seats. County Stadium, as promised, occupies a delightful middle ground on both these criteria. Under the grandstand the concessions are numerous and varied, and the food is high quality (although not quite as good as at Comiskey). Above, the very best seats are very close to the field–closer than at Comiskey, it appears, although not as close as at Wrigley–and the grandstand rises more steeply toward the back, improving the sight lines for those unable to afford box seats. The upper deck too is steeply pitched, with even the worst seats–the Bob Uecker section–right on top of the action. Extra seats were squeezed in by making the gates small and the aisles thin, but somehow this never seems to cause jam-ups; County Stadium was designed for a more docile race–Milwaukeeans–tolerant of others and willing to wait a moment for someone to cross their path.
We got to see County both day and night, as we journeyed up last month for a twi-night doubleheader between the Brewers and the White Sox. It was, in fact, one of the pivotal days of the season for the Sox, because in the first game both Alex Fernandez and Frank Thomas made their major-league debuts.
That game–and the nightcap, which the Sox also won–left us with such a delightful feeling that it’s worth recalling, now that the Sox have fallen on harder times. (A blown save by Bobby Thigpen two weekends ago was costly. It sent the Sox on a four-game skid, during which Fernandez was no help, blowing a three-run lead to lose a game.) Himes had staked the Sox’ fortunes on his eye for talent, on rushing the future based on players he had picked in the draft, and it appeared to have a chance of paying off. The Sox had the youngest team in the majors even before calling up Thomas and Fernandez, and that night, with those two in the lineup, the Sox looked like Carlton Fisk and a team of local high school stars making a stop on a barnstorming tour. That impression was only enhanced by County Stadium, where the tiresome list of “Official This and That of the White Sox” or “Down on the Farm, brought to you by John Deere”– the unremitting hucksterism to be found these days at Comiskey and Wrigley–was replaced by the game itself and by a fondness for hot dogs and beer and the other things so deeply associated with the traditions of baseball. When the black-and-white scoreboard television broke in between innings to present a message from Abbyland sausages, in which a cartoon character leads the fans in a polka, how could we resist laughing? To recall it now is to revive a kinder, gentler, earlier time, both in the game’s history and in the White Sox’ fortunes of this season.
