JR Radcliffe

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

The Brewers became the first team to defeat Chicago with the Cubs' new acquisition Cole Hamels on the mound in a Monday thriller, overcoming the typically hostile home crowd that accompanies the Cubs-Brewers battles at Miller Park.

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Hamels afterward waded into some dangerous waters when he suggested the matchup wasn’t exactly a “rivalry,” given how Cubs fans are able to overrun Milwaukee so easily.

Oh boy, it’s on.

While I personally think the interpretation of a “rivalry” can be a bit of a winless errand – it’s all subjective, and it doesn’t really matter in the thick of a pennant race when every game matters, anyway – Brewers fans surely felt like this was a veiled shot at their fan base. Perhaps Hamels doesn’t think they’re invested enough to prevent Cubs fans from overrunning Miller Park every time the two teams meet.

Let’s review the facts, shall we?

First, let’s dispel the myth that the Cubs are contributing to Milwaukee’s impressive standing in the attendance rankings

The Brewers continue to perform well at the gate and have a history of achieving top-10 standing in Major League Baseball attendance, despite playing in one of baseball’s smallest markets.

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The Brewers are 10th in average attendance in 2018, ahead of places like Atlanta, the New York Mets, Philadelphia and Washington – a list of large markets and many with playoff aspirations.

If we subtracted the Cubs games entirely from the equation, the Brewers' average attendance … would still be 10th.

Even if a random American League team played those games instead of the Cubs, it’s very possible 35,000 fans would turn out. In a recent six-game homestand against Colorado and San Diego, the Brewers dipped below 32,000 fans just once. You realistically can only add a couple thousand additional tickets sold per Cubs game, and that’s not going to move the averages around much at all.

Milwaukee is the only market that has to deal with the proximity of a considerably larger market

There are other teams that play in close proximity, though none as close as Chicago and Milwaukee playing in the same league (Oakland and San Francisco and Baltimore and Washington only see each other once in a while). San Diego and Los Angeles are almost as proximal, as are Philadelphia and New York. At least San Diego and Philly stand a chance as top-10 largest U.S. cities competing with one of the country’s two biggest.

Chicago is the third-largest city in the country, and Milwaukee is the 31st. In the city-limit population alone, we’re talking about four times the number of people, and that’s not counting the considerably dissimilar-sized suburban areas. There are just way more of them. As ESPN's David Schoenfield points out, the entire state of Wisconsin is roughly half the Chicago metro.

The Brewers have tried creative promotional ticket deals to circumvent the inevitable, that Cubs fans will be willing to buy tickets en masse, either from the club or on the secondary market. It doesn’t seem like there’s a solution.

At the risk of trying to sound like I’m spinning this into a good thing, wouldn’t you rather attend games at a roofed stadium with actual parking and nicer facilities if you could? Wrigley has made some major improvements in recent years (seriously, you can’t really call it a dump anymore), but it’s still more comfortable in Milwaukee for a lot of reasons, and only 90 miles away. For fans in the northern suburbs, it might actually be less time in the car.

Oh, and the Brewers didn’t have a national network broadcasting their games while everyone was growing up, which is why there’s a healthy population of Cubs fans embedded in Milwaukee (and everywhere else).

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The greater the invasion, the more Brewers fans don’t want to put up with it

It’s never been as simple as saying Brewers fans shouldn’t sell their tickets to Cubs fans or Brewers fans should make a point of turning out for those games to combat the Cubs invasion.

I see a lot of games at Miller Park each year, and I can say with some certainty that the Cubs games are the least fun, and it’s got nothing to do with how “nice” the opposing fans are. Who wants to go to your home stadium and hear the visiting team get cheered? It’s dispiriting and clouds the experience, unless you’re the combative type who likes the adrenaline rush of facing that sort of adversity. I am not. I’m a dad with two young kids, and I’d just as soon not expose them to a crowd where many of the patrons are locked and loaded for "us vs. them."

Opposing fans are a lot like cable customer service. Your singular experience with one or two representatives determines how you view the whole fan base. I’m sure Cubs and Brewers fans are just as likely to be friendly as not. But whether it’s perception or reality, it feels like attending a Cubs-Brewers game at Miller Park means you’re not getting the best cross-sections of either fan base. You’re getting the folks who are at least a little bit prepared for a battle of wits.

Then you throw in the possibility that ticket demand on the secondary market yields some pretty nice payouts, and it becomes a no-brainer. Maybe that line of thinking makes someone less of a fan, even if they’re sweating every single pitch from their couch. Few fans attend every game, and they’re not going to choose the games that offer the least amount of fun, so I find the expectation that Brewers fans should come to their team’s defense a little unreasonable.

Chicago fans make more money, probably

According to census data, the median income of Chicago-Naperville-Joliet is $66,020 in 2016. In Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, it was $58,029. You could make these numbers say whatever you want, and remember that cost of living in Chicago and the surrounding communities is much higher than it is here. But if you want to be as reductive as possible: they probably have more money to attend a game.

All of this is to say that the reasons Brewers fans stay away from the game have nothing to do with how they view the rivalry

I’m not sure there’s a number to show it or quantify it, but Cole Hamels is just going to need to trust us. It’s a rivalry. A full-blown one. Maybe it’s because Milwaukee fans hate to be “the little brother” of their neighbor to the south. Maybe it’s because of personal experiences with Cubs fans. Maybe it’s the frustration of seeing the Cubs rise from their self-imposed ashes to present a strong roadblock to the playoffs for a franchise that doesn’t get many swings. Maybe it’s seeing Miller Park get overrun. But the local fans do not tolerate the Cubs.

If Hamels is insinuating that the locals don’t support their team or believe in the rivalry, he’s wrong.

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But, let's at least consider one counterpoint. Why can’t the Brewers fans hold off the Cubs fans, but Packers fans can hold off Bears fans in NFL games (and overtake Soldier Field at times)? The Packers play farther away from Illinois (thus perhaps creating a greater barrier for Chicago fans), and there’s no question the passion for Green Bay football surpasses the overall passion for Brewers baseball in this state, not to mention that the Packers are a larger brand around the country.

But should we not hold ourselves to the same standard, and ask why the same thing can’t happen with Brewers-Cubs games? Of course, when Packers fans wait a generation to get their season tickets, they're probably less willing to sell them (and we're talking about an entirely different price point per game).