How Milwaukee’s silly sausages became one of the most beloved spectacles in baseball
The sausages are seen behind an outfield fence in 2007.
By Don Riddell, CNN
(CNN) — The Milwaukee Brewers are deadly serious about their baseball this season.
Finishing with the best record in MLB, they’re hoping that this will be the year they can finally win a World Series as their playoff campaign begins on Saturday. But this is a franchise that doesn’t always take itself too seriously, and a run to the Fall Classic would help showcase one of the most wonderfully ridiculous servings in sport: The slapstick sixth-inning sausage race.
It’s exactly as absurd as it sounds. Human runners, wearing 7-foot-tall foam costumes with goofy faces and colorful features depicting a Bratwurst, Polish, Italian, Hot Dog and Chorizo, race each other around home plate on the warning track. The comedically top-heavy sausages, which can easily topple forwards into the dirt, temporarily take center stage as the baseball players gaze on in amusement from their dugouts, sometimes wagering on the outcome.
But from the very first race in the summer of 1993, these sausages have sizzled and arguably helped to modernize the most traditional American pastime.
“I think the things that become iconic and popular are things that the fans adopt, as opposed to something forced on them,” Brewers’ President of Business Operations Rick Schlesinger explained to CNN Sports. “This was a perfect example of something innocent, a little silly, whimsical, but, you know, quintessentially Wisconsin.”
Dating back to the 1800s, the state of Wisconsin was a popular destination for European immigrants, and they brought their love of meat and beer with them. The town of Sheboygan, just 60 miles north of Milwaukee, claims to be the “Bratwurst Capital of the World.” When the baseball team came along in 1969, the Brewers’ name indicated that they’d be leaning into their community’s roots.
A quarter of a century later, local graphic designer Michael Dillon pitched the idea of a live-action sausage race to the team’s then-Vice President of Operations Gabe Paul Junior, but he says the notion of it seemed so obvious that everyone was probably thinking it.
The team had already animated a cartoon film of three anthropomorphic sausages running across the Milwaukee skyline on the big screen and when they were seen to arrive at the gates of the stadium, the characters would race across the scoreboard as digital dots.
Paul initially dismissed the suggestion – “I don’t think that’s going to fly,” Dillon recalled of their conversation – but he subsequently changed his mind. The Brewers wanted a special event to mark the return of the Brewers’ legend Paul Molitor, who had recently moved to Toronto, and a sausage race was it.
Dillon said he quickly made the giant costumes out of foam rubber, contact cement and spray paint, and turned up to race in them on June 27, 1993.
“When we put them on, we couldn’t stand up inside County Stadium,” he told CNN Sports, “We had to walk bent over with people holding them in front of us. When it came time for the sausage race, the gates opened up, we ran out and you cannot imagine what happened.”
He says the roar of the crowd was deafening: “I mean, I was inside a tube of foam rubber, but I could hear this enormous sound.”
In honor of his German grandfather, Dillon wore the “Brett,” the bratwurst costume with his green lederhosen. His business partner of Italian descent Dan Necci took “Guido,” the Italian chef, and his employee Jeff Paul, Gabe’s son, took the Polish sausage, “Stosh,” in his striped rugby jersey.
Visibility inside the sausages was limited.
“Oh my god,” Dillion exclaimed, “the hole to look out of was maybe, like, eight inches, and when you ran it bounced up and down, you couldn’t see where you were going, I ran into one of the other sausages.”
Dillon said that because of the need for secrecy, they had only practiced running in the costumes once before the big day, they weren’t really prepared for the physical and navigational challenges.
“Anyway, we ran across the field, I won, and the home plate umpire was pissed about it. He said that it was making the sport into a joke,” Dillon added.
Dillon returned to his design studio with the costumes, wondering what would come next. A few weeks later, the Brewers called to say they wanted another race and when it started becoming a more regular event, he donated the costumes to the team and let them get on with it themselves.
Knowing now what the race would later become, he told CNN, “My friends hound me that I should be getting money, but no, it’s fine. I had fun doing it and it has enriched my life, and that’s enough for me.”
A couple of years later, the Brewers added a fourth link, “Frankie Furter,” a hot dog in a baseball uniform, and by the end of the 2000 season, when the team was preparing to move to a new stadium across the road, the video animation was dropped and the sausages began racing during every home game.
In 2006, on the team’s first ever Cerveceros Day to celebrate Latin heritage and culture within baseball, “Cinco” the Chorizo made his debut in a sombrero. However, the spicy sausage wasn’t permitted to race full-time until 2007, because MLB prohibits the introduction new mascots during a season. Even in the bizarro world of meat racing, there are still rules to abide by.
Over 30 years later, the event has transcended the Brewers, parodied and imitated in equal measure.
More than half the teams in the league have their own versions of the mascot race – for example salmon in Seattle or presidents in Washington, D.C. – and Milwaukee’s famous five have been featured twice in commercials for ESPN’s SportsCenter show. In one, the sausages spoofed Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls, chasing panicked employees through a narrow office corridor.
The Brewers prefer not to say who runs in the costumes, saying mostly they are franchise employees, members of the “Brew Crew,” but they admit that several players have competed and people with connections might be allowed in, too. In 2011, the Brewers’ then-first baseman Prince Fielder told the New York Times, “My wife’s done it. My two boys have done it. My wife’s cousin came and actually tore her A.C.L doing it. She took it like a champ.”
The Brewers have embraced the sausages to the point that the race results are tallied along with their gameday reports, but the sausages have also been the subject of police reports and made national news.
In 2013, the $5,000 Italian costume, went missing for two weeks until it surfaced at bar in Cedarburg. According to the bartender Jen Mohney, two men dropped the costume on the premises and told her, “You did not see anything.”
She called the police as soon as they had left, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,“Like I didn’t just see two guys plop a sausage on a bar stool.”
According to the 46-page police report, the officers responding to the call at TJ Ryans noted the tire tracks in the snow and evidence of a speedy getaway, plus a ziplocked bag with a note inside.
“Sorry I’m such a sauced weenie,” it read. “You probably think I am the wurst. I started feeling the heat as the police began to ketchup by connecting the links. I know it was a greasy move so here I am.”
Guido has been a magnet for controversy; a decade earlier he had been knocked to the ground when the Pirates’ first baseman Randall Simon took a swing at him with his bat from the visitor’s dugout, causing both the Italian sausage and hot dog to fall. Inside the costume, the 19-year-old University of Wisconsin student Mandy Wagner was laughing, and she still thought it was funny even when she learned of Simon’s involvement as she was being treated for a scraped knee at the first aid station.
Nobody was laughing after the game, though, when Simon was arrested and booked for misdemeanor battery. Although he was never charged with a crime, Simon was suspended for three games, fined $2,000 by MLB and ordered to pay $432 by the sheriff’s department.
Speaking about the incident to MLB.com in 2022, Wagner recalled the police visiting to take pictures of her injured pinkie and a “Good Morning America” news crew reporting live from her backyard.
“They were criminalizing him,” she recalled, “and I didn’t feel like that was fair. I didn’t want to be a part of that.”
Simon called to apologize and signed the notorious bat for her, she was also treated to a free vacation in his native Curacao. Headline writers had a field day, calling it “The Great Link Stink,” and so did the merchandise vendors who began selling T-shirts with the message ‘Don’t Whack our Wiener.’
Since the sausages began racing, the Brewers have only made it to the postseason eight times and their only World Series appearance came much earlier, in 1982. Now, there doesn’t appear to be any weak links, and both their players and their sausages could be ready for the heat of the biggest stage.
Reflecting on the sausages’ enduring success, Michael Dillon says he still feels an emotional connection.
“Oh, my babies,” he exclaims, whenever he sees them, and he always talks to the mascots at games.
He didn’t see the original costumes again until he was commissioned to design the Miller Park logo, and they were under a pile of stuff.
“Someone took them when they were being thrown away and they ended up being sold on eBay, which is where the new Wisconsin Cultural Historical Museum found them and purchased them,” he said, noting that the costumes will soon go on display.
Interest in the sausages shows no sign of abating. Dillon also says that he’s going to be profiled by author Russell Florence in a book about 100 people who have changed the face of baseball, adding that he can see a direct link between the risible race and the highly successful sports and entertainment brand The Savanah Bananas.
But he could never have imagined any of this back in the spring of 1993.
“It’s just a fluke,” he explained. “They have personalities, they have nationalities,” everyone in the community feels as though they have a sausage to root for.
Now retired from the McDill agency that he founded, Dillon says that he’s still invited back by the Brewers, and he’s thrown out the first pitch on the 20th and 30thanniversaries of the inaugural race.
“Miller Brewing was my biggest client, we had some phenomenal jobs that were high profile, I published some travel books and got interviewed by the BBC, but that pales in comparison to this,” he said. “The one thing that everyone remembers me for is the racing sausages!”
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