Some conversations in life you just don’t forget. Eight years ago Saturday, I was an intern in the Milwaukee Brewers’ media relations department on my way back from visiting friends at Purdue when I had the following exchange with my mom somewhere in between West Lafayette and Merrillville, Ind.:
Mom: “Hey Matt, did you hear about the girl that got hit over the head with a bat by a player at the Brewers game?”
Me: “Mom, what on Earth are you talking about?”
Mom: “Yeah, some girl running in the sausage race got hit by a player on the Pirates.”
Me: “Umm…”
Sure enough, I turned on Sportscenter first thing the next morning and was greeted with the image you see above. University of Wisconsin-Madison student Mandy Block was running in the Klement’s Sausage Race dressed as the Italian Sausage on the warning track near third base.
You can see Pirates 1B Randall Simon standing on the dugout’s top steps with a bat, taking a swing and striking the top of the costume, knocking Block off balance and sending her sprawling to the ground, soon to be followed by the Hot Dog, who didn’t have time to react.
Up until that point, the 2003 campaign was largely a forgettable one for the Brewers, although I was personally having the best summer of my life working for the team. Crowds of less than 15,000 fans were de rigueur and most of the excitement surrounding the organization was centered around 90 miles to the southwest, where Prince Fielder headed up a team of talented prospects that would serve as the base for the team’s current success.
The next day, our office was a flurry of excitement. Sausagegate, as it would come to be known, was being featured on every major national sports show. Reporters were calling wanting to talk to Block about the incident and get the team’s reaction to it. While the race had been popular locally for years, Sausagegate unwittingly thrust the race into the national spotlight, making it baseball’s most iconic mascot race if there ever was one.
Neither Block nor the Hot Dog were seriously hurt in the incident, the bat having never actually touched Block’s head because there’s a good three feet of room in between the top of the racer’s head and the top of the costume.
Simon said at the time he was just joking around, but naturally the sight of a big, strong baseball player hitting a person with a bat – regardless of whether they were in a sausage costume – is going to resonate with the general public. Simon was eventually fined a couple hundred bucks, Block and the girl dressed as the Hot Dog both received autographed bats from Simon, and everyone moved on with their lives.
Having spent parts of three seasons as a sausage myself, I can tell you the costumes are extremely top heavy thanks to all that extra weight at the top. In fact, one of the hardest parts of the race is making the turn around home plate because as you’re turning, the top of the costume tilts a little bit.
Block herself has since left the organization, reportedly moving on to bigger and better things with Campbell’s Soup Corporation. The sausage race continues, now with five instead of four after the Chorizo became a permanent fixture during the 2007.
And to this day, the sausage race entry on my resume – and not my master’s degree or anything else I’ve done in my career – remains the single greatest source of intrigue for strangers I meet on the street. Everyone wants to know if I was the one that got hit (obviously, no), if it’s a real race (yes) and what it was like to be a part of that race night in and night out.
To answer the last question, it is a million times more fun than it looks from the stands or on TV, even if you don’t win. Few things in life have given me the adrenaline rush that comes with hearing PA announcer Robb Edwards’ booming “Sausages on your mark…get set…GO!” and then sprinting toward the finish line as 40,000+ fans stand and scream encouragement.
And as an added bonus, the innocent no longer have to worry about getting whacked as they traverse from the third from the first base side of the field.
Below is a news report of Sausagegate on local Milwaukee TV. Only in Milwaukee could this be considered “breaking news”.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3V9kJw-kWQ8
