This scene from “Major League,” filmed at our beloved Milwaukee County Stadium more than 25 years ago, pretty much sums up what kind of a season it was for the Milwaukee Brewers.
This first Sunday afternoon of October was spent at work, handling our live Green Bay Packers coverage as usual. I watched the Brewers’ last game of the season for only a couple of minutes and didn’t listen on the radio.
Appropriately enough, Brewers radio broadcasts once ended with a cover of the Beatles’ “The End.” That I knew. But until earlier this year, I didn’t know who did that cover.
Then my friend Larry Grogan dropped it into his Funky 16 Corners Radio Show one night in February, while the Brewers were in spring training. The second-to-last song in an hour’s worth of Beatles covers was that one, the cover that once was the outro for Brewers games on the radio.
It’s by jazz keyboardist Gap Mangione, from his 1972 LP, “Sing Along Junk,” which appears to be long out of print. That’s a young Steve Gadd on the drums. His first professional gigs were with the Mangione brothers, Chuck and Gap, in the late ’60s.
On the old Brewers broadcasts, they’d let this run for about the first 30 seconds. Then they’d talk over it and read all the sponsors’ names. Then they’d return to the music for the last 10 or 15 seconds, the true outro.
They don’t play “The End” at the end of Brewers broadcasts anymore.
But all I need do is listen to those last 10 or 15 seconds, and I know another baseball season is over in Wisconsin.
