Brewers fans get 15,000 free tickets from MillerCoors to celebrate playoff push
As the season starts to seriously wind down, playoff races are starting to ramp up. And the Milwaukee Brewers are in the thick of both the NL Central pennant race and the NL wild-card contest. Beer company MillerCoors, which has deep roots in Milwaukee, wants to celebrate the Brewers’ surprising season and support their hometown team as they try to make it to the playoffs.
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How exactly will MillerCoors be supporting the Brewers? By sending fans to games at Miller Park for free. Here are the details from Fox6 out of Milwaukee:
According to a news release, MillerCoors officials purchased 5,000 tickets for each of the three games vs. the Pittsburgh Pirates next week — 15,000 tickets total. They’ll be offered to fans for free beginning Friday, September 8th at 9:00 a.m. Seats will be in the Loge Outfield, Loge Bleachers, and Terrace Box locations.
It’s an effort to “put the Brewers bandwagon in overdrive with an intended destination of October baseball at Miller Park.”
Free baseball in the thick of a pennant race is pretty excellent. And while this might feel like a way to boost sagging attendance, that doesn’t seem to be the case — the Brewers have had good attendance in 2017. According to ESPN’s calculations, the Brewers are 11th in average attendance this season, which is great (especially when you consider that they’re a smaller-market team). They get around 31,000 fans per game in a stadium that has a capacity of just over 41,000. And looking at the per-game attendance figures at Miller Park, there have been a lot of games that have had between 35,000 and 40,000 attendees.
So while this is definitely a great PR move for MillerCoors and the Brewers, it’s also born out of genuine excitement for the team and how they’ve performed all year.
“This Brewers team has fought all year long and they are now in a great place to battle it out for a spot in the postseason,” MillerCoors GM Jim Kanter said in the release. “Miller is proud to call Milwaukee home and proud to call the Brewers our hometown team. We want to show our support by gifting these tickets to the best fans in baseball.”
It’s not going to be an easy road for the Brewers. To make it to the playoffs, the have two possible routes. The first one is to gain five games in the NL Central standings over the next month, and then overtake the Chicago Cubs at the top of the division. The second one is to win the second wild-card spot by toppling the Colorado Rockies, who have a three-game lead.
But there’s a complication — the St. Louis Cardinals are now tied with the Brewers in the NL Central and the wild-card. Which is what makes this attendance push from MillerCoors so timely. Nothing like a full stadium of roaring fans to help push the team toward their first playoff appearance in six years.
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Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher
