Spring has sprung and the Milwaukee Brewers are set to begin a new season.
The Brewers open their 2025 regular-season slate on Thursday against the Yankees in New York. Following a three-game series in the Big Apple, the Crew will return to Milwaukee for their home opener on Monday versus the Kansas City Royals. First pitch is set for 1:10 p.m.
“We’ve been furiously working this offseason to get everything ready. It’s a state holiday when the Brewers have their home opener,” Brewers President of Business Operations Rick Schlesinger said.
The Brewers are two-time defending NL Central Division champions and compiled a 93-69 record in 2024, far exceeding the expectations of many prognosticators. First-year manager Pat Murphy, who replaced longtime skipper Craig Counsell after he departed for the Chicago Cubs, earned National League Manager of the Year honors, becoming the first Brewers manager to win the award.
Tell us who you’d pick to be a Betty this year!
Milwaukee has made the playoffs six of the last seven seasons but is still trying to earn a trip to the World Series for the first time since 1982. Last season ended in heartbreaking fashion with a wild card loss to the New York Mets.
The Brewers return a squad that features a core of young players, led by rising star Jackson Chourio. There’s also franchise cornerstone Christian Yelich, who missed the end of last season and the playoffs after a back surgery. Yelich had a strong spring training, offering hope that he’ll be able to return to peak form.
Veteran Freddy Peralta anchors the starting rotation. Brandon Woodruff, a longtime staple of the staff and a fan favorite, won’t be ready for the start of the season but is making steady progress in his recovery from right shoulder surgery that caused him to miss the entire 2024 season.
This season marks a new chapter for the Brewers, as the team begins its first year under a newly signed lease and stadium funding deal that will keep the team at American Family Field for the foreseeable future. The deal “ensures that the Brewers will be here through 2050 in a state-of-the-art, fully funded ballpark,” Schlesinger said.
Schlesinger spoke with a cadre of reporters this week on the diamond at American Family Field for a wide-ranging chat about the new season and beyond. Some of the topics covered in the discussion:
Prospects for the season
“We obviously have a lot of excitement building up for the season. (General Manager) Matt Arnold and his staff have put together a really exciting team. It’s a young team. When Christian Yelich is your grizzled veteran at the tender age of 33, it epitomizes the youth of this team. We’re excited for the season and look forward to a very competitive NL Central. We’re excited to showcase the talent and getting all the fans excited for what I think will be a very special season.”
Television broadcasts
“FanDuel Sports Network is our broadcast partner for 2025, rebranded from Bally Sports Wisconsin. For our fans, it will be very seamless. We’re available on all major cable networks, by satellite and also streaming. We’re very excited about the expansion of the streaming options. FanDuel will offer Brewers games live on a streaming service, either through FanDuel or Amazon Prime, throughout the entire state of Wisconsin and some areas that previously had not been receiving streaming opportunities for the Brewers, such as Iowa, some places in Minnesota, the Upper Peninsula and Northern Illinois.”
MLB Go-Ahead entry
“It’s a facial-authentication system. We’re going to be one of 10 teams in 2025 that are going to have this new system. It’s going to be completely voluntary and it will be at two gates – home plate west and third base. For fans who opt in to the system, you basically take a selfie and send it to the MLB app. It’s basically two clicks. You will walk through the magnetometers like always but you don’t have to show your ticket. It’s a much speedier entry into the ballpark. If you have a purse or a bag, you still have to have those checked. But if you bring just your keys, wallet and phone and your great enthusiasm, you just walk right in. People don’t want to wait in lines. If you can get in faster, that’s a good thing.”
Food Truck Alley on the left field loge level
“It’s kind of an offshoot of the 3rd Street Market Hall [which opened last season at the ballpark] that has been very successful. We’re trying to bring in local Milwaukee food purveyors featuring authentic local Milwaukee kinds of flavors. There will be three food trucks. They will not have engines, but they will look like food trucks and will be assembled here. The brats, the dogs, the beer will still be our staples but the reality is that the fans want to experience some variety. On Opening Day, I’m sure it will be a really popular spot.”
Removal of Terrace Level seats
“In right field on the terrace level, you will see the construction of offices [for baseball operations]. We did remove about 1,600 seats. The reality is that new ballparks are going to smaller capacity. Even though we are now at 40,100 capacity, we’re still comfortably above the average in stadium capacity. We have plans over the next few years to add seats to different spaces. I don’t know if we’ll necessarily add 1,600 new seats, but we’ll add capacity to the ballpark with some different areas that we’re exploring. The ballpark is evolving and ever-changing.”
Purpose of the new office space
“In baseball operations, it’s a hunt for talent. We are competing with 29 other clubs for analytics people and for executives. Matt Arnold has built one of the best baseball operations departments of all 30 clubs. You’ve got to do it by recruiting people and giving them good work spaces. A lot of what gets done is collaborative, where they’re discussing drafting, trades and the makeup of the [team]. That all happens in conference rooms and in offices. It’s completely funded by the Brewers. That’s something that we thought was a good investment not only in terms of human capital but it will also translate, we think, into performance on the field.” Construction is expected to be completed by October.
Is drawing nearly 3 million fans possible again?
Before the pandemic, the Brewers drew 2.85 million fans in 2018 and 2.92 million in 2019. The club had 2.34 million fans through the gate last season, down about 14,000 from 2023. “A lot of reasons for that. Obviously, fan behavior is a little bit different. There was some newness associated with the team performance in 2018. We had not been to the postseason prior to that since 2011, so there had been a period of time where the team was not reaching the levels we are now in terms of competitiveness. The fans, I wouldn’t say they are used to us being in the postseason, but it’s not as novel as it was in 2018 and 2019. I’m really comfortable with where we are in attendance. People have many more ways to consume the Brewers experience. The live game broadcast is exceptional, as are the streaming opportunities. So even though we have not seen those same numbers, the fandom hasn’t diminished. We can get back to those numbers for sure, with another exciting year on the field. Hopefully, a deep run in the postseason gets fans excited and gets us back to those numbers. But I can’t say enough about how great the support is from the state and this community. We were second last year in Major League Baseball in terms of TV ratings. We’re comfortably above the MLB average in attendance. We offer a great experience here. We’re really high on our metrics in terms of social media. All of the benchmarks we use to gauge fandom and excitement are there.”
Season ticket sales
“Season tickets are up over last year. We have a very strong season ticket base. It’s reflective of the great support we have from the community. It’s not only individuals; it’s small businesses and companies. And it’s not just people in Milwaukee. We have season seatholders from hundreds of miles away. And the fact that we have this great roof, they can drive two or three hours and come to a game and not be shut out with inclement weather or a three-hour rain delay. Our group sales numbers are also up. We’re tracking slightly higher with overall tickets sold this year versus the same time last year. Once we start playing baseball and our fans see the team on the field, I expect those numbers will continue to grow. We’re going to have a very, very good year on the field and a very, very good year at the gate.”
Winterization of the ballpark
The Wisconsin Professional Baseball Park District Board in January approved a nearly $30 million in upgrades to American Family Field, including a winterization that will enable the stadium to host events year-round. “My anticipation is that the project will start after the 2025 season. I suspect it will take more than one off-season to complete. There’s a lot of work to be done. There’s a lot of infrastructure that has to be put in. A lot of air handling units and boilers and cabling and making sure that the water lines work in the winter. We’re very excited about the opportunities that winterization presents for the Brewers with big events in the winter. We haven’t had that opportunity before, whether that’s basketball, hockey, concerts, wrestling, monster truck shows. It’s open-ended.”
Already-completed improvements
“The stadium district has completely redone all the broadcast cabling infrastructure. It was original to the ballpark, so you can imagine the advances in technology from 1997, when it was first put in, to today. This is going to make it a much more seamless, effective experience for people watching Brewers games. That was a major project. We also completely renovated the kitchen on the club level. That also was original to the ballpark. It was a very inefficient space that serves a lot of people. It was completely redone with new kitchen equipment and a much larger space. We also renovated the bathrooms adjacent to the space. We also replaced and upgraded all the freezers and refrigeration. It’s something the fans may not notice directly, but as infrastructure gets old and deteriorates and becomes antiquated, it needs to be replaced.”
Ongoing efforts to make the ballpark a year-round destination
“Winterization, obviously is going to be a big component and a driver of people coming here year-round. We’ve had great success with X-Golf and the [J. Leinenkugel’s] Barrel Yard. In fact, X-Golf does so well in the off-season that my focus now is how to drive more usage during the season. Obviously, if it’s 70 degrees in Wisconsin you’re going to be outside on the course, but we’re trying figuring out ways to drive more traffic to that spot. It’s been really successful and it’s achieved our goals. Are there other things we can do to bring people here year-round? Yes, we’re certainly looking at that. It’s a great footprint. We’ve got a lot of parking. It’s a central destination and easy to get to and it’s a fun place to be. Once it’s winterized, the opportunities will present themselves to do more than just big events in the bowl.”
Condition of retractable roof
“The stadium district does a fantastic job of making sure the roof is operable. It spends a lot of money every year on roof maintenance. That’s been the case since day one. I will tell you that there are a lot of examples in North America where operable roofs are not working well for a lot of reasons. We are going to do major maintenance every year. The roof gets inspected every year. It’s been a great example of taxpayer dollars being used wisely, intelligently and responsibly. The roof is a signature part of the ballpark. It’s the reason we’re able to draw the number of fans we do in April and May.”
