I am pleased to report to you, avid follower of athletics (or, at least, athletics-oriented opinion columns) that, upon examining anecdotal evidence throughout the Chippewa Valley, a professional baseball team plays in our state. Not just a minor league team, but one that plays – get this – Major League Baseball! They’re called the Brewers, and you will notice the evidence by the preponderance of scripted M’s on caps, and shirts featuring logoed gloves with baseballs in the middle.

    The return to success of the Milwaukee Brewers over the past few years, culminating in a playoff slot this season, combined with the statewide marketing effort on the part of the team, has re-established a western Wisconsin fan base for the Brewers. I first noticed this trend in one of my columns last year. Despite fundamentally being a Twins fan, seeing more fan support for the Twins in this part of the state earlier this decade did not feel right to me. The Packers and Badgers dominate our region’s fandom, and the Brewers should have never had a problem finding similar levels of passion, especially considering our area’s baseball heritage. To a significant degree, that problem has now gone away.

    That problem is now the exclusive possession of the Milwaukee Bucks. (For those of you unaware, that’s the professional basketball team in the state. They play in a major league, too!)

    The lack of tangible support for the Bucks in the Chippewa Valley has bothered me for years, crystallized by my discovery of one fan following the Bucks during their appearance in the 2001 NBA Eastern Conference Finals. One fan, in all of Eau Claire. This was in June, when the Packers and both prime Badgers sports were in dormancy, and the Brewers ... well, they, too, were dormant, even though they were in the middle of their season. The Express were still four years away from taking the Carson Park field. Yet, no one seemed to care that our team was a couple games away from taking on Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal and the rest of the L.A. Lakers for the NBA title.

    Our team – or was it, really? Is a team our team when no one cares about that team? It may be Milwaukee’s team, though reading other opinion columns about the Bucks indicates even sports fans in that part of the state exhibit ambivalence.