Brewers shuttle driver is on a 900-game roll

Baseball prides itself on tracking the great streaks. Most wins in a row. Most consecutive World Series championships. A hitting streak by Joe DiMaggio so impressive that it made Marilyn Monroe fall for him.

The record books don’t include most games in a row by a stadium shuttle driver. Not yet, anyway.

Joe Janz — and we’re taking his word for this — says he reached 900 Milwaukee Brewers games without a miss on Aug. 30. The streak began in August 2006. Sunday’s game will be number 914.

He drives a minibus from Steve’s on Bluemound tavern to Miller Park for all regular games and the precious few playoff games we get here.

Long before the official streak began, Joe was shuttling fans to and from the ballpark, and County Stadium before that, first as a cab driver in the 1970s and later as longtime owner of Liquid Johnny’s near State Fair Park.

Now you’ll find him parked outside Steve’s, 5841 W. Blue Mound Road, in a people-mover they call SOB’s Brew Cruiser. It seats 14, and he can cram in twice that many with the standing room spots. The tricky part is trying not to spill your beer on the turns and stops.

Joe Janz didn’t set out to make baseball-adjacent history.

“To tell you the truth, the streak just happened. It’s 81 games (per season). I can adjust my schedule. You’re talking about five hours a game. First of all, I love baseball. This is my favorite team,” he said as we sat in his bus waiting for the first riders to Thursday night’s game against the Cubs.

I rode along on eight 1.1-mile trips he made from the bar to a circle drive right outside Miller Park, and then back. Dressed in a Brewers shirt, cargo shorts and a Schlitz cap, Joe, 64, dodged traffic backups near the stadium. You get the sense he could do this route in his sleep. He grew up in this neighborhood.

He flashed hand signals to the dozens of other shuttle drivers, letting them know which entrances were most congested. At Hawley and Blue Mound, he stopped short of the intersection because he had figured out that’s the way to trigger the sensor for a left-turn arrow. Returning to the bar, he could gauge how crowded it was getting by counting the smokers on a deck outside.