How Milkmen welcomed fans during championship season
Staff, audience followed coronavirus safety plan
Tim Dillard was pitching for the Texas Rangers during spring training in February when he heard of teams closing clubhouses, sanitizing and cleaning everything.
Shortly afterward, spring training was canceled as the coronavirus spread throughout the world.
“That was the first time that people were like, ‘This is serious. What do we do now?’ ” Dillard said.
Dillard, a former Milwaukee Brewers pitcher and an 18-year veteran of pro baseball, then started looking for a new team to call home and was surprised when he found the Milwaukee Milkmen.
“Not only were they playing, but they had fans and I thought, ‘This is crazy,’ ” Dillard said. “This is the rarest thing going on right now.”
Last week, the Milkmen completed a 60-game season, culminating with their first championship in the American Association of Independent Professional Baseball, defeating the Sioux Falls Canaries — and they were able to play in front of fans.
With the season over, officials with the Milkmen and City of Franklin can breathe a sigh of relief that they were able to pull this off without any major issues.
Only one game was postponed due to a Milkmen team member testing positive. Increased testing and other precautions meant the games did not become a source of community spread.
How did they do it?
Weeks of preparation
Having fans in Franklin Field was the result of weeks of planning and coordination between Franklin officials and ROC Ventures. The company owns and operates the Milkmen and The Rock Sports Complex, which are on the same property in Franklin.
“There were days where it wasn’t going to happen, many, many days,” said Mike Zimmerman, ROC Ventures owner. “Getting the season going was really difficult.”
Courtney Day, director of health and human services for the City of Franklin, said her staff was approached by the ROC Ventures staff in May about possibly having a season with fans.
“Understandably, I was skeptical at first because bringing any number of people together in any circumstance just seemed like a crazy idea,” Day said.
Zimmerman said they had to prove to local health officials that they could pull it off.
“The health department was really great to work with, they would come out and do audits and that kind of stuff, and the Common Council, they wanted it,” Zimmerman said.
Day said ROC Ventures “put together a fairly comprehensive plan,” which included selling tickets to 35% capacity of each section and posting signs asking people to be physically distant from each other while sitting or buying food.
Although Franklin Field does not have a roof, the state considers the facility an enclosed place, which requires fans to be wearing masks.
Players, coaches and staff also were tested twice a month and wore masks or face coverings during the games.
“They had staff that walk down and wipe down the railings, they have people going into the bathroom and wiping down the high-touch surfaces,” Day said. “They tried to be as touchless as possible with the concessions stand, asking people to use credit or debit transactions whenever possible.”
Two days after starting the season, however, in a series against the Chicago Dogs, a team member tested positive for COVID-19. A game was postponed, but the American Association said at the time that no fans were at risk of exposure from the person who tested positive.
But a coronavirus plan is only as good as the patrons participating, and Day said she was happy with how the fans reacted to the changes.
“Part of the success was the fans adhering to the rules that were put in place,” Day said. “Without the fans cooperating as well, it could have turned into something very bad, very quickly.”
Day was at the opening weekend series to see the plan in action.
“I was pleasantly surprised,” Day said. “It was not just that everybody within the Milkmen organization were following the protocol, but the fans as well . ... I think people were just happy to be out and the small inconveniences of spreading out or wearing a mask or washing their hands more frequently didn’t seem to bother people.”
Throughout the season, Day and
her staff would periodically attend games to make sure the team and fans were adhering to health protocols.
The city has a hotline for people to report businesses for not following the guidelines. When her staff gets a call about a business, they follow up with their own investigation.
For a Milkmen game, that process became difficult to execute in a timely manner — by the time they would get complaints or see something on social media about a lack of masks, the game could be over.
In those cases, Day said, they followed up with management to remind them about the guidelines of the state mask mandate.
Dan Kuenzi, chief operating officer for ROC Ventures, said the Franklin Health Department was “not able to trace a single case back to our ballpark or one of our games.”
As a result, the Milkmen were allowed to increase their capacity to 50% for the last few weeks of the season.
As the season continued, spectators kept their distance, but an overwhelming majority were not wearing masks by the time the championship series started. However, staff members continued to wear masks and routinely cleaned surface areas.
Adjustments to the league
Several teams in the American Association weren’t able to put together a plan to handle the coronavirus pandemic, and the league shrunk in both the number of regular-season games, from 100 to 60, and the number of teams, from 12 to six.
“As long as the six of us held hands, I always felt that we could pull this off,” Zimmerman said.
Milwaukee native and Milkmen outfielder Adam Walker was completing his offseason workouts when he saw the cancellations coming.
“I was doing all of that and expecting for the season to be canceled,” Walker said. “There’s that little bit of hope that it wouldn’t (be canceled) and it came true.”
Walker went on to win 2020 Player of the Year for the American Association.
“We weren’t sure how everything was going to run,” Walker said. “But a lot of changes on the field and off the field, social distancing, just keeping everything sanitized, it was just strange. It was things we had to get used to.”
But if one of the other teams experienced an outbreak, that could have put an end to the league.
“I thought the protocol was good, and we made it through the season,” Walker said. “(The coronavirus) is still out there beyond the season. Even when the season is over, you still want to be safe.”