Baseball more than afterthought here

Frank Hebl peered out from underneath the bill of a paint-spattered Brewers cap with the old-fashioned yellow-and-blue mitt logo on the front that is, in the words of the youthful 72-year-old former baseball player and coach, "so cool."

Frank leaned over the side of his beat-up red pick-up truck in the parking lot of a Dunham's sporting goods store in Menomonie — a part of western Wisconsin once infested with Minnesota Twins fans. Then he turned over a garbage can he'd been hauling around, so I'd have something to rest my notebook on.

"What do you do in hard times?" he asked me.

Worry? Work harder? Try to find a place to work at all?

"You look down through hard times, baseball was popular during the Depression. It was popular during World War I and World War II," said Frank, who used to teach math at the nearby University of Wisconsin-Stout. "America needs something to change the subject."

That something is not the Yankees. Or the Twins. They would be part of the same old conversation.

Anyway, I was up in Minnesota right before stopping to talk to Frank, and even hometown hero Joe Mauer is being called a softie and a self-coddler. Minnesota is eating its own.

Craig Foster, the owner of Foster Sports in River Falls, says he used to sell eight Twins T-shirts for every two Brewers shirts. Now, the ratio is about six to four — and River Falls is only half an hour from the Twin Cities. Twins fans, said Craig, have "real shallow allegiances."

Inside the Dunham's store, the manager told me he couldn't talk about sales. But you could tell from the displays that Menomonie right now is Packers and Brewers territory. There were a couple of Adrian Peterson shirts hanging from the rafters and reams of A.J. Hawk and Ryan Grant and Aaron Rodgers and Cecil Fielder and Ryan Braun jerseys.

Outside, Frank told me he didn't think Twins fans are becoming Brewers fans so much as Brewers fans are becoming a little more vocal.

"I don't think (Twins fans) are turning," he said. "I think (Brewers sentiment) has always been there. But being a Brewers fan has come with a nagging discontent for a long time.

"It's like a cold sore," said Frank. "It's there and you kind of wish it would get better" and for so long it never does "and come football season it will just go away."

This football season, the sore is already long gone. The Brewers are "for real," Frank says. It's the "camaraderie" and the "intangibles" that are key. Suddenly the nation wants to kiss us, instead of mock us.

Despite the garbage can he tipped over, Frank is not a trash-talker. He won't deride the Twins. He's just a fan of good baseball, he says. And right now the way to see good baseball is to watch the Brewers.

Frank, the oldest of 17 kids from the gigantic Hebl family of Madison and Sun Prairie, once played some pretty good baseball himself.

"I went to school to play sports, not to learn anything," said the guy who attended college in both Madison and at Whitewater. "We had visions of playing ball for the rest of our lives."

No one gets to do that. During a season like this one, the thing is though, dreams last a lot longer than a strong arm or keen vision. Even Braun won't play forever. But he's playing now and — thirty years down the road — we might still be talking about 2011 instead of, say, that distant year of 1982.

Older folks remember that 1982 was the last time the Brewers won something big and also was a very tough economic time for many Americans looking for something to take heart in.

Like Frank says, it's time to change the subject.