For longtime Brewers employees, the wait for another World Series run is finally over
MILWAUKEE – On April 3, 1970, two days after a federal bankruptcy judge delivered a ruling that meant the Seattle Pilots could move to Milwaukee and become the Brewers, Bud Selig showed up to work and a temporary employee was waiting. Her name was Betty Grant, and there would be nothing temporary about her assignment. Grant ran the Brewers’ switchboard for 33 years, meaning she was the first face anyone saw, or the first voice they heard, for a whole generation of Brewers fans before she hung up the telephone for the last time in 2003.
That first day, the Brewers’ first front office hire sat on the floor.
It’s impossible to tell the story of every Betty Grant, the folks who worked for the Brewers for decades, through thick and thin. There’s a board in the front office that includes some of them, a dozen or so names of folks who have been employed by the Brewers full-time for at least the last 30 years.
Some of the names, you probably know. Some, you don’t.
Here are just a few.
The ticket master
Unless you’re married to him, the answer is no.
Jim Bathey cannot score you World Series tickets (without a valid credit card).
Bathey is the Brewers’ vice president of ticket sales, and he’s retiring in December after 35 years with the ballclub. Well, 35 years full-time. He also logged five seasons working as a vendor at County Stadium while he was in high school at Brookfield Central and an undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He sold peanuts during Game 5 of the 1982 World Series.
“By the way, that’s the only World Series game I’ve ever been to in my life,” Bathey said.
After getting a master’s degree in sports administration, he joined the Brewers’ front office in November 1991 to be one of the team's three telephone salespeople. The entire ticketing department was eight people. Today, there are about 55.
“There wasn’t much training,” Bathey said. “They handed me the Yellow Pages and said, ‘Go call businesses and sell them these ticket plans.’”
The Brewers won 92 games the following season, and Robin Yount collected his 3,000th hit. A new VP of ticket sales arrived the following year and significantly grew and modernized the department, so by 1993, Bathey was overseeing 18 other salespeople.
Before the start of the 2026 postseason, Bathey’s colleagues surprised him with an early retirement party, complete with “Win for Jim” T-shirts. Forty-four years after selling peanuts at Game 5, he’s about to attend the World Series again.
“It’s been surreal,” Bathey said. “I wake up every morning saying, ‘OK, I’m not dreaming.’”
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The traveling secretary
They don’t use that term much anymore, traveling secretary. Dan Larrea is the vice president of team travel and clubhouse operations, and even that barely describes the scope of the role. Beyond the complicated job of getting the Brewers and their families where they need to be throughout the season, getting Minor League callups to Milwaukee and taking care of countless needs and requests along the way, Larrea is behind some of the small touches that have gone viral during the Brewers’ run.
The custom sparkling wine bottles in the team’s postseason clinch parties? That was Larrea. The “win wall” in the clubhouse, telling the story each season, victory by victory? He had a hand in that, too. The “Midwest” jerseys worn by Brewers players in Williamsport, Pa., in August for the Little League Classic? Larrea and his team.
Looking back, those small touches began to mean more to Larrea after his friend and daily lunch companion Bob Uecker stopped traveling with the Brewers. It heightened Larrea’s perspective about what the game means to the people in and around it.
He was interning for the Denver Broncos in late 1995 when a former graduate school classmate at UMass phoned with a tip. The Brewers had an opening in media relations, which back then was housed in what once was the Milwaukee Braves’ clubhouse. The director of the department worked in an office that was once the Braves’ shower.
Larrea took the job in January 1996. A year later, he moved to director of team travel. That makes 2026 his 30th season in the role.
“We were a shoestring operation back then,” Larrea said. “I had a pager and a cell phone, but it was suggested I not use that often because it costs a lot of money. We flew 13 different airlines, and I had to source out the best pricing. Honestly, it’s a whole different world.”
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The farm director
If you squint, you might see Tom Flanagan in photos from Nolan Ryan’s 300th win or Yount’s 3,000th hit. He was a batboy for both of those historic games at County Stadium, where Flanagan worked as the Brewers' clubhouse attendant beginning in 1990 while he was in high school at New Berlin Eisenhower.
Flanagan was set to go to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but he switched to the Milwaukee campus so he could continue working for the Brewers while studying information technology. Longtime Brewers staffer Dean Rennicke, who’s now an assistant dean at Concordia University, referred Flanagan to Dan Krautkramer, the one-man Brewers IT department at the time. When the Brewers were in town, Flanagan worked in the clubhouse. When they were away, he worked in IT, and eventually he became the go-to guy for general manager Sal Bando.
A career in baseball operations was born.
“I think we were the last team to have carbon copy scouting reports,” said Flanagan. “You know, the white, yellow and pink sheets? I would sit there and [enter] their scouting reports into this new database, and I tried to train the guys on this program. It was the dinosaur age.”
Flanagan sat in a vestibule surrounded by baseball ops offices, and learned scouting and player development by speaker phone. After Jack Zduriencik came to the Brewers as scouting director in 1999 -- where he later drafted Prince Fielder, Rickie Weeks and Ryan Braun -- he made Flanagan his assistant. He was totally unqualified, Flanagan says, but he took the job anyway, and rose to oversee the Minor League system that feeds talent to Milwaukee.
Now, he gets a World Series.
“Knowing the city so well and seeing 37 years worth of different degrees of success and failure, starting as a kid before I even worked for the team, it would be the ultimate experience,” Flanagan said.
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The caretaker
Brewers senior director of media relations Mike Vassallo is the one who dubbed Tony Migliaccio “The Caretaker,” after the Jack Nicholson character in “The Shining” who doesn’t age. And it’s true that if you look at the Brewers’ 1978 team photo, there’s Migliaccio in the front row, looking just as he does today. Even though he blinked.
Like Flanagan, Migliaccio started as a batboy. His father sold cars for Selig Ford in the 1960s, and after Tony’s mother passed away in 1977, he asked Bud Selig whether there might be a summer job to keep Tony busy. Tommy Ferguson, the Brewers’ original traveling secretary who’d help Selig solve the problem of uniforms when the franchise came to Milwaukee in 1970 by simply tearing off the Seattle Pilots’ logo and lettering and replacing it with Brewers in the same blue and yellow coloring, introduced Migliaccio to clubhouse manager Bob Sullivan.
That was in 1978. Tony Migs has worked for the Brewers ever since.
“They said, 'We’re going to give you a job working in the clubhouse,'” Migliaccio said. “I didn’t even know what that was.”
He pitched in junior college for a couple of seasons in the early years, returning every summer to the Brewers, including for the 1982 World Series, and was working on a communications degree in 1985 when Sullivan unexpectedly passed away. Migliaccio was 22. He had plans to graduate and get what he calls “a real job,” and even considered a position in the Brewers’ marketing department. Instead he was promoted to become baseball’s youngest clubhouse manager.
He’s seen a lot since then. But he’d never seen the Brewers make it back to the World Series.
“We were so close, you know? Game 7,” Migliaccio said, referring to the ‘82 Suds Series against the Cardinals. “We had a lot of lean years in there as well. To get back, it’s indescribable.”
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The second baseman
Born in tiny Eden, Wis., and schooled at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, Jim Gantner was drafted by the Brewers in the 12th round in 1974, made it to Milwaukee two years later and has been working in some capacity for the Brewers ever since. At 73, he’s still on a personal services contract with the club, helping out at fantasy camps and clinics, attending autograph signings and doing speaking engagements.
If you’ve heard Gumby speak, you know that’s a treat.
And he loves speaking about these 2026 Brewers.
“Like [Pat Murphy] said, they’re a bunch of gamers,” said Gantner. “And I love watching gamers play.”
He still watches a lot from his home near Holy Hill outside Milwaukee. He also still feels 1982 in his bones, from the highs of clinching the American League pennant and taking a 3-2 lead in the World Series, to the lows of losing in seven games.
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For himself, for teammates like Yount who still ache from that loss, for the other longtime Brewers employees and for the fans, Gantner hopes this is the year they win it.
“You know, it’s very special. I grew up here in Wisconsin, I played here for the home team, and to still be employed by the home team is a blessing,” Gantner said. “You can’t go anywhere right now without hearing about the Brewers. I just hope they bring a world championship to Milwaukee and the state of Wisconsin. And I think they will.”
Gantner will be on hand for the watch parties the Brewers are planning at American Family Field for Games 3 and 4 while the World Series is away in Florida.
But he gave his tickets to Game 1 to his daughter, and Game 2 to his son.
“You never know how many times you’re going to experience this in your life,” Gantner said. “I’ve been there, played in it, had the thrills and excitement. So let’s give them part of what I went through when I was playing. I’ll be watching every pitch.”