In casing you missed it, here's how the Brewers cooked up the Sausage Race

Not only was former Brewers reliever Mike Fetters in the house, he was in the game during the sixth inning at County Stadium on June 27, 1993, when, to everyone’s surprise, the left-field gate swung open and baseball’s original mascot race came to life.

Three decades after Milwaukee’s in-game Sausage Race became a sensation, however, Fetters’ memory of the occasion had faded. During a 2023 visit to Milwaukee as D-backs bullpen coach, he was asked to recall what was surely one of the sublime moments of his fine, 16-year Major League career.

“I don’t remember it one bit. I’m sorry,” he said.

Then, an idea.

“[Dan] Plesac ran in it,” Fetters said. “Ask him.”

The Brewers’ all-time saves leader, Plesac had departed via free agency the year before in 1992, when the Sausage Race was still a digital affair. For several seasons in the early 1990s, it was a between-innings feature on County Stadium’s “state of the art” dot matrix scoreboard, with a cartoon Bratwurst, Italian sausage and Polish sausage racing through scenes of downtown Milwaukee to the ballpark. (The Hot Dog didn’t join until the mid-1990s, and Chorizo in 2007.)

So, if Plesac did race, it would have been as a visitor.

“Did not,” Plesac said, “but wished I did!”

Mark Grace, Luis Gonzalez and Hideo Nomo ran the Sausage Race as visiting players. Legend says the record time belongs to Green Bay Packers wide receiver Javon Walker, who ran in 2004. Geoff Jenkins ran during a stint on the Brewers’ injured list in 2003, when he was two days shy of returning from a wrist injury.

“I won by seven lengths,” Jenkins said. “Long live the Hot Dog.”

Jenkins made his only All-Star Game that season.

Brewers broadcaster Bill Schroeder recalled a game in the mid 2000s when he bounced around the ballpark during a telecast and hosted segments everywhere from the track bean high above center field to the first-base camera position to, yes, a trip around the infield warning track as the Bratwurst.

“I cheated,” Schroeder said.

How does one cheat in a mascot race?

“I cut the corner over here behind home plate,” he said.

Did he win?

“No,” Schroeder said.

The original Sausage Race was just as chaotic. On June 27, 1993, as the Blue Jays battery of pitcher Jack Morris and catcher Pat Borders warmed up for the bottom of the sixth inning with a big crowd of 45,580 in the stands, the usual scoreboard race became a live affair.

Bratwurst, Polish and Italian bumbled around in left field for a bit, then ran right down the third-base line to home plate. It must have shocked Borders. It must have shocked everyone, since no player from either team had been given a heads up that this event was about to happen.

The winner of that first race was also the event’s founder, Michael Dillon, a Milwaukee-based graphic designer who urged a Brewers marketing official in the fall of 1992 to bring the digital race to life. When he got the go-ahead in ‘93, Dillon designed and produced the three original foam mascots himself.

"Absolutely no one knew that this was going to happen, except possibly some groundspeople," Dillon told NPR in 2019. “The umpire didn't know. They started that sausage race on the Jumbotron and then the cartoon stopped and went blank. And the gate swung open and the crowd went insane."

Copycats have appeared across MLB over the years, ranging from the good (Presidents Race in Washington D.C., Legends Race in Arizona) to the acceptable (Pierogi Race in Pittsburgh, Tool Race in Atlanta, Hot Dog races in Kansas City and Cleveland) to an unfortunate spin-off in Denver called the Tooth Trot, in which a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a floss dispenser raced with a tooth. That event went down the drain in 2021.

There’s nothing like the original, though the Brewers’ racing sausages have not been without their scandals. On July 9, 2003, Randall Simon of the Pirates took a playful swing at the Italian Sausage with a baseball bat, knocking down the young woman who was racing. After the game, and still in full uniform, Simon was escorted by security to the Sheriff's office on the ballpark’s service level, where he was arrested and booked for misdemeanor battery. The charge was later dropped and Simon was cited with disorderly conduct and fined. MLB suspended Simon for three games.

The woman, Mandy Wagner, told MLB.com in 2021 that she came to believe the whole affair was blown out of proportion. She had a nice chat with Simon on the telephone, and she and her mother took a vacation to Simon’s home country courtesy of The Curacao Tourism Department.

Ten years later, in 2013, there was another costume caper when the Italian Sausage went missing after appearing at a fundraiser for the Milwaukee Curling Club in Cedarburg, Wis. Again, law enforcement got involved. Two weeks later, two men walked into a bar, sat the sausage on a barstool and told the bartender, “You did not see anything.”

She called the police, and Italian was reunited with his brothers.

After another decade passed, the Racing Sausages, often imitated but never topped – unless we’re talking sauerkraut or Secret Stadium Sauce – hit the auction block. The original trio from that very first race 30 years ago, went up for auction on eBay.

“It’s unique to Wisconsin,” former Brewers batboy, player and manager Craig Counsell once said of the sausages. “It wouldn’t work anyplace else.”

A version of this story was first published in 2023.