Waukesha Sports Fans Prepare For Six Weeks Of Awkward Silence Before Packers Season
With the Milwaukee Brewers clinching their division, local bars estimate they have six weeks to sell baseball promotional merchandise before football dominates.
WAUKESHA — With the Milwaukee Brewers having clinched their division, Colleen Prybylski, 58, owner of the Third Rail Tap on Barstow Street, said Sunday she has approximately six weeks to move her remaining baseball inventory before Packers merchandise takes over the building entirely, a timeline she described as "tight, but I've done it tighter."
The window runs from this weekend through the first weekend of November, when the baseball season is expected to be fully over and no one in the building will admit to having owned a Brewers cup. Prybylski said she began planning for the transition on Wednesday, several days before the division was clinched, a decision regulars have called premature and she has called "inventory management."
"We've already removed all Brewers posters," Prybylski said. "In the past, we waited too long and had to donate them to the donation center."
The Inventory
As of Sunday afternoon, the Third Rail's remaining baseball stock consisted of 212 promotional stadium cups, 3 vinyl window clings, 1 felt pennant, and 14 posters, all of which were taken down Wednesday night and are now stored in the basement between a keg cooler and a cardboard cutout of a 2011 Packers cornerback. The cups are sold at 2 for $1, or free with any basket of wings, an offer that has moved 9 cups since Labor Day.
Prybylski said the cups are the difficult part. The posters can be rolled, and the pennant can be hung in a Packers-adjacent context if the lighting is right, but the cups are, in her words, "a lot of cups." She estimated 40 percent are from a single giveaway night that she did not attend and cannot explain.
"The cups are the difficult part. They're a lot of cups."
— Colleen Prybylski, owner, Third Rail Tap
The last time Prybylski waited until after a Brewers postseason to clear baseball merchandise, in 2023, she delivered 11 boxes to the donation center on Sunset Drive on November 8, by which point the Packers wall was already up and the boxes had to be carried past it. A donation center employee who asked not to be named said the staff now recognizes Prybylski's truck and has cleared a shelf "for the usual."
The Silence
Prybylski said the merchandise is the smaller issue. The larger one, she said, is the stretch of roughly six weeks in which half of her regulars are still watching baseball and the other half have moved to football, and neither group is confident which sport it is allowed to ask the other about.
She has documented the effect. On a Tuesday last October, she logged a 4-minute stretch beginning at 8:15 p.m. during which the only sound in the bar was the ice machine. "Nine televisions, and not one person had a question," Prybylski said. "It was a Tuesday, so I let it go."
Kevin Hanratty, 54, an HVAC technician who has sat at the third stool from the end for eleven years, said he had been following the Brewers' playoff push with what he described as "mild interest" until he arrived Thursday and found the posters gone. He then said he had assumed the Packers' season did not really begin until October. Prybylski informed him that Green Bay has been playing for several weeks. Hanratty said he had heard that, but "didn't think it counted yet."
"I'll probably just stop coming until September 2027," Hanratty said.
Asked whether that would include Sunday football, Hanratty said he watches Sunday football at home, "where the chairs are mine," and that the Third Rail is a bar he visits for the in-between. Told that the in-between is precisely the six weeks Prybylski is trying to fill, he said he understood that, and ordered a basket of wings, which came with a cup.
What Comes Next
Prybylski said the Brewers' remaining cups will remain on the shelf behind the register until the final out of the team's season, at which point they will be boxed and delivered to Sunset Drive. She has already called the donation center to warn them, and said she has asked to be put down for the first Monday of November.
Asked whether she had considered keeping a small amount of baseball signage up year-round, Prybylski said the wall space is spoken for. Asked by whom, she said Packers.