Bar Braces For 'Unexpected Demographic Shift' As Brewers Meet Dodgers

WAUKESHA — Tom Devereux has owned O'Leary's Tavern on Broadway for eleven years, and until Tuesday afternoon he had never once fielded a phone call asking where a Dodgers fan should sit.

That changed three times in one hour. The Milwaukee Brewers' NLCS opener against the Los Angeles Dodgers on October 11 has caught Waukesha's sports bar scene flat-footed, and nowhere more than at O'Leary's, where Devereux spent Wednesday morning mounting a second television on the west wall and drafting a sign he is calling, without irony, a 'Dodger Supporter' discount.

"We've lived in Packers and Brewers territory so long that we genuinely forgot other teams have fans," Devereux said, holding a stud finder in one hand and a 55-inch television box in the other. "One guy on the phone asked if we'd have blue and white bunting. I had to tell him we have green bunting left over from St. Patrick's and that's really the extent of our bunting program."

The discount

The parking discount, printed on 40 half-sheets of yellow paper and taped to the host stand by 11 a.m. Wednesday, offers visiting Dodgers fans 25 cents off their meter time if they show a Dodgers jersey, hat, or what Devereux's sign generously describes as 'any item reasonably interpreted as Dodger-adjacent.'

"We debated 50 cents," said Carol Spitzer, 44, O'Leary's day bartender of six years. "Tom felt that was overcorrecting. We settled on a quarter because it's a round number and because the meters out front only take quarters anyway, so it's really just a philosophical gesture."

Devereux said the last time O'Leary's saw a comparable influx of out-of-town fans was in 2021, when a wrong-turn Chicago wedding party mistook the bar for a reception venue three blocks away and stayed for two Brewers innings before anyone corrected them. That group, he said, left a $40 tip and never came back.

Seating math

The second television required Devereux to reconfigure eleven tables along the west wall, a project he completed Wednesday with the help of his nephew, Keith Lindqvist, 22, who is between semesters at Waukesha County Technical College and was paid in burgers.

"We went from one sightline to two sightlines," Lindqvist said, standing on a barstool to level the new mount. "Technically we now have more television than we have ceiling height for, but Tom says that's a Thursday problem."

"We've lived in Packers and Brewers territory so long that we genuinely forgot other teams have fans."

— Tom Devereux, owner, O'Leary's Tavern

Downtown's other obstacle

Devereux acknowledged one wrinkle the discount sign can't fix: visiting fans still have to find O'Leary's in the first place, a task complicated by downtown Waukesha's block-by-block one-way grid. He said he has started giving phone directions that include the phrase 'just trust me' at least twice.

"I had a guy call from a gas station on St. Paul Avenue convinced he was lost," Devereux said. "He was four blocks away. I told him to take Newhall under the tracks if the train's down, and he asked what train. That's when I knew he was really from out of town."

O'Leary's plans to open both televisions at 11 a.m. Sunday, three hours before first pitch, with Spitzer manning the west side and a second bartender, hired specifically for the series, covering the original screen. Devereux said he has ordered an additional case of napkins but declined to say how many, calling the number 'a trade secret born of panic.'

Asked whether the discount and second television represent a permanent shift for the bar, Devereux was noncommittal. "If the Dodgers keep winning, sure, maybe this becomes who we are," he said. "If the Brewers win in four, we're back to one TV and regular parking by Thursday. I'd prefer the second one, honestly. Fewer napkins."