MILWAUKEE — Roy Nowak woke up for work on Tuesday, not expecting anything out of the ordinary.
But after listening to the news and hearing that the Brewers were doing a surprise giveaway at Miller Park -- handing out free Chorizo lawn gnomes and tickets to the team's games with San Francisco next week as part of their "Where's Chorizo?" and Spring Madness promotions -- he decided to stop by. After all, the park was on his way to work.
An hour later, Nowak was sitting across from Brewers Hall of Fame closer Rollie Fingers, eating breakfast. Safe to say, Nowak never expected his day to take that kind of turn.
Among the 2,000 Chorizo gnomes the team gave out as part of the promotion were three grand prizes — a breakfast with Fingers, which Nowak found randomly when he picked up his gnome, a tailgate party with all of the Brewers' racing sausages, and a chance to throw out the first pitch.
"I couldn't believe it," Nowak said. "I thought this was one of the greatest prizes. It's unbelievable."
Nowak was just one of a wide array of Brewers fans Tuesday morning who made their way to the grassy areas surrounding Miller Park, where little Chorizo gnomes were stashed.
Twelve-year-old Dominic Schiro wouldn't have heard about the promotion if he hadn't gotten up early after forgetting to do his homework the night before. As a big fan of the sausage race — and Chorizo especially — Schiro not only got a keepsake for his baseball collection, but he and his mom also found tickets in a box for the Giants series. And none of it would have happened had he had his homework done on time.
"Lucky me," Schiro said.
He said he knew something was up when Chorizo wasn't in the race in the Brewers' last home game.
That was all a part of Brewers chief operating officer Rick Schlesinger's grand plan for the promotion. And he knew, once fans found out, that they'd be at Miller Park to search for the special prizes — it's a testament to how loyal the team's fans are in and around Milwaukee, Schlesinger said.
"They're always over-delivering," Schlesinger said. "We have fans always coming to the games and giving record crowds and here at a little over five in the morning, we've got hundreds of people coming out to Miller Park to find their gnome. … We're lucky to live in this community where people are this intense about their teams."
Last season, that intensity was especially obvious when the Brewers tried the same promotion with Bernie Brewer, stashing gnomes across multiple Wisconsin cities. With so many Bernie gnomes available and no ability to monitor those gnomes, many fans were disappointed as some people took several gnomes each.
This year, Schlesinger wanted to make sure that wasn't the case.
And with several people rolling into Miller Park only minutes after the announcement of the promotion was made public, it's safe to say that the idea has come a long way from Schlesinger's original plan. Inspiration for the promotion came from the University of Wisconsin's student government planting pink flamingos all over campus when he was enrolled in the late 1970s.
The enthusiasm even impressed Fingers, who joked this morning that "nothing goes better with coffee than Chorizo." The Hall of Fame reliever happened to be in town when the Brewers asked him to be a part of the promotion, and knowing how dedicated the fans were in Milwaukee, he gladly accepted the opportunity to help out.
"They love baseball," Fingers said. "They love the Brewers and anything dealing with the Brewers, they're going to come out. There's some diehard fans here, and the ones that come out this morning, those are diehards."
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