What's brewing? By Warren Bluhm News-Chronicle The sad thing about what is happening with the Milwaukee Brewers is that people were starting to notice baseball again, ever so slightly. Heck, this is the third or fourth column I've devoted to the subject since midsummer. We had the awful Detroit Tigers to talk about - 119 losses, almost an all-time record! - and the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox coming so close to ending decades of futility. The Brewers were pretty bad, but they were showing signs of life. You know what's so amazing about Richie Sexson, Ben Sheets and Scott Posednick? It's the first time in years that I know the names of three Brewers. There was a time I knew them all. In the summer of 1979, I saw 10 games at Milwaukee County Stadium. Do you know that for a half-dozen years, from 1978 through 1982, the Brewers hit more home runs than any other team in the American League? Those were heady days. How the mighty have fallen. It's been 11 years since they won more games than they lost. I lost interest in the team when I figured out the routine: Players would only be in Milwaukee until they got good, and then the team would sell or trade their contract to the New York Yankees or Atlanta Braves or one of the other pennant-contending teams. So long, B.J. Surhoff. Bye bye, Jeff Cirillo. If you didn't blink, you might have spotted Hideo Nomo and Bob Wickman. Despite my flagging interest, I bought into the conventional wisdom: Maybe if southeastern Wisconsin taxpayers helped them build a new stadium, the Brewers would be able to generate enough revenue to field a competitive team. This year, with a new team president and a new manager, a smidgen of enthusiasm was beginning to come back. Now it's all a shambles. Word leaked out that the Brewers board of directors, already pinching pennies with a $40 million payroll, one of the lowest in the high-stakes world of Major League Baseball, had voted to cut that number to $30 million for the next year or three. The last politicians who backed construction of Miller Park couldn't jump off the bandwagon fast enough. There are calls to force the team to open its books and figure out where, if it's not going into players' salaries, all the money is going. The controversy is still shaking itself out at this writing. Team president Ulice Payne Jr. is probably going to quit, but maybe they'll find a way to keep him and save face, maybe they'll find a way out of the latest public relations disaster, maybe they'll even become the Miracle Brewers and win a few games with the lowest salaries in the game. Yet it just feels like - after 11 years of futility and a growing sense that the people who run the Milwaukee Brewers don't have a clue anymore about how to field a competitive team and attract fans to their shiny new stadium - after a single season where it felt like they might just start turning the ship around, now they have dashed those final hopes and given up. You don't boost your business by shrinking your product. You don't fight the Atlanta Braves, or even the Florida Marlins, by becoming the Durham Bulls - with all due respect to that venerable minor league baseball team. Our only hope is that the Milwaukee Brewers are sold to someone who likes Miller Park, a stadium built in part to prevent the possibility the team would be sold to someone who would move the team to another city. The people who now own the Brewers either are unable to field a competitive team because of fiscal constraints or, more sadly, they don't care to do so anymore. Saddest of all, they have run the operation so far into the ground that we don't care anymore whether they stay or go.