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On Monday, the Cubs pulled a surprising move by parting ways with former manager David Ross and replacing him with Craig Counsell, who’d been with the Brewers since 2015—a development that didn’t go over well with someone in the Milwaukee area who defaced a sign at a Little League park named after the skipper.
Counsell’s ties to the Milwaukee Brewers run pretty deep. His dad worked for the franchise while raising his family in the lakeside suburb of Whitefish Bay, and in 2004, he made his debut with the team he spent a season with before heading to Arizona.
A couple of years later, he signed a contract with his hometown club and remained there until his MLB career came to an end in 2011. After hanging up his cleats, the two-time World Series champion took a job in the Brewers’ front office before he was hired to replace Ron Roenicke as manager prior to the start of the 2015 campaign.
He got off to a slow start, but he led Milwaukee to the NLCS after making the postseason for the first time in 2018, and the team only missed the playoffs a single time for the remainder of his tenure (and still boasted a winning record when they failed to make the cut).
Counsell went 707-625 while at the helm in Milwaukee, and it’s hard to blame him for pouncing at the chance to manage the Chicago Cubs.
However, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, one person (presumably a salty Brewers fan) took exception to that decision, as the sign bearing his name at the Little League baseball complex in Whitefish Bay that was dedicated to him in 2o12 was defaced with graffiti in the wake of the news (the word in question is a three-letter synonym for “butt”).
A member of the Whitefish Bay Little League board has since covered up the vandalized Craig Counsell Park sign with a tarp.
What neighbors have to say about the overnight defacement coming up on @WISN12News at 11am. pic.twitter.com/4R0Hikcfw5
— Madison Moore (@MadisonMooreTV) November 7, 2023
It takes a special kind of person to vandalize a Little League field because they’re mad the person it’s named after decided to take another job, but this only goes to show you should never underestimate the pettiness of sports fans.