Emily Balsley
Emily Balsley holds up her shirt depicting the Brewers' fan experience.
Watching a Brewers game on TV recently, I noted the announcers promoting a T-shirt giveaway for the game on Aug. 12 — a new promotion this year, T-shirt Tuesdays, with images on the shirts designed by Wisconsin artists. I don’t think the announcers mentioned the artist, but I noticed that the screen said “Art by Emily Balsley.”
“Hey! I know her!” I yelled at the TV.
Now, technically, I don’t know Emily Balsley, an artist here in Madison. But Isthmus wrote about her interior design at her Monroe Street-area home in 2016 (“Color Evangelist”), and she created our July 2022 cover, a playful take on summer road construction, that won a “gold” award that year at the Milwaukee Press Club. So I feel a connection.
She’s been a resident artist at Madison Public Library’s The Bubbler, as well as a lot of other book and magazine illustration work, and a number of murals you might recognize from around Madison and the state.
Not only is Balsley one of four Wisconsin artists chosen to design a giveaway T-shirt this year, she’s also throwing out the first pitch at Tuesday’s game.
Reached by phone, Balsley tells Isthmus how it all came about. “Someone from their experiential marketing department reached out to me,” she says. “They were starting this new initiative of artist T-shirts. The idea was to break out of the typical branding mode and get some fresh perspectives on the Brewers.”
They had stumbled upon her art through social media and asked if she was interested in doing a shirt. “Of course I jumped on it because I've been a lifelong Brewers fan.” Balsley remembers listening to and watching games on the radio and on TV with her dad in Marathon City, Wisconsin, where she grew up and where she also played softball.
In coming up with the design, Balsley first of all “wanted it to be coming from me. I didn't want to just make something [more generically] baseball.”
She started thinking about the fan experience, “all of those little moments that happen when you're in the crowd, all the different foods that you eat, someone who likes to keep score manually, high fives and beer drinking and someone with a foam finger, or the excitement of catching a ball.” She started sketching and came up with a crowd scene of Brew Crew-ers enjoying the game in all those ways and more.
Balsley also explained the process in a promo video for the Brewers.
“What I really like about the design is once you kind of get into it, you start noticing all of these little moments,” Balsley says, adding that she hopes that fans “see themselves” in the shirt.
10,000 of the shirts will be given out to the first ticketholders through the gates at Tuesday’s game. The more frequent bobblehead giveaway is for 25,000. Balsley is not sure why fewer T-shirts are being given out and has been trying to figure out what time to tell friends who want to nab a T-shirt to get to the game. “We’ve been saying 5:30,” Balsley says, but that’s just a guess.
“I would feel terrible if people who are going to the game who aren't baseball fans, but they want to get the shirt, go and there's no shirts left. So, I'm feeling a little bit of stress.”
A busload of family, friends and neighbors is heading to American Family Field from Balsley’s Monroe Street neighborhood.
The Brewers are playing the Pittsburgh Pirates that day, which makes for an interesting dynamic because Balsley’s husband is originally from Pittsburgh and is, along with his family, a Pirates fan. His extended family is also coming in for the game. Balsley characterizes the mood as “friendly competition” and notes that regardless of team affiliation, they’re “all Emily art fans.”
She’s also been practicing for that first pitch, actually measuring out the distance in their yard. “I played softball and so I can make the throw. I'm not worried about the distance. I just want to look good,” she says. “I don't want to just lob it in there. I'm actually practicing a wind up and I want to put a little speed on it. So, we'll see. I am quite nervous, to be honest.”
The Brewers are currently the hottest team in baseball, with the best record so far. Tickets for Tuesday’s game are still available.
“I would love more people to be there, of course,” says Balsley. “So, come to the game and get a T-shirt. I want to see them around Madison. That'd be so cool.”
Emily Balsley
