The slogan for the campaign in 2001 touting the Brewers’ new stadium was, “It’s all here, under one roof,” and newspapers in Milwaukee featured the clever advertisement. It was designed to highlight the retractable roof of what was then known as Miller Park, an advantage that was well-received in wintry Wisconsin and thought to be practical. Naturally, the illustration was fantastical.
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For starters, there’s an actual family gathered together for a meal. A man is seated, still wearing his tie and buttoned shirt. To his right, there’s a vintage display cabinet and elegant drawer. Behind him, on a pristine wall, there’s a large painting of flowers. To his left, there’s a houseplant. It’s a nice home. Conspicuously, there’s a woman hawking hot dogs while wearing a vending tray. Instead of serving bowls, there are disposable trays on the table filled with condiments. There’s a colossal jug of ketchup on the large, fancy dining room table yet to be pumped. Bags of peanuts are serving as sides.
Twenty years later, the most improbable aspect of the advertisement isn’t any of that.
It’s the little girl.
Her name is Ginger Poulson. She’s now 29 years old. And 20 years after reluctantly appearing as a model in the advertisement, the Brewers recently hired the Wisconsin native as an area scout.
Yeah, really.
“It’s a very cool, full-circle moment, and when you just take a step back and look at it, you’re like, wow, God kind of knew what he was doing back then,” she said. “It’s fun to look back at it because it’s, like, what are the odds?”
Putting it mildly, the chances are not favorable, especially considering all of these fun circumstances surrounding the advertisement:
- Poulson’s aunt Mari Eschenbaum happened to be working for the agency, Kohnke Hanneken, that was creating the advertisement for the Brewers. With the agency wanting an older, historic home for the advertisement, Eschenbaum offered her sister’s house (Poulson’s mother), which the Poulsons still live in. It’s a century-old, Tudor-style house in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
- Poulson’s mother has 10 siblings. Therefore, Poulson has several cousins, and any one of them could have been chosen instead of her. She was in the second grade at the time, and they just so happened to be looking for a girl her age. Also in the advertisement are her aunt Maia Hanson, cousin Thor Hanson and father Dave Poulson.
- Poulson, who grew up an avid Brewers fan, had no interest in being part of the advertisement. None. Zero. She did not want to do it.
“I had no desire for it to be me,” Poulson said before laughing. “It is hilarious in hindsight because I love baseball. So it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be in a Brewers ad.’ It was more, ‘I don’t want to be a model.’ My cousins were really annoyed that I was the one in it and I had no interest in modeling at the time. I was a tomboy. So in hindsight, it’s pretty funny because now I don’t think kids would say no to that.”
Ginger PoulsonOn the day of the shoot, one of Poulson’s aunts picked her up from school. By the time they arrived at the Poulson house, many people from the ad agency were already there, including the casting director. It was around that time when Poulson’s mother informed her that she would be the little girl for the shoot. It entailed getting her hair braided and wearing a buttoned shirt — two things Poulson wasn’t exactly fond of.
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“You can’t actually tell your mother no,” Poulson said. “So I don’t think it was really a choice. I came around. I was just being a little bit difficult about it at first.
“I might have been a little stubborn at first about it but it was a fun experience. And it was cool. And it didn’t take that long, either. It probably took longer for my mom to braid my hair than the actual shoot.”
Well, thanks, mom.
Because now, there’s also the wild happenstance of the Brewers hiring her as an area scout, making her one of a select few woman scouts working in the major leagues.
“To me, that’s kind of cool because that could not have even been on my radar when I was at that age,” Poulson said, referring to when she was a kid in the advertisement. “I didn’t even know what a scout really was and I definitely didn’t think it was something that I could do when I was older.
“It’s kind of cool because now hopefully being in this position, it’s something that any little kid — whether it’s a little boy or a little girl — could look at and be like, hey, that’s something I could do, that’s a job I could have someday. And it’s not something where they’re like, oh, I’ve never seen anybody like me who’s in that position.”
Poulson is the area scout for Ohio, Indiana and Michigan while also being responsible for the eastern halves of Illinois and Wisconsin. Dan Nellum is her supervisor. The Brewers hired her on Sept. 17 by luring her away from the Toronto Blue Jays, where she was working as a scout analyst, mainly working with the front office. She hopes to one day become a general manager.
Her story of breaking into baseball is pretty cool, too.
Growing up, Poulson was more of a soccer player and never played softball, but loved baseball and the Brewers. She enjoyed learning the backstories of the players — where they came from and what made them so good — which are essentially the questions she is expected to answer nowadays. She was a frequent visitor to County Stadium and then Miller Park, now known as American Family Field.
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“I was just a baseball nerd,” she said.
Poulson studied broadcast journalism at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She initially wanted to be a sports reporter and loved the field. While in school, she covered plenty of college baseball and was able to land internships covering the Cape Cod League.
There, she met scouts who planted the idea of working in their industry.
“Have you ever thought of it?” they’d ask.
She’d laugh.
And then she’d say, “No.”
“Because at the time,” Poulson said, “you have enough people sometimes that question your knowledge when you’re a reporter and whatnot that I’m like, if people are gonna question it in this field, I don’t even want to know how it would be like as a scout.
“In hindsight, I haven’t actually had to deal with that nearly as much as you would think. So that’s been great. But at the time, it was just not on my radar.”
So Poulson continued to freelance for MLB.com, covering the Arizona Fall League and others, covering some minor-league baseball. But after graduating, she said, she knew she did not want to work in local news, the typical entry-level position for journalists. While reading a book about Branch Rickey signing Jackie Robinson, Poulson had an epiphany of sorts, and realized the reason she didn’t want to pursue journalism any further was that she had no interest in being on camera or seeing her name on a byline — she just loved baseball. She taught herself SQL and R to have a coding background, a prerequisite for most modern baseball jobs. A week later, she noticed MLB was starting its diversity fellowship. She applied. She was one of approximately 20 out of a field of 1,400 to land a job. The Blue Jays hired her. Eventually, she was moved to full-time in the amateur scouting department as an analyst.
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In September, the Blue Jays granted Brewers vice president/domestic scouting Tod Johnson permission to speak with Poulson about one of Milwaukee’s openings. She didn’t want to leave the Blue Jays but thought it best to step out of her comfort zone if she ever wanted to advance. She spoke with Johnson, national supervisor for scouting Doug Reynolds and others, and said she was impressed with the Brewers’ culture.
Plus, for Poulson, it’s home.
Recently, she was back at her parents’ house in Waukesha, staring at the advertisement from 20 years ago, reflecting on chances, fortune and fate.
“It was always a fun moment to look back on even before the Brewers had called me for this position but now it’s just a very full-circle moment,” Poulson said. “It just makes me realize that everything happens for a reason.”
(Photo of Ginger Poulson: Courtesy of the Milwaukee Brewers)
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