Foenem didn’t know much about baseball. He hadn’t heard the Brewers were in the playoffs when he sat down to write about them. What he knew fit in one breath. There’s a pitcher, home runs are good, and three strikes means you’re out. He put all of it in a song. Now the players hear it eight to 10 times a day.
Foenem is Rudy Jackson, 24, a Wisconsin native. Esther Zuckerman tells his story on the Journal’s front page. The whole thing began at the zoo. The Milwaukee County Zoo had a free day this month, and he wrote a song for it, cheetahs and hyenas included. A TikTok user saw it and asked for one about the Brewers. He said yes and got to work. Two days later the song was online. It’s mostly the team’s name, sung high, over and over, with a few very simple lines in between. One of them just cheers the team on to hit some home runs.
Then the Brewers kept winning. The song is now the unofficial anthem of their run to a first World Series since 1982. It plays in the clubhouse behind interviews. Major League Baseball posted the lyrics in all caps on X while the team swept the Dodgers. Milwaukee’s mayor, Cavalier Johnson, filmed himself swinging a bat to it and put that online. The release post has over 550,000 views on TikTok. John Egan, a Green Bay comedian who hosts a Brewers podcast, calls it a “good-bad song.” It isn’t bad, he says. You just think it’s a parody the first time you hear it.
Two days and 10 minutes
Here’s the part we like. Nolan Busalacchi, 23, runs a small label and media company called Run Along Forever. It works with Milwaukee artists. He’d helped with the zoo video. When he heard there was a Brewers song, he found a videographer and headed to the ballpark. The footage came in and he cut it fast. Once the edit was done, he posted it within 10 minutes. Nobody waited for perfect. Foenem says he wasn’t chasing a hit at all. In his words, “my whole goal to make music is to make people laugh.” The team invited him to DJ a workout. He hopes to perform at the Series and says he’ll probably pass out if he gets the chance. There’s a library song in his catalog too.
Our read
This is a career story (Career), and a small one on purpose. The song cost two days. The video cost one trip to the ballpark and a quick edit, and it was online within 10 minutes of being done. That’s the whole bet. Most of us treat a side project like a mortgage. We plan for a year, buy the gear, build the website, and never ship. The Milwaukee version runs the other way. Make the thing for your own town, put it out, and see who laughs. If nobody does, you’re out a weekend. Cheap, fast swings are how a 24-year-old becomes a team’s mascot and how a 23-year-old grows a label. They’re also how someone near retirement finds a second act that pays for part of it.
The line in your plan this touches is the second-act income, the money you hope to earn after the main job ends. Here’s the check for this week. Write down one idea, what the first version would cost in days and dollars, and the date you’d post it. Fund the test from fun money and leave the retirement account alone. Nobody waits for the rain to find out if the umbrella works. A short plan review is the same habit.