(gentle music) (serene music) - Thanks for watching another episode of "My Wisconsin Backyard."

Hi, I am Traci Neuman, along with Brian Ewig.

- And we're here today at Franklin Field at the Ballpark Commons, to learn about Milwaukee's other professional baseball team, the Milkmen.

(crowd cheering) - [Traci] We'll introduce you to some of the players, and tell you more about the league.

- There we go, yay.

(onlookers cheer) - [Brian] We'll show you the Miracle League of Milwaukee, where people of all abilities play organized baseball.

- [Announcer] Attention please.

(air horn blasts) - [Brian] Plus, we'll learn about Chinese culture and traditions at the Dragon Boat Festival.

- All right, let's get right to the show.

- All right, let's do it, but- - What are you doing?

- You know they're not gonna start the game without throwing out the first pitch.

- I'm not doing that.

- Well, I'm not doing that.

- All right, well, what do you wanna do?

- Well, there's only one way to solve this.

Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.

- Paper covers rock.

- Oh, all right, we'll go together I guess.

- Deal.

(playful jazzy music) (crowd cheers and claps) (hip hop music) - It's very high level baseball for independent baseball.

You got guys from all over the place.

Got guys who've played in the MLB, a lot of guys who played Double-A, Triple-A.

- Baseball up here, people just love it.

It's like the pastime up here.

- This is a nice place to play baseball, to be honest, this is a great place, Milkmen have really good fans.

- If you wanna see a good competitive baseball game, the Milkmen game's a good place for that.

- We realize that baseball, just true baseball, is not for everybody.

And you'll see in our games a different brand of baseball.

- [Announcer] Number 14, Cam Balego.

(crowd cheering) - That's the American Association of Professional Independent Baseball.

A lot of Double-A, Triple-A, former big league guys that have been released by organizations.

They come here, try to get their careers back on track, and get picked back up.

- These guys are professionals, they're paid, and a lot of 'em have come from different backgrounds.

We've got some guys from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, some that are fresh outta college.

- [Announcer] Oh, foul ball.

- [Dan] In affiliated baseball, the Minor League system, you know, you might have guys, and you're trying to develop them, you know, getting them ready for the Major Leagues.

But our product is a little different.

You know, every night we come out we try to play to win.

And it's a very competitive brand of baseball.

- I feel like here is a really good league to play for any young guy, because you need to find yourself as a player.

Nobody gonna tell you how to do it.

If you don't find yourself, you're gonna be out of baseball real quick.

So when you play in affiliated ball, they always look for your tools, and how to get better at your tools, besides winning.

And here it's more about winning every day.

How you can prepare yourself to win every day.

(people cheering) - [Dan] Independent baseball is different, you know, as far as the players and where they're at.

But really it's more than just baseball.

(crowd cheering) But we do a lot of other things in between innings.

We have a lot of fun activities.

We have games, we've got music playing all the time.

So it's engaging the fans in different ways.

♪ Bum bum bum ♪ (speaking in foreign language) - I believe we play a hundred games in roughly like 110, 115 days.

So it's definitely not easy.

Usually we'll get one off day a week, and that's usually Mondays.

Keep putting the work in every day.

You know, it's not easy.

We play a lot of games in a little amount of days.

Right now my goal is to hopefully get signed to an affiliated team.

Obviously the overall goal is to hopefully make it to MLB but you just gotta take small steps at a time.

And you know, right now the goal is to just get picked up by an affiliated club.

- [Roy] The people get together to watch a game.

It is really nice.

It's family atmosphere here, so it's really nice.

- Oh, it's great.

I get to help them get their careers back on track.

And anytime you can help a guy reach their dreams, their potential, it's very rewarding and gratifying.

(bat cracking) (coaches shouting) (crowd cheering) - [Player] All right!

(players chatting) (cheerful acoustic music) - [Peggy] I think whether you're retired or not, you have to have something to do.

You have to have something that drives you, something that gets you up in the morning, something about which you hopefully are excited, and provides you opportunities to learn something new.

- I was an emergency physician for 33 years, practicing mostly in urban areas, including in Milwaukee.

And so I was able to see a lot of the chronic health effects that people suffered from.

So that led to start of thinking about what would be the next chapter for us in terms of healthcare.

And so that led us to really start thinking about how would we grow food if we had a chance to grow food?

And it's always been Peggy's dream to have an apple farm.

So I went along with the dream, and now here we are growing organic apples.

- Alright, this, here we go.

This is work I'm proud of, this row right here.

So this row, this is Crimson Crisp.

Apples are one of the dirty dozen fruits and vegetables, because of the tendency to use a lot of type of non-organic ways of managing disease and pests.

And there's many concerns about the use of those kind of chemicals, some of which date back to World War II, and were literally weapons of warfare, and now being used as weapons against pests and disease.

By being certified organic, this lets us really, you know, assure our customers that we have followed all of the rules, and we intend to do so.

And we are offering a much cleaner variety of fruit than you can find conventionally.

And I think that many, many people feel that that's really important to them, to their children, and just to the health of the planet.

- One of our main pests is called plum curculio.

We call it the evil weevil.

And what we do is we basically have very fine powdered clay, and we mix this with water, and then we put this in our tank for spraying.

And basically what this clay does is that it coats the apple with this very white surface.

And so the pests don't really like this.

So what it does is it leaves the apple with a sort of a white coating when we spray it.

It's a very simple protective way, and very natural.

You could literally eat this clay if you wanted to.

And that prevents some of our pests from actually being able to get into the apple.

(acoustic guitar music) Organic originally is all about the soil.

So the whole point of organic is organic material, and that organic material is found in the soil.

And so the original organic concept is what we subscribe to, that we're all about amending the soil, improving the soil, providing the soil basis for what we grow in terms of fungi, bacteria, air, water, the things that go into the soil is what we are really growing.

The apples that we see are basically the result of what's down below in the roots.

And so really that soil is the basis for what you get in terms of nutrients and micronutrients.

It takes a lot to grow an organic orchard.

So this requires a lot of manual labor.

- In March, we start with pruning, doing the heavy pruning, of taking out heavy branches that have gotten too big.

So these trees are in a constant state of being renewed.

The only part that stays really is the trunk.

Everything else can needs to be renewed and pruned to keep the trees healthy, and to keep the trees maximally productive.

Bloom here happens about mid-May, so we bloom around May 14th to 15th historically speaking.

We then have to start with thinning the applets.

- The conventional orchard can spray a chemical that will drop a certain percentage of the apples, where we are not allowed to do that.

So we spend a lot of time in the spring manually thinning all of the apples.

- [Peggy] And our first crop would be available perhaps the third week of August.

Pretty much up until about a week after Halloween, we have a harvest coming in of different apples almost weekly.

You really need to learn things that are new all the time, to keep your brain going, and to keep your body going too.

So this does that for us.

We're both science-based people, science backgrounds.

This has afforded us an opportunity to learn a whole new different science that we didn't know before.

(plucked string music) - This Dragon Boat festival has been around for thousands of years, and the significance of the whole entire thing is that we'd like to share the Chinese traditions with Milwaukee.

And it brings the community together, closer together, with all of us sharing our traditions with each other.

In the Chinese tradition, it's believed that the dragon symbolizes health, good luck, and wealth, prosperity.

In any other culture, the dragon is kind of feared, especially like in the European cultures, whereas in the Chinese culture, it's revered.

Everybody loves the dragon.

And actually in the Chinese zodiac, the dragon is is the most sought after year to be born in.

The tradition is to wake up the dragon, and it starts with dotting the eyes of the dragon.

And once the eyes are dotted, the dragon will wake up and dance around, and that symbolizes the festival starting.

(rowers chatting and laughing) - [Rower] All right, push it off.

(speaking in foreign language) - [Announcer] Attention please.

(air horn blaring) - There is a dragon head on the dragon boat, and it's a race consisting of, in Milwaukee, four boats at a time.

They're racing against time.

And there are 22 people on the boat.

20 paddlers, one drummer, and one steersperson.

(drums beating, paddlers chanting) In the different positions, the first one is a drummer.

The drummer keeps the beat, and she or he is actually following the person in front, the two people in front, who are paddling in sync and keeping the beat, and from keeping the beat, all the other nine rows of people, which is 18 people, are trying to follow that beat as well.

Whenever the drummer raises his hand, that's when you raise your paddle, and when the drummer goes down and hits the drum, that's when your paddle hits the water.

So there is quite a bit of coordination and thinking that has to go along with it.

And when you paddle, it's not like paddling a canoe, which is sideways, it's actually what you're digging downwards, and going to the side, and then picking it up, and going down again into the side.

So it's a lot of core muscle work.

(rowers chanting) In the Milwaukee Dragon Boat race, there has to be 8 women in there, and 12 men.

And the 12 men that are in the boat actually represent the engine side of the boat.

And they're actually like in the middle of the boat, and they power the boat, and the women are the ones in front and at the back.

And the women set the pace of the boat.

And then the steersperson at the back is the one that is steering the boat straight, to a finish line.

It's actually now a really large sport, that is all over the world, and is celebrated.

I do hope that it continues.

It's a nice tradition to have, and to follow, because the children learn a little bit about what China was all about.

(hip hop music) - Oh my God, look at that.

Ooh, this is good eating, buddy.

These are the ones you want.

- [Onlooker] Wow.

- [Instructor] What do you wanna do with him?

Do you want to keep him, or do you want put him back?

- [Child] Put him back.

- [Instructor] Put him back?

- [Vijay] Take one.

You wanna grab one?

- Wait, can you keep that?

- That's the bait.

You have to learn to put it on.

You put it on right up here.

- They're so cute.

- This little guy loves fishing.

So we are here to do some fishing for him.

He wants to learn, he knows how to fish, but he doesn't know the right way of fishing.

So we are here for that.

And they need to learn more about our natural resources and everything.

And it's something that you do to relax yourself, an activity.

He really loves it.

And I go with him, I'm not into fishing a whole lot, but I'm doing it for him.

(upbeat jazz music) - [Traci] To see more of our short stories, check us out on Facebook and Instagram or milwaukeepbs.org.

(upbeat jazz music) (synth music) - We're playing doubles.

Two people on one side, two people on the other side.

It's a smaller court than tennis.

You have to be moving around a little bit, this way, this way, this way, this way.

Forward, backward, backward, forward.

And then you serve underhand only, below the belly button, and you have to serve to the opposite court.

You have to serve deep, return deep, run up to the kitchen line, which is near the net.

And you cannot step into the net unless the ball bounces into the net.

So you serve, bounce once, bounce twice, and then you run up to the net and start playing back and forth.

The scoring actually is the hardest part of pickleball.

You always have to announce your score before you go into play, because the score gets a little confusing.

When you first start, you go zero, zero, start.

Then if you lose your point, then the opposite side goes, and then they go zero, zero, one.

And then if they make the point, get it over the net, then it goes one, zero, one, and then one, zero, two.

It's a little complicated, but after a while you get it.

(players chatting) You win when you reach 11, 11 points you win.

So that's it.

It's a lot of fun.

You meet a lot of wonderful people.

- I make a lot of mistakes, and the people here are very patient.

- I've had two knee surgeries, and I was out here a few months after, because you could be.

You know, that's the beauty of this.

You can get back in this game easily.

- I think it's a combination of ping pong and tennis, and you don't need the stamina for tennis, you need the quickness of ping pong.

So I like it.

I like it.

I've been playing about four months, I've been hearing about the pickleball craze.

My wife used to play tennis.

We found we couldn't play tennis together, because she'd call it out, I'd call it in, said we're gonna get divorced over tennis, so we gotta stop that.

I play racquetball, but she didn't like racquetball.

So we found this and it seems like it's a fit for both of us.

- When you have a volley that keeps on going, that is so exciting.

Of course it's a cardiovascular game, hand eye coordination, running, all of that.

It is an addictive game, because the minute you've start it, you find, you know, really, that's not difficult.

But then as you get into the game and the intricacies of the game, it's really a lot more complicated.

I'm 85 years old, but I am incredibly physically active.

I'm here every morning, 9:00, I play from 9 to 11, and we play all year round.

It's really for all ages.

So many of the players bring their daughters or sons to play with, you know, to train them, you know, and teach them the game.

There is no age limit.

Continue on playing.

Absolutely.

You are not dead yet.

You know, so you can continue on playing.

Truly, yes.

I really think the craze, if that's what you call it, I honestly think it's gonna go on, and on, and on.

(synth music) - Should we just go ahead and start in the back?

(Baroque guitar music) When we moved in, all that was here was this bird's nest and the ditch lilies here.

Everything else was rocks.

I like things hidden.

If you walk in the garden, you'll see different, there's metal statues hanging out in there in different areas.

The dog, I mean you see immediately, but then there's a frog that fell over with his drink.

There's a cat that's trying to scare you.

So this all in here is perennial.

Everything in here will come back.

There are no annuals in this garden.

And then on the side of the house will be the vegetable garden.

And then in front of the house is more the weeds, and some decorative things in there with rugosas, and just other things.

But it's also mainly just for the statues.

(Baroque guitar music) It relaxes me, it relaxes you, it helps you kind of meditate to an extent as well, and you get to feel like you finished something, or you accomplished something.

But this walkway here is where grandma walked on the dirt, and then I just filled it in with the rocks.

So we just keep it in her memory.

So she's passed two years ago now.

So we've always come in the garden and remember her.

That's mainly why I got into gardening, was because of her, most likely.

My grandfather would do the lawn mowing, and she would actually get her hands dirty.

So I would be with her getting my hands dirty, and she helped me build my garden.

I mean she couldn't do the digging and all that stuff, but at least she could be a presence here, and give me direction on what does she think was good?

And she would say, oh, whatever you wanna do is fine.

I go, well, no, no, no, finally, I got her, okay, just walk a path, that you think would be pretty for a stream.

And then she did that.

And this is her little area that I've created.

Her favorite color was orange.

So I always try and find orange plants or hanging baskets.

I have a pagoda that she made me bring from California in my carry-on, which is about 60 or 70 pounds.

I'm surprised the conveyor belt or whatever the thing is we put our stuff on didn't break, 'cause it was pretty heavy.

And this garden, I really don't tend to at all.

I do not cook, but my husband cooks.

So these vegetable gardens are his gardens.

(Baroque guitar music) - To me, the best stuff in the vegetable gardens are the herbs, because it makes it a year round garden almost.

Basil, yes, it only grows in the summer, but grow a bunch of it, make pesto, freeze it.

And you have fresh basil all year round.

Or tarragon, and put it in soups that you can freeze, oregano that you can dry.

The herbs are the best part.

The parsley will keep growing sometimes till November or December.

The beloveds, the sorrel that I wanted, I just couldn't find it.

It's like, it's really good.

I wanted it, I like to eat it.

I put it in my soups or salads.

That's the only way I can do it, as long as I'm doing it.

Fresh tomatoes, they just taste better.

I'm not doing a big, you know, climate changing thing here.

This is more just about my health.

Always our health.

Always having fresh, healthy, nutritious things.

- One thing with me and my grandmother, we gardened until almost the last days, she's just led me in gardens.

I think a lot of her bled onto me in the sense of what I do, and how I operate my life.

(Baroque guitar music) - [Announcer] Auggie!

- [Onlooker] Let's go, Auggie!

- [Leila] There are multiple miracle leagues around the state of Wisconsin.

- Dodgers on three, one, two, three, - [All] Dodgers!

- Miracle League is a baseball program for kids and adults that don't fit into your typical able-bodied, neurotypical sports programs.

It's a recreational sports option for basically anybody.

- [Announcer] This is for a shout out, Carter.

- It's two teams plus two teams.

- Mm hm.

- One team plus another team.

- Yeah, so two teams play each other every Monday.

- Go, yay.

(crowd clapping) - In a typical Miracle League game, everybody gets an at bat.

There's no strikes.

Everyone's on base.

The last batter of the inning hits a grand slam and brings everyone home.

- [Announcer] Shot up the middle.

- A lot of the players will have one-on-one volunteers on the field with them.

Athletes who need maybe some physical help.

Sometimes they just need a little bit of support or encouragement.

- [Announcer] He's gonna score a run.

- [Leila] I think it's important to the kids, because they get to see friends that they don't see in any other setting.

It's also an opportunity for them to have a recreational outlet that's not a therapy appointment, it's not a doctor's appointment, it's something that's fun.

(crowd cheering) - Yeah, I don't know.

I can't really say without kind of tearing up how things really do work, with seeing the smiles on their faces of what they're able to do on a day in, day out basis.

Just playing sports, or being part of a group like this, it's special.

(bat cracking) (crowd cheering) - [Announcer] She showed that bat what's what.

- [Leila] We really try to let the parents be parents, and sit in the stands, and just participate if they want to, because they get to have a break.

They get to sit in the stands and they get to talk to somebody that understands what they're going through better than anybody else in their lives.

- It's really cool.

The community's really cool.

Everyone in the stands cheers for every child that's up at bat, and everyone gives each other high fives when they make it home or on home plate.

- We can't do this without volunteers.

Volunteers are the most important part of this program.

We've got volunteer coaches who are coming every week.

We've got volunteer, what we call buddies, who are with the athletes one-on-one.

Some of our athletes are a little bit more independent, and just want somebody to hang out with, and dance with in the outfield.

But we really, we really are so reliant on volunteers to make it happen.

- You don't have to be an athlete, You don't have to be anything, I guess.

Just as long as you wanna come out and volunteer and help a special needs child, kids.

- [Leila] Absolutely do it.

Whatever's holding you back, don't let it hold you back.

If you've been thinking about it or considering it, absolutely do it.

'cause it's such a rewarding experience, and the kids are so inspiring to watch.

- [Eric] They can do anything they put their minds to with the volunteers.

- [Announcer] Opposite field bomb from Theo.

- [Eric] They can do anything they want.

- All right on three, baseball is amazing.

One, two, three, - [All] Baseball is amazing!

- [Coach] Good job guys, way to go.

All right, buddy.

(serene music) - Well thanks for watching another episode of "My Wisconsin Backyard."

We want to thank the Milwaukee Milkmen for having us out today.

- To see more of our short stories, you can check us out on Facebook and Instagram, or Milwaukee PBS.

Should we say goodbye?

- Yeah.

(serene music)