Retired school teacher is a long-time season ticket holder
By Jason Arndt
Editor
Retired schoolteacher Mark Gruber, of Burlington, almost didn’t attend Sunday’s Milwaukee Brewers game against the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Gruber, however, is glad he did after a tape-measure home run by Brewers’ Mike Moustakas won him a new Toyota RAV4, thanks to a Wisconsin Toyota Dealers promotion.
In the bottom of the eighth inning, with the score deadlocked 2-2, Moustakas’ blast reported by StatCast as a 419-foot shot struck the top of the RAV4 vehicle parked in Toyota Territory located in center field.
Moustakas’s home run, according to the Brewers, was the first time a ball struck the vehicle in its six-year promotion.
At the time, Gruber did not think anything of it, considering he wasn’t sure whether the ball actually made contact with the vehicle.
“I thought it was headed that way, but I lost track of it right at the end, so I wasn’t sure it was hit. Then I stopped thinking about it completely,” he said.
An inning later, an usher approached Gruber and his wife, Dawn, at their designated season seats.
Mark Gruber initially thought the usher was trying to boot him from the game.
“In the ninth inning, a Brewer employee was tapping me on the shoulder and asked to see my ticket stub,” he remembered.
“At first, I thought to myself, ‘What the heck is going on here? These are my season tickets, I have had these for years.’”
“Then he goes, you just won a car,” Gruber said.
He was selected among a sell-out crowd of more than 40,000 fans.
Gruber only expected to take home a Christian Yelich bobblehead, but not a new car.
“You never expect to win a car like that. I don’t know how to react to it. I certainly am happy and have been smiling a lot, but it hasn’t quite sunk in yet,” he said.
To read the full story pick up the June 13 edition of the Burlington Standard Press.
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