The Milwaukee Brewers are deadly serious about their baseball this season.

Finishing with the best record in MLB, they’re hoping that this will be the year they can finally win a World Series as their playoff campaign begins on Saturday. But this is a franchise that doesn’t always take itself too seriously, and a run to the Fall Classic would help showcase one of the most wonderfully ridiculous servings in sport: The slapstick sixth-inning sausage race.

It’s exactly as absurd as it sounds. Human runners, wearing 7-foot-tall foam costumes with goofy faces and colorful features depicting a Bratwurst, Polish, Italian, Hot Dog and Chorizo, race each other around home plate on the warning track. The comedically top-heavy sausages, which can easily topple forwards into the dirt, temporarily take center stage as the baseball players gaze on in amusement from their dugouts, sometimes wagering on the outcome.

Chorizo leads a sausage race in 2022. Joe Robbins/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

But from the very first race in the summer of 1993, these sausages have sizzled and arguably helped to modernize the most traditional American pastime.

“I think the things that become iconic and popular are things that the fans adopt, as opposed to something forced on them,” Brewers’ President of Business Operations Rick Schlesinger explained to CNN Sports. “This was a perfect example of something innocent, a little silly, whimsical, but, you know, quintessentially Wisconsin.”

Dating back to the 1800s, the state of Wisconsin was a popular destination for European immigrants, and they brought their love of meat and beer with them.