The chances you’ll need to scramble for Brewers playoff tickets this year are about as slim as the chance you’ll need to find tickets to Bob Donovan’s inauguration as mayor. However, the Crew doesn’t actually need to qualify for the postseason in order for you to get your hands on some (functionally worthless) Brewers playoff tickets. With such a narrow window between the end of the season and the start of the playoffs, teams that enter the final weeks of play with any mathematical shot at a title are required to print postseason ticket sheets.
As teams are eliminated, these “phantom tickets” are either destroyed or given away as souvenirs. Of course, many make their way to the secondary market. For such odd and relatively rare items, they are surprisingly affordable. After all, most fans don’t want to commemorate a season in which their team contended but fell short. But for Brewers fans, with but a handful of playoff trips in franchise history, even these near misses deserve a little celebration. After a quick scouring of eBay, I found a handful of seasons in which the Brewers stayed alive late enough to require a postseason ticket run. So, let’s take a look at some of these seasons and gander at the tickets to Brewers World Series that might have been, but never were.
1983. Final record 87-75, 5th place, 11 games out of first.
The Season: The 1983 Brewers were a frustrating bunch. The odds-on favorites to repeat as AL Champs, the team struggled out of the gate and were still under .500 as late as the end of June. They took off in July and August, running up a 40-21 record that briefly put them in first place. But things were crowded at the top, with the Orioles, Yankees, and Tigers all fighting with the Brewers for the division crown. A ten game losing streak in September made the playoffs impossible in all but the strictest mathematical sense. They were officially eliminated after the 150th game of the season. Manager Harvey Kuenn was fired a week and a half later.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Fun with numbers: After crushing 216 homers as a team in 1982, the ’83 squad hit just 132.
The Ticket: A clean and classic look, had the Brewers survived, it would have been valid for a battle with a solid but flawed Phillies team that was only 4 games better than the Brewers. It would have been a good matchup and, had the streaky Brewers been able to survive the AL West champion White Sox, they would have had a fair shot the wheeze-kid Phillies.
1988. 87-75, tied for 3rd place, 2 games out of first.
The Season: A near-miss that everyone forgets, the 1988 Brewers were at 67-67 on August 29 before winning 16 of their next 21 games to suddenly come to life in the sluggish AL East. Still alive with three games left to play, they dropped two of three in Oakland to juggernaut A’s while the first place Red Sox limped to a division crown. Although the 1987 team is far more often memorialized, that bunch fell out of contention in May despite a 17-1 start to the season.
Fun with numbers: 25-year-old pitcher Chris Bosio had a breakout year, running up a 3.36 ERA over 182 innings. He also had one of the weirdest final stat lines for a Brewers pitcher ever: he had more complete games (9) than wins (7) and also tallied six saves.
The Ticket: Kind of a blasé mess and under-whelming for a World Series ticket. They would have played the Dodgers, who probably would have destroyed them.
1992. 92-70, 2nd place, 4 games out of first.
The Season: The Brewers were baseball’s surprise team in 1992, riding a 20-7 September into a sudden pennant race with the eventual world champion Toronto Blue Jays. Unfortunately, the Jays were just as hot on the home stretch. On October 1, the Brewers were just two games out with four to play, but finished 2-2 while Toronto won out. Had the three division format existed, the Brewers would have won the Central Division. 1992 seemed like just the start, with rookie manager Phil Garner leading the way and Pat Listach, Jamie Navarro, and Cal Eldred looking like the next wave of Brewers superstars. Sadly, it would be the team’s last winning season for fifteen years.
Fun with numbers: The ’92 Brewers had only two players with double-digit home run totals, but featured 11 with ten or more stolen bases and led the AL with 256 swipes. They also led the league with 115 times caught stealing.
The Ticket: A Beauty! The use of the 3D globes is a nice touch, matching with the revamped World Series logo. The Brewers would have taken on Atlanta, making the Braves the visiting team in the park they called home for the 1957 Series. And as someone who was ten years old in 1992, I have no doubt the Brewers would have won the series on a Game 5 walk-off homer by Darryl Hamilton that I would have caught in the bleachers. Then the entire team would have come to my birthday party and given me a World Series ring. Yeah…
|
|
1997. 78-83, 3rd place, 8 games out of first.
The season: Easily the weakest team on the list, the 1997 Brewers actually spent 28 days in first place (the ’92 team spent zero), but never got more than a few games above .500. A semi-hot streak in late August put them as close as 2.5 games to the front-running (and eventual AL champion) Cleveland Indians, but they quickly slid under .500 and never recovered. Like the 1983 ticket, this one exists only out of pure mathematical necessity, although the Brewers were not technically eliminated until the last week of the season.
Fun with numbers: In 1997, outfielder Gerald Williams had the most playing time of any player on the team and posted a .282 on base percentage with a .369 slugging percentage.
The Ticket: Holy ESPN2! This is an absolute mess of a ticket – a kind of grunge-inspired, Fresh Princeish, MTV Newsey, snowboarding, type thing. They might as well have printed them on a hacky sack. The Brewers would have played the equally in-the-moment (but very talented) Florida Marlins. I have run 2,000 computer simulations of this matchup and every one has Gerald Williams popping out to the first basemen in foul territory to end the four-game sweep.
