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Milwaukee Brewers
Sunday was the 42nd anniversary of one of the greatest defeats in Brewers’ franchise history, a loss that in many ways the organization has never fully recovered from.
The 1982 Brewers took a 3-2 World Series lead into St. Louis, needing just one more victory to clinch the franchise’s first championship. They had blown out the Cardinals in Game 1 and retaken the series lead with a pair of nail biters in Milwaukee, coming from behind to win Game 4 and holding on through a late Cardinals surge to take Game 5.
Most Brewers fans are, of course, well aware of what happened next. The Cardinals returned the favor for the Game 1 blowout with a 13-1 win in Game 6, then came back from a 3-1 deficit to break Milwaukee’s hearts with a 6-3 win in Game 7.
Legendary Team
Despite the way their season ended, the 1982 Brewers remain one of the legendary teams in Milwaukee sports history. Fans lined Wisconsin Avenue to honor the American League pennant winners in an impromptu parade. For some, the outcome of that series was an upset. The bigger upset is, perhaps, the fact that more than four decades later the Crew has never had a chance to avenge that loss. The organization and its fans have certainly gotten plenty of mileage out of memories of 1982 (there was even a new movie about it this year), but they’ve never been back.
The Brewers have been closer to a championship caliber team recently, of course, and there might be some level to which Brewers fans are getting spoiled by the team’s recent success. Fans who followed the team in the 90’s or early 2000’s, for example, likely would have happily traded the team they were watching for one that would play postseason games in six out of seven years. In all but one of those occasions they were dismissed early, however, raising a question about whether the sport’s other top contenders are doing something they’re not.
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Every year’s World Series champions generate some kind of narrative about how to succeed in the modern game, and no matter who wins this year one of the strategies will be somewhat obvious: The Yankees and Dodgers combined to spend about $500 million on player payroll this season, outspending their rivals in a way most MLB teams will never consider.
Pennant Winners
This season’s pair of pennant winners, however, have something else in common: Last offseason both teams were already clear favorites to reach the postseason, but they kept adding on. In December the Dodgers went out on the trade market and acquired one of the best available starting pitchers, former Rays ace Tyler Glasnow. Glasnow is injured and hasn’t pitched this postseason, but he was an All Star and a big part of the Dodgers’ success before that. The Yankees made an even bigger splash, acquiring Juan Soto in a seven-player deal. Soto had an excellent season in a contract year in New York and followed it with an even hotter postseason, as his game-winning home run in Game 5 of the ALCS was his third in the series.
The Brewers have achieved one of the stated goals they laid out early in the David Stearns era, sustaining a competitive window that cracked open for the first time with an 86-win team in 2017 and has remained open for most of a decade since. They’ve exceeded expectations several times during that run, winning divisions and hosting playoff games. On paper they could be the favorites to win the Central again in 2025. Being a favorite to return to the World Series, however, will require them to do more than just keep the window propped open.
Of course, not every World Series winner entered the season as a favorite. The narrative was entirely different last fall when the Diamondbacks and Rangers, two teams who only narrowly qualified for the postseason, played for a championship. Sometimes “a chip and a chair” is all teams need to stay in contention. For the Brewers, however, those annual bites at the apple have yet to end with an actual mouthful.
The Brewers dramatically exceeded nearly everyone’s expectations in 2024, winning the NL Central in a year where most predicted they would take a step back. Instead, they brought postseason baseball back to Milwaukee. To take another step forward and be a favorite to contend in 2025, however, might require them to push past simply being “good enough” to play in October.
