When a team is as good as the Brewers, don’t call it a fairy tale
By TYLER KEPNER / THE ATHLETIC
For decades and decades, the 1982 Brewers stood alone. They were Milwaukee’s best, the only team in franchise history to reach the World Series. They had regal Hall of Famers, sidekicks with bodies by Schlitz and a manager, Harvey Kuenn, with a wooden leg and a bulging cheek of tobacco. Folk heroes all.
“We adore our ’82 players,” Marti Wronski, the Milwaukee Brewers’ chief operating officer, said Thursday night. “We celebrate them whenever we can.”
Wronski was 10 years old that fall, watching with her father at home in Neenah, Wisconsin, near Oshkosh. Her favorite player, Robin Yount, did all he could in that World Series, hitting .414 to match the Milwaukee area code. When the St. Louis Cardinals won in seven games, the city still held a parade down Wisconsin Avenue. The Brewers had made them proud.
Nobody knew that the team would miss the playoffs for the next 25 seasons. In nearly half of those years, the Brewers finished last or next to last. The shadow of the ’82 Crew grew longer.
“I think it was a source of pride,” said Ryan Braun, the retired Brewers slugger. “We just wanted the current fans, the younger generation, to have their own team that they could get behind, right? We’d heard so much about that team, and we got close so many times.”
Braun was standing on the field at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, where this year’s Brewers had done what his teams couldn’t, what no team could since the days of Yount and Paul Molitor, of Don Sutton and Ted Simmons, of Pete Vuckovich and Pete Ladd. They had advanced to the World Series. “I couldn’t be more proud to say that I was a Milwaukee Brewer,” Braun said. “It’s a euphoric feeling, it really is.”
The Brewers won by turning a beast into a mouse, toying with it just for the illusion that it might have a chance to survive. In all four games of this National League Championship Series, the Brewers trailed the two-time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers, the dynasty with cash and cachet to spare. In all four games, they beat them anyway.
In Game 4, they spotted the Dodgers four runs. The Brewers’ starter lasted one inning and their first 10 hitters made outs. They ended up with a 6-4 victory and clubhouse Champagne, with a rather subdued on-field celebration in between.
A year ago, in this round and at this park, the Dodgers swept the Brewers. They didn’t go wild after the final out. That made an impression on last year’s losers.
“Watching the way they carried themselves on the field after sweeping us last year was a little bit eye-opening,” said first baseman Jake Bauers, the most valuable player of this NLCS with six runs batted in and a relentless approach at the plate.
“We won the DS against the Cubs, and I think we kind of celebrated like that was something,” he said about the 2025 season. “Those guys swept us, they sent us home, and you would have thought it was a handshake line at a spring training game. That’s something that I carried with me. That’s something that I remembered. It was a little bit of motivation to just say: ‘We’ve got to keep going until there’s not another game left to play.’”
The Brewers are off for seven days before hosting the World Series opener on Friday against the Tampa Bay Rays, who eliminated the Cleveland Guardians in six games. It will be a matchup of low payrolls on the eve of a labor standoff.
The league wants a salary cap to give small markets a chance. Yet the Brewers, who play in the sport’s smallest market, are doing just fine, thanks.
“We believe in ourselves,” said Christian Yelich, who has helped the team reach the playoffs in eight of his nine Milwaukee seasons. “We didn’t just, like, wake up and find ourselves here. We expected to be a team that was in this position and have this opportunity. We didn’t feel like this was unexpected or a special, cool, little story.”
Now it’s a special, cool, big story. Manager Pat Murphy said the series amounted to gamers over Hall of Famers. True enough, but in fairness, most of the Brewers are too young to be candidates for Cooperstown.
Only three Brewers who appeared in the NLCS — Yelich, Bauers and closer Trevor Megill — started the season in their 30s. Another reliever, JoJo Romero, turned 30 last month. He got the win twice in this series, part of a bullpen that has worked 40 2/3 of the team’s 71 innings in October, with a 1.33 ERA.
Megill, Romero, Aaron Ashby, DL Hall and Abner Uribe aren’t exactly old guys; none appeared in the majors before 2020. They just seem that way with the Brewers, who started Jacob Misiorowski, 24, and three rookies in the NLCS.
Meanwhile, the Brewers hit the fewest home runs in the NL this season: 154, or 50 fewer than the Dodgers. In the NLCS, though, Milwaukee slammed seven to Los Angeles’ one. The Brewers held Dodgers hitters to a .148 average (4 for 27) with runners in scoring position.
“They played flawless,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “They really did.”
Not exactly. The Brewers struck out 45 times in the series, made three errors, walked the bases loaded in Game 3 and got just 4 1/3 innings in the opener from Misiorowski, the presumptive NL Cy Young Award winner. None of it mattered. The Dodgers didn’t hit and their pitchers never solved the Brewers’ patient, calculated chaos. The Dodgers looked feeble and couldn’t even attract a capacity crowd. Meanwhile, two time zones away, Milwaukee fans cheered the scoreboard at their stadium.
“We had a watch party at the ballpark tonight, at the same time, so we had about 14,000 fans there and our staff kept calling me so I could listen,” Wronski said. “It was so loud there, you would have thought there was a live game in the ballpark.”
There will be on Friday, when Milwaukee resumes its pursuit of a title. Don’t call it a fairy tale, not when a team has won 110 times since opening day. Call it a chance to prove, at last, that the Brewers can — and should — win it all.
“I don’t think about proving anything to anybody,” said Matt Arnold, the Brewers’ president of baseball operations. “We just try to be the best version of ourselves every single day. This group is really special, and I don’t say that lightly. I’ve been in this for 26 years, and there are a lot of different ways to make this work. It’s just a really fun group that really cares and goes in the same direction.”
It’s a direction no Brewers team has taken in 44 years, a path blazed by new folk heroes. Next stop: the World Series.
