IT’S 5.30 ON a Friday morning and I don’t know how to feel. Tired, for sure. For the past 10 days or so, I’ve been waking up at ridiculous o’clock. Even for a morning person like me, it’s starting to take effect.
But it’s not because I can’t sleep. And I haven’t adopted the Mark Wahlberg 3am gym bro session plan. No, the reason for my self-inflicted tiredness is that over 30 years ago, I decided to dedicate my fandom to a baseball team who reside in the smallest market in the United States, Milwaukee, Wisconsin: the Milwaukee Brewers. And they have just punched their ticket to the World Series for the first time in 44 years.
For those not familiar with the Brewers, they’re a feel-good story. The smallest city with a professional baseball team, they moved to Milwaukee from Seattle in 1969, and since then, sadly have seen more losing seasons than winning ones. They’re named the Brewers because of Milwaukee’s famous beer brewing history. If you’ve ever had a Miller, a Pabst, a Schlitz or a Blatz – or an Icehouse (if you know, you know) – then you know Milwaukee is synonymous with brewing, even giving the city a kind of hoppy smell that only locals can love. But now it was trying to be known for baseball, becoming the first professional franchise in the city at that time, and the locals loved them.
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Throughout the 70s, the Brewers kinda sucked. This was before my time, so I can’t speak to the level of pain that fans went through, but let’s say that even though the new home team didn’t give a ton of good baseball for fans to root for, the fans still showed up for them.
Fast-forward to the early 80s, and the team had turned a corner. Thanks to two homegrown players who would become legends and Hall of Famers in Robin Yount (the Brewers GOAT) and Paul Molitor, along with veterans like Rollie Fingers (Google his moustache, it’s phenomenal), and a charismatic manager named Harvey Kuehn, the team made it to the promised land of the World Series for the first time in its history.
The team known as Harvey’s Wallbangers came within one game of winning it all, only to lose to the St Louis Cardinals. But the team was young, hungry and there was hope with fans that this wouldn’t be the last time they got a chance at baseball immortality.
- A win for the little guys -
Now it’s more than four decades later, and needless to say, it hasn’t gone so hot. For most of that time, the Brewers have been best known for their stadium, and for the fact that legendary announcer Bob Uecker was the voice of the hit movie Major League, so you know it hasn’t gone great on the field.
Injuries, bad drafting, and being the smallest market in a sport with no salary cap kept the Brewers perpetually down. Baseball is a bit like the Premier League; sure there are some rules around how money comes in (don’t tell Manchester City that), but broadly speaking, there is no limit on the contract value you can give to players. Big markets with big TV deals and big sponsors, like the New York Yankees or LA Dodgers or Chicago Cubs, are always going to have an advantage over the minnows like Milwaukee who can’t bring in the same revenues.
Teams in smaller cities like the Brewers, Rays, Twins or Reds always tried to keep up with the big boys. They threw money at players, knowing that if it didn’t work, it would set back the franchise years, and yet felt they had no other choice but to embrace this flawed model for the rest of the 80s and 90s. The Brewers were the Brighton or the Burnley of their time, always scrappy and trying but destined to the bottom of the table when competing with the big money teams.
Then teams got smart.
The Oakland As – as seen in the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt – showed just what was possible for a small-market team. The As and others like them started to wise up and build from the draft, investing in coaching and building teams with young talent from the ground up, finding needles in haystacks through analytics and data-inspired recruiting and scouting. It’s not dissimilar to Arsenal’s approach in the early 2000s: get them young for cheap, grow them, and sell them at their peak, giving small-market teams a model to work with, provided they had the right people and the right knowledge, ownership, coaching and players to do it.
The Brewers jumped on this trend in the 2000s, and after nearly two decades of living in a version of baseball Mordor, finally started to turn a corner and win some games with some exciting young talent. After years of wondering, “Where is our Derek Jeter, or Ken Griffey Jr, or Barry Bonds?” we now had players like Prince Fielder, Ryan Braun or Ben Sheets, who were homegrown legitimate stars, giving us something to root for and enjoy.
And in 2008, it finally happened. Twenty-six years on from that 1982 World Series, we were back in the playoffs for the first time thanks in part to a huge trade for a stud pitcher named CC Sabathia, riding to the playoffs on his back (not literally, but it’s not far off how good he was).
- Belonging -
And this is where my story as a fan requires me to parachute back in. I first adopted the Brewers back in 1992 when I moved to Wisconsin from Oregon, where we didn’t have a baseball team. I was 12. Baseball was my sport, and baseball is what connected me to my new home in West Bend, Wisconsin, about 25 minutes north of Milwaukee, the way I made friends and found a place in this land far from Oregon.
The first Brewers game I attended live was on 8 September 1992 against the Cleveland Indians. I remember this because it was the game before Robin Yount (remember, the GOAT!) got his 3,000th hit, a baseball milestone reserved for only the elite of the elite of the sport. My friend’s dad got tickets but alas, we missed the historic moment by one game (Yount hit 3,000 the next day).
But I was hooked.
Milwaukee County Stadium at the time was the home, and it was as derelict as it gets, but we loved it and fans showed up regardless of the outcome. I still have the ticket stub to this game. I was a fan for life.
The 16-year wait to see the Brewers finally back in the postseason involved hundreds of games in person, thousands of games I watched or listened to, and tens of thousands of conversations about the Brewers with friends and colleagues, mostly about how shit the team was, and why we kept bothering to watch anyway. It was a common bond we had; the Brewers were a small, bad team, but they were OUR small and bad team.
From the time we could drive, I spent most of my late teenage summers at Miller Park, the new state-of-the-art stadium which opened in 2000, tailgating with friends before games. Tailgating is unique to American sport but especially in the Midwest, where I’m pretty sure we invented it: basically it’s an excuse to drive your car to the stadium, park with thousands of others, break out a portable grill and cooler full of beer, and have the biggest party on concrete with other like-minded fans up to three hours before a game. When you combine the fact that a baseball game itself can take about 3 hours, you’re spending the guts of 6 hours a day with friends and baseball! But it was glorious, especially as young fans, as these games were used as an excuse to be together and create memories that still last today, regardless of the outcome on the day.
- Sleepless nights -
I moved to Ireland in 2007, just ahead of the 2008 adventure into the uncharted territory of the playoffs. The Brewers had a chance to go to the World Series, and I was living 4,000 miles away. Of course, it was my fault they were crap for all those years.
At the time, it was hard to find baseball in Ireland; you had to buy the MLB package to watch games as there was no way in hell Sky or Setanta at the time would buy rights for a game. I managed to find the feeds and see the games, and even forced some of my friends from my rugby team to watch the first game. They had no idea what was happening, but we made a ton of food as part of our own ‘tailgate’ that got everyone through the night. The start of a tradition of sleepless October nights watching playoff baseball at odd hours, hoping things would be different, was born in Dublin.
Unfortunately the Brewers fell to the Phillies that year, but hope had finally found its way to a small Midwest city fan base, and for the next 18 years, the team has been pretty damn good: good drafting, good coaching, good ownership, smart management, and exciting young prospects became the norm, and little old Milwaukee has been one of the most successful franchises in terms of wins in the past decade or so. Hell, we even beat the Cubs and Cardinals regularly, which for any Brewers fan is enough itself to make be the highlight of most years.
Trades for players like Christian Yelich in 2018 gave us a bona fide superstar who won a Most Valuable Player award, and nearly a second one, and pitchers like Josh Hader and Corbin Burnes would win the Cy Young Award for the best pitcher in baseball, giving us even more clout and success with the horses to start winning championships.
But even through those good days, the World Series was always just out of reach, and with it, the elusive hope and joy that you can convince yourself you’re owed and promised as a dedicated fan.
And when you have hope, and it keeps letting you down, this can turn to pain.
And for the past few years, after many playoff appearances where many early-morning alarm clocks have forced my eyes open to stumble downstairs and quietly watch my team in the hope that this year would be different, I started to question if it would ever happen.
- The road to Valhalla -
I did the maths. From my first game in 1992 to now, the Brewers have played over 5,500 games, not including the playoffs. Thanks to a ridiculous 162-game season schedule, that’s a lot of games in which you’re riding the fan wave of emotion, especially when the overarching payoff is to experience the World Series, baseball Valhalla, the pinnacle for any kid who grew up playing, watching, and loving this sport.
You do start to question if it will ever happen. When teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers can pay one player more than you pay your entire team, you start to remind yourself that it’s unfair. Only five teams in the history of baseball have never won a World Series, and the Brewers are one of them, so will it ever happen? And why did I have to move to a state to root for a team who is constantly the bridesmaid and never the bride in a game where the rich get richer and Milwaukee stays the same? What’s the point?
Which brings us back to the present: last Friday, 16 October, after 5am and before the sun was up, alone downstairs before anyone else in the house was awake, before I looked at my phone knowing the results would already be being discussed by friends and family back home in our WhatsApp group chats, I watched the Brewers do the impossible: not only beat Goliath, the two-time defending champion Dodgers, but sweep them 4-0.
In Los Angeles.
To go to the World Series for the first time since 1982.
And it was worth it.
- Going home -
Now, thanks to an incredible understanding wife and those same friends who through my teenage, college and adult years have stayed connected through the Brewers, we’re all going back to Milwaukee to be there for this moment. Me, flying 4,000 miles just to be in the same city as my team with my friends.
We don’t have tickets. Hell, the tickets are going for more than a Super Bowl ticket at the moment, but that’s OK. I’ll be there for at least five games to see them take the Tampa Bay Rays, another team who hasn’t won the World Series before. I don’t know where we’ll watch it, or if we’ll score a ticket, or if I might end up pulling the trigger on flights to Tampa to travel there to a game, or just watch it with my friends in their living room. It’s all unknown, which makes total sense considering this is unknown territory for the Brewers as well.
The smallest market team who never win anything is now knocking on the door of history, and I need to be there to see if I can squeeze out one more ‘worth it’ feeling from this team this year.
Milwaukee, here I come! After 44 years of hurt, my baseball team is back in the World Series – and I'm going home
IT’S 5.30 ON a Friday morning and I don’t know how to feel. Tired, for sure. For the past 10 days or so, I’ve been waking up at ridiculous o’clock. Even for a morning person like me, it’s starting to take effect.
But it’s not because I can’t sleep. And I haven’t adopted the Mark Wahlberg 3am gym bro session plan. No, the reason for my self-inflicted tiredness is that over 30 years ago, I decided to dedicate my fandom to a baseball team who reside in the smallest market in the United States, Milwaukee, Wisconsin: the Milwaukee Brewers. And they have just punched their ticket to the World Series for the first time in 44 years.
For those not familiar with the Brewers, they’re a feel-good story. The smallest city with a professional baseball team, they moved to Milwaukee from Seattle in 1969, and since then, sadly have seen more losing seasons than winning ones. They’re named the Brewers because of Milwaukee’s famous beer brewing history. If you’ve ever had a Miller, a Pabst, a Schlitz or a Blatz – or an Icehouse (if you know, you know) – then you know Milwaukee is synonymous with brewing, even giving the city a kind of hoppy smell that only locals can love. But now it was trying to be known for baseball, becoming the first professional franchise in the city at that time, and the locals loved them.
Throughout the 70s, the Brewers kinda sucked. This was before my time, so I can’t speak to the level of pain that fans went through, but let’s say that even though the new home team didn’t give a ton of good baseball for fans to root for, the fans still showed up for them.
Fast-forward to the early 80s, and the team had turned a corner. Thanks to two homegrown players who would become legends and Hall of Famers in Robin Yount (the Brewers GOAT) and Paul Molitor, along with veterans like Rollie Fingers (Google his moustache, it’s phenomenal), and a charismatic manager named Harvey Kuehn, the team made it to the promised land of the World Series for the first time in its history.
The team known as Harvey’s Wallbangers came within one game of winning it all, only to lose to the St Louis Cardinals. But the team was young, hungry and there was hope with fans that this wouldn’t be the last time they got a chance at baseball immortality.
- A win for the little guys -
Now it’s more than four decades later, and needless to say, it hasn’t gone so hot. For most of that time, the Brewers have been best known for their stadium, and for the fact that legendary announcer Bob Uecker was the voice of the hit movie Major League, so you know it hasn’t gone great on the field.
Injuries, bad drafting, and being the smallest market in a sport with no salary cap kept the Brewers perpetually down. Baseball is a bit like the Premier League; sure there are some rules around how money comes in (don’t tell Manchester City that), but broadly speaking, there is no limit on the contract value you can give to players. Big markets with big TV deals and big sponsors, like the New York Yankees or LA Dodgers or Chicago Cubs, are always going to have an advantage over the minnows like Milwaukee who can’t bring in the same revenues.
Teams in smaller cities like the Brewers, Rays, Twins or Reds always tried to keep up with the big boys. They threw money at players, knowing that if it didn’t work, it would set back the franchise years, and yet felt they had no other choice but to embrace this flawed model for the rest of the 80s and 90s. The Brewers were the Brighton or the Burnley of their time, always scrappy and trying but destined to the bottom of the table when competing with the big money teams.
Then teams got smart.
The Oakland As – as seen in the movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt – showed just what was possible for a small-market team. The As and others like them started to wise up and build from the draft, investing in coaching and building teams with young talent from the ground up, finding needles in haystacks through analytics and data-inspired recruiting and scouting. It’s not dissimilar to Arsenal’s approach in the early 2000s: get them young for cheap, grow them, and sell them at their peak, giving small-market teams a model to work with, provided they had the right people and the right knowledge, ownership, coaching and players to do it.
The Brewers jumped on this trend in the 2000s, and after nearly two decades of living in a version of baseball Mordor, finally started to turn a corner and win some games with some exciting young talent. After years of wondering, “Where is our Derek Jeter, or Ken Griffey Jr, or Barry Bonds?” we now had players like Prince Fielder, Ryan Braun or Ben Sheets, who were homegrown legitimate stars, giving us something to root for and enjoy.
And in 2008, it finally happened. Twenty-six years on from that 1982 World Series, we were back in the playoffs for the first time thanks in part to a huge trade for a stud pitcher named CC Sabathia, riding to the playoffs on his back (not literally, but it’s not far off how good he was).
- Belonging -
And this is where my story as a fan requires me to parachute back in. I first adopted the Brewers back in 1992 when I moved to Wisconsin from Oregon, where we didn’t have a baseball team. I was 12. Baseball was my sport, and baseball is what connected me to my new home in West Bend, Wisconsin, about 25 minutes north of Milwaukee, the way I made friends and found a place in this land far from Oregon.
The first Brewers game I attended live was on 8 September 1992 against the Cleveland Indians. I remember this because it was the game before Robin Yount (remember, the GOAT!) got his 3,000th hit, a baseball milestone reserved for only the elite of the elite of the sport. My friend’s dad got tickets but alas, we missed the historic moment by one game (Yount hit 3,000 the next day).
But I was hooked.
Milwaukee County Stadium at the time was the home, and it was as derelict as it gets, but we loved it and fans showed up regardless of the outcome. I still have the ticket stub to this game. I was a fan for life.
The 16-year wait to see the Brewers finally back in the postseason involved hundreds of games in person, thousands of games I watched or listened to, and tens of thousands of conversations about the Brewers with friends and colleagues, mostly about how shit the team was, and why we kept bothering to watch anyway. It was a common bond we had; the Brewers were a small, bad team, but they were OUR small and bad team.
From the time we could drive, I spent most of my late teenage summers at Miller Park, the new state-of-the-art stadium which opened in 2000, tailgating with friends before games. Tailgating is unique to American sport but especially in the Midwest, where I’m pretty sure we invented it: basically it’s an excuse to drive your car to the stadium, park with thousands of others, break out a portable grill and cooler full of beer, and have the biggest party on concrete with other like-minded fans up to three hours before a game. When you combine the fact that a baseball game itself can take about 3 hours, you’re spending the guts of 6 hours a day with friends and baseball! But it was glorious, especially as young fans, as these games were used as an excuse to be together and create memories that still last today, regardless of the outcome on the day.
- Sleepless nights -
I moved to Ireland in 2007, just ahead of the 2008 adventure into the uncharted territory of the playoffs. The Brewers had a chance to go to the World Series, and I was living 4,000 miles away. Of course, it was my fault they were crap for all those years.
At the time, it was hard to find baseball in Ireland; you had to buy the MLB package to watch games as there was no way in hell Sky or Setanta at the time would buy rights for a game. I managed to find the feeds and see the games, and even forced some of my friends from my rugby team to watch the first game. They had no idea what was happening, but we made a ton of food as part of our own ‘tailgate’ that got everyone through the night. The start of a tradition of sleepless October nights watching playoff baseball at odd hours, hoping things would be different, was born in Dublin.
Unfortunately the Brewers fell to the Phillies that year, but hope had finally found its way to a small Midwest city fan base, and for the next 18 years, the team has been pretty damn good: good drafting, good coaching, good ownership, smart management, and exciting young prospects became the norm, and little old Milwaukee has been one of the most successful franchises in terms of wins in the past decade or so. Hell, we even beat the Cubs and Cardinals regularly, which for any Brewers fan is enough itself to make be the highlight of most years.
Trades for players like Christian Yelich in 2018 gave us a bona fide superstar who won a Most Valuable Player award, and nearly a second one, and pitchers like Josh Hader and Corbin Burnes would win the Cy Young Award for the best pitcher in baseball, giving us even more clout and success with the horses to start winning championships.
But even through those good days, the World Series was always just out of reach, and with it, the elusive hope and joy that you can convince yourself you’re owed and promised as a dedicated fan.
And when you have hope, and it keeps letting you down, this can turn to pain.
And for the past few years, after many playoff appearances where many early-morning alarm clocks have forced my eyes open to stumble downstairs and quietly watch my team in the hope that this year would be different, I started to question if it would ever happen.
- The road to Valhalla -
I did the maths. From my first game in 1992 to now, the Brewers have played over 5,500 games, not including the playoffs. Thanks to a ridiculous 162-game season schedule, that’s a lot of games in which you’re riding the fan wave of emotion, especially when the overarching payoff is to experience the World Series, baseball Valhalla, the pinnacle for any kid who grew up playing, watching, and loving this sport.
You do start to question if it will ever happen. When teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers can pay one player more than you pay your entire team, you start to remind yourself that it’s unfair. Only five teams in the history of baseball have never won a World Series, and the Brewers are one of them, so will it ever happen? And why did I have to move to a state to root for a team who is constantly the bridesmaid and never the bride in a game where the rich get richer and Milwaukee stays the same? What’s the point?
Which brings us back to the present: last Friday, 16 October, after 5am and before the sun was up, alone downstairs before anyone else in the house was awake, before I looked at my phone knowing the results would already be being discussed by friends and family back home in our WhatsApp group chats, I watched the Brewers do the impossible: not only beat Goliath, the two-time defending champion Dodgers, but sweep them 4-0.
In Los Angeles.
To go to the World Series for the first time since 1982.
And it was worth it.
- Going home -
Now, thanks to an incredible understanding wife and those same friends who through my teenage, college and adult years have stayed connected through the Brewers, we’re all going back to Milwaukee to be there for this moment. Me, flying 4,000 miles just to be in the same city as my team with my friends.
We don’t have tickets. Hell, the tickets are going for more than a Super Bowl ticket at the moment, but that’s OK. I’ll be there for at least five games to see them take the Tampa Bay Rays, another team who hasn’t won the World Series before. I don’t know where we’ll watch it, or if we’ll score a ticket, or if I might end up pulling the trigger on flights to Tampa to travel there to a game, or just watch it with my friends in their living room. It’s all unknown, which makes total sense considering this is unknown territory for the Brewers as well.
The smallest market team who never win anything is now knocking on the door of history, and I need to be there to see if I can squeeze out one more ‘worth it’ feeling from this team this year.
Baseball Milwaukee Milwaukee Brewers MLB Wisconsin World Series World Series Diary