Brewers Video
Eventually, if you win enough divisions and get enough bites of the apple, the scrape of your teeth against the skin of the fruit becomes maddening. You get greedy. Just once, you want a chance to take the thing in hand, sit beneath a tree, and eat it at your leisure, in full. You don’t just want the summer of entertainment and passion; you want the unhurried pleasure of an autumn harvest and the untrammeled joy of a winter without ‘what-if’. The ethos of 21st-century American sport is that success is measured in championships, and that regular-season wins are just steps on a long ladder to the rooftop arena where the real battle takes place.
The Brewers didn’t win their rooftop battle this year. They weren’t quite able to eat the whole apple. They will have some hunger in their bellies this winter, as they’ve had in all 55 previous winters of the franchise’s residence in Milwaukee. They peaked in the summer, although they were able to extend their campaign and its parade of wonders a bit deeper into the fall this time.
All year—but specifically and especially after the debut of Jacob Misiorowski in mid-June and the arrivals of Andrew Vaughn and Brandon Woodruff in early July—the Brewers’ specific form of excellence lay in the fact that they were more likely to play at a level near their best than any other team was, on any given day. In the NLCS, the Dodgers simply showed up with four of their very best games of the year, and the Dodgers’ best is better even than the Brewers’. Los Angeles was built to win this series, and the next one. The Brewers were built to have a chance to win them, but more importantly, to get this far in the first place.
Our prevailing sports culture values the Dodgers’ construction and their timing much more highly than the Brewers’. If we’re honest about it, though, one thing isn’t inherently better than the other. In fact, you can make a strong case that the day-to-day brilliance of the Pat Murphy Brewers somehow suits the everyday game better than the Dodgers’ showcase-circuit act—that what they achieved this year was more important and more compelling than what the Dodgers achieved this week.
That won’t convince many of you, though, because the Brewers have had enough of those great summers and frustrating falls. The team and its fans crave the external validation that comes with the pennant, and then with the World Series championship. That’s not irrational or ignoble, even if there’s a certain, undeniable virtue in the kind of greatness the Crew carved out this year. It’s just nature at work. We want what eludes us. The closer we come to it, the more it hurts not to have taken hold.
Therefore, let’s linger a moment with this wonderful team, even as we mourn their inability to complete the mission for another year. Let’s celebrate their near-perfection by savoring the last time they approximated it—the collision of the sublime and the ridiculous that gave this team its last glimpse of a chance to win it all, because in that instant, there turned out to be something better than perfect.
The bases were loaded in the top of the fourth inning. They didn’t have a lead yet, in the series or even in the game; it was 0-0. Quinn Priester was undeniably in trouble, though. The only out in the frame had been a great catch by Isaac Collins going back on a Freddie Freeman drive, and now the lethal lefty slugger Max Muncy stood in the box, threatening to put two or three runs on the board at once.
Or four, even. Muncy drove the ball to dead center field, a high-arcing, thunderous strike. Sal Frelick raced back on the ball and got himself flat enough to the wall to move slightly along it as he measure the ball, but he had to go up quickly and he jarred his body against the barrier a bit as he jumped. He met the ball just above the wall, but the contact with it led the pill to ricochet out of his glove and off the top of the wall. Coming down as the ball drooped lazily toward the ground, though, Frelick seized it sure-handedly. He didn’t bobble, or hesitate. He fired the ball, quickly and accurately, to Joey Ortiz, the cutoff man in shallow center.
Ortiz knew just what to do with the throw, and even if he hadn’t, Brice Turang was shouting it at him. He fired home—another strike, hard and right on the money. William Contreras was waiting there, and not waiting like a catcher who needed to leave a lane for the runner but get a tag down quickly. He, too, had immediately clocked what happened, and he took the peg as much like a first baseman as is possible, under those circumstances. Then, with only a moment’s pause, he started jogging up the line toward third base, where he stepped on the pillow.
Somehow, that was an inning-ending double play. Somehow, after the ball left Muncy’s bat and the possible results of the play were plainly that one, three, or four runs would score, zero did. The Dodgers had been confused, just long enough. The Brewers’ key personnel weren’t, at all. They all knew what was going on. They all made the right play, the right way, and a little rip in the fabric of the game allowed them to cheat death. The game went on, still 0-0.
That’s the best place, as it turned out, that we could have left this Crew. Will they be remembered as champions? Sadly, no. On seemingly countless days throughout the summer, though, they were just that. For two solid months, they were the best baseball team I’ve ever seen; they just had that stretch too early for ESPN-pilled fans to fully appreciate it. They were, at times, even better than perfect. They were clutch; they were unusual; they were extremely deep and talented.
They didn’t win it all, but they won a bunch of things that mattered a lot. After the Cubs led by five games as late as mid-June, Milwaukee won their third straight division title by that same margin. After Chicago forced a Game 5 in the NLDS, the Brewers gave final proof of their superiority by winning it. This team was special, and perhaps their signature play was that one: wild, dangerous, a bit imperfect, but wonderful. A bit farcical. Not all about the final out. Better than that.
“What’s that word? ‘Farcical’?” Murphy said one Sunday in June, after a writer observed that Jake Bauers’s farcical frame to finish off a blowout win Friday night in Minneapolis had kept the bullpen fresh enough to complete the sweep over the following two days. “I like that. I’m gonna use that.”
Maybe we all should. Baseball is often farcical. It certainly was on that play in Game 1. Such a farcical endeavor can’t be measured only by who’s still standing come Halloween. It has to be about who endured adversity until Memorial Day, played like gods from Flag Day past the Fourth of July, and survived the comedown after Labor Day to keep winning at least partway through October. It has to be about teams like the 2025 Brewers, and even if they won’t get a Commissioner’s Trophy by which to remember it, no one should forget this team’s halcyon days.