Brewers and Mariners: A Tale of Two Championship Losers

With the Seattle Mariners losing last night in heart-breaking fashion, fans are denied the coveted Brewers-Mariners battle between two teams who’ve never won a World Series. That perfect pairing will have to wait. I was fourteen when the Brewers last made the World Series, and I’m prepared to keep waiting. I’m just running out of time!

The ALCS and NLCS couldn’t have been more different: the former was a 7-game, back and forth affair between two teams playing at a high level, with alternating stellar pitching and offensive punch; the NLCS was a 4-game snoozefest, with the Brewers breaking records for the worst batting average and OPS in playoff history for a series of more than 3 games. They scored a whopping four runs in four games. Only game 4 provided fans with an indelible memory, as the world’s greatest player had arguably the greatest playoff game in history.

I didn’t see it.

I was traveling in New York, and when I peaked at my phone and saw that the Crew was already down 4-0, I decided to go to bed, prepared to wake up to the realization that Milwaukee’s season was over.

The next day my mom and I drove two and a half hours to Cooperstown to see the Baseball Hall of Fame, one of my favorite places on the planet. When I handed the attendant my tickets, he noticed the Brewers hat on my head and commented, “Man, how about Ohtani?” I sheepishly admitted I hadn’t watched the game. “Three home runs! And 6 innings pitched with 10 strikeouts.”

Wow!

I’m glad I missed it. I’m reminded of a Brewers-Twins matchup I attended in Minneapolis in 1994, when Twins pitcher Scott Erickson cruised through 8 2/3rds innings of no-hit ball. I found myself surrounded by Brewers fans who were actually cheering for the guy to finish the job. Hell no! Greg Vaughn was at the plate and I was praying – PRAYING – for a home run to not only ruin the no-hitter, but to kill the shutout and complete game as well. I didn’t get my wish, and I was pissed. I don’t mind watching history, as long as it’s not against my team.

Anyhow, all of this begs the question: is it better to lose a hard-fought battle in heartbreaking fashion like Seattle, or to lose in such an anemic fashion like Milwaukee? I mentioned a few weeks ago that I’ve been to two deciding playoff games in which the Brewers lost. It wasn’t fun, but at least the series provided moments of joy. This year’s NLCS against the Dodgers provided nothing for Brewers fans to hang their hats on. It wasn’t any fun. To go from winning a deciding game against the Cubs on Saturday to being eliminated by the following Friday….that’s a different sort of heartbreak.

Seattle fans, the three-run home run in the 7th was a brutal way to lose. Brutal. But try to embrace the season, the amazing 15-inning victory to clinch the ALDS, and the terrific battle against the Blue Jays. You had a hell of run.

So did the Brewers, until they didn’t.

I guess any way you lose, you end up in the same place.

The Tale of Two Fan Bases

The tale of two fan bases: my daughter purchased tickets for Game 4 of the NLCS at Dodger Stadium for $78 - for actual seats, not standing room only.  By contrast, tickets for Game 1 of the NLCS at Miller Park are going for $120 for standing room only.  The population of metropolitan Los Angeles is 13 million.  The population for metropolitan Milwaukee is 1.5 million.  And while total MLB attendance dropped by 4% this year, the Brewers attendance increased by just shy of 8%, drawing the tenth largest attendance in the league, at 2,850,875.  Not too shabby for the smallest market of thirty MLB teams.  To be fair, the Dodgers have the highest attendance in the entire league, but this is due not only to the size of the city, but to the size of Dodger Stadium (56,000 vs. 42,000 for Miller Park).

But regarding demand for playoff games, the larger issue is undoubtedly past success. 

It was fun last week listening to Cubs fans complain about losing the division tie-breaker and instead making the playoffs as a lowly wild card, when just four short years ago they would have been thrilled to have been in the hunt.  Now that Cubs fans have tasted success, nothing short of domination is deemed acceptable.  I’ve experienced similar feelings with the Packers.  After winning Super Bowl XLV, it was assumed that Green Bay would be back the next year and the year after that.  No such luck; the subsequent years ended in bitter disappointment.  Only Patriots fans know the boredom that comes with continuous success.

Brewer fans have no such worries.  In nearly fifty years as a franchise, 2018 is only the Brewers’ third league championship.  For many Brewer fans, no matter what happens in the NLCS, this year has been a success, a terrific run, unexpected and a total blast.

But you would think Dodger fans would have similar feelings.  Sure, they were in the World Series last year, but they haven’t won it all since 1988, and they came oh so achingly close to winning it all last year, falling just one game short, that you would think fans would be chomping at the bit, desperate to witness their first world championship in thirty years. 

No doubt, each playoff game from here on out will be a tough ticket, whether basking in the sun of Los Angeles or getting ready for winter in Milwaukee.  But as a Brewers fan, it’s hard not to be thrilled not only with the team’s performance, but with the fans who are making my attempts to buy tickets a royal pain in the ass (and a jolt to my bank account).

I couldn’t be prouder.

Sports Writing as good as the Watching

There’s a current sports columnist whose prose harken back to the glorious baseball writings of Roger Angell, whose work I hadn’t known until my wife purchased a book called Game Time: A Baseball Companion – a fine, fine read if you like baseball history – and in our current environment of immediacy and “just the facts, Ma’am,” it’s easy to overlook quality work that sometimes appears on the web. Two weeks ago the Cubs and Nationals engaged in an epic battle for game 5 of the NLDS, and Yahoo sportswriter Jeff Passan published a piece with as much beauty, poetry and gravitas as the game itself. The Cubs didn’t clinch the series until 1:15 AM Eastern Time, and Passan published his piece less than four hours later. It would have taken me weeks to produce something as good, and even then it would probably fall short. This guy can write well and write fast. 

And I know, this is what great journalists have been doing for decades, but in a world when news is published as it happens, one revelation at a time, full of errors and retractions, typos and grammatical mistakes, it’s refreshing to know that a guy like Passan can pull off a feat that few are willing to pay for these days. Kudos to Yahoo Sports for shelling out some cash for quality. 

I happened upon Passan’s essay by chance after the Cubs victory, but now I seek out his material, and this morning I was yet again rewarded after last night’s incredible Game 2 of the 2017 World Series, an 11-inning victory for the Astros – their first World Series win in franchise history – and among the best baseball games I’ve ever had the privilege of witnessing.

Baseball lends itself to grandiose writing, perhaps more than other sports – something about the pacing of the game, with pauses between each pitch – and it would be easy to overdo it with the writing equivalent of John Facenda’s deep baritone voice narrating an NFL film, and although Passan occasionally dips his toes in the waters of grandiloquent prose (comparing October baseball to a “feral animal best left to carve whatever circuitous path it pleases”), most of the time he just writes really good sentences – nothing flashy, but more than “just the facts, ma’am.” Consider the following:

The fortuity that favored the Dodgers in the third inning, when Bregman’s RBI single bounced off the brim of Taylor’s cap in center and caromed to Pederson instead of scooting by, had evened out by the grace of Diaz being in the right place at the right time.

Nice. Yes, the facts are there, but they’re there in a way that’s pleasant to read.

During the last week I’ve had the pleasure of watching two of the greatest endings to sports games I’ve even seen. One was last night. The other was last Thursday, when the Raiders had two game-winning touchdowns called back in the final seconds, only to score another one – this time official – to win 31–30. Unfortunately, Jeff Passan doesn’t write for football, and nothing I found on-line stood out as anything more than a decent summary of the game.  Perhaps good writers gravitate toward America’s Pastime the way good musicians do Bach, but I have to think that any sport can lead to writing that warrants our attention.

In the meantime, I’m going to tune into the remaining World Series games when I’m able to, and to Jeff Passan's writing either way.