There is something inherently funny about the way the Milwaukee Brewers, of all teams, finally won their first-ever World Series: in ruthless, cold-blooded fashion. This is the small-market, Upper Midwest, rust-belt team perhaps most famous, until now, for (1) a hat logo that everyone loves, (2) a sausage race and (3) a couple of baseball’s most notable clowns: the adored former player and broadcaster Bob Uecker, and the maligned former owner and Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig. Their manager, Pat Murphy—“Murph”—looks straight out of central casting for a sitcom about a Wisconsin dive bar.
We’re talking about a ball club with some of the friendliest fans in sports, and whose team is among the most merciless in recent baseball history. Just as the Brewers’ sense of timing has been perfect this whole postseason, these stone-cold killers even managed to dispatch the Tampa Bay Rays before Halloween. If you haven’t been paying attention, the Brewers have been praised by the baseball world all year long—even Derek Jeter said so—for playing baseball the “right way”: small-ball, teamwork, manufacturing runs, grinding away at every at-bat.
But what the Brewers have done is revealed what “the right way” actually looks: a bloodbath. And just like in any horror movie, they proved impossible to kill. They trailed games throughout the playoffs, including in every game of their relentless sweep of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NLCS, in which the Brew Crew appeared to gradually suck the life out of the two-time defending champions.
For much of their existence, the Brewers have played second banana to the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals, their division rivals. But even these rivalries are one-sided, as the Cubs and Cardinals save most of their hatred for one other.
The so-called Border Battle between Milwaukee and the Minnesota Twins is one of Selig’s forced interleague rivalries, but it’s best viewed as a proxy, summertime, low-stakes feud between Vikings and Packers fans. Maybe what’s most promising is that an overlooked team has forged not just a winning formula, but a unique identity consistent with the club and its hometown’s unfussy reputation. Much has been said of the Brewers’ playing style—but still not enough.
They are an antidote to the turgid, individualist, power baseball of the 21st century. If the modern game has come to resemble an artillery barrage, in which teams are built around players selected for launch angle and exit velocity rather than strikeouts and batting average, the Brewers (not to mention the Rays) reached the Fall Classic by restoring a pitch-by-pitch knife fight. Nobody punishes teams quite like the Brewers.
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