MLB Playoffs: Why the Milwaukee Brewers are the team you should be rooting for
By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer
So you need a team to bandwagon?
Maybe you’re a Yanks or Cardinals fan whose hopes of a glorious October were dashed by the random cruelty of the wild-card game. Maybe you’re a Padres fan just now resuming baseball-watching activities after San Diego’s horrid late summer slide led you to take some time away. Maybe you're a diehard of a cellar-dweller, and you’ve known since May that you were going to bandwagon the White Sox and now you need to find a new club because ... well ... yikes.
Well, let me direct you to the Milwaukee Brewers. The champions of the National League Central won their opening postseason game Friday afternoon in a nail-biting 2-1 victory over Atlanta. If you missed it, totally chill, no worries, you were probably at work or watching Chicago’s bullpen combust or Jordan Luplow’s grand slam.
It was quite a well-pitched affair with Atlanta starter Charlie Morton and Milwaukee ace Corbin Burnes trading zeroes until the seventh. That’s when large adult son and human flycatcher (more on that later) Rowdy Tellez obliterated an 0-2 fastball for a two-run go-ahead big fly deeeeeeep to center field. Get a load of this smash.
With Milwaukee only one game into its October journey, it’s definitely not too late to hop on board. If you’re a Reds fan going hard for the Rays or a Jays fan pulling for Atlanta, I’d urge you to reconsider your temporary autumnal alliances. The Brewers are for you. Here’s why.
1. They’ve never won the darn thing
Only six franchises in Major League Baseball have never won a World Series. Four of those title-less teams are absent from the postseason proceedings: Seattle (sad face), San Diego (bigger sad face), Texas and Colorado. That leaves Tampa and Milwaukee.
The Rays are alluring, I get it. The procession of rookie pitchers named Shane, Ji-Man Choi’s taterific swing, the weird stuff that happens in Tropicana Field, Randy Arozarena transforming into a combination of peak Barry Bonds and Thanos; it’s no doubt a good time. They’re definitely the backup wagon to board. But is it really cool to bandwagon a 100-win team?
The Brewers, on the other hand, are the perfect level of good; a definitive quality ballclub that ran away with its division and won 95 games, but is in no way the favorite to capture the National League crown. That’s 51 years of Milwaukee Brewers baseball without a championship. They’ve only been in the World Series once, in 1982, back when they were an American League team.
If you saw any footage of the Bucks winning the NBA title, you know that Milwaukee is a great sports town just waiting to explode if and when the Brewers finally win the World Series. Isn’t that something you want to be a part of, even if from afar?
2. They’re going to play a lot of close postseason games
This is a team built on pitching, particularly starting pitching. The three-headed rotation beast of Burnes, Brandon Woodruff and Freddy Peralta was, by some metrics, one of the greatest front threes in baseball history. No really. They’re only the third team in the wild-card era to have three starters throw at least 140 innings, each with an ERA under 2.85. The others were the 2002 Red Sox (Pedro, Tim Wakefield and Derek Lowe) and the 2011 Phillies (Cliff Lee, Doc Halladay and Cole Hamels).
They also had a very mediocre offense, finishing just 12th in MLB in runs and a remarkably low 23rd in team WRC+ – below the Cubs and only one spot above the Orioles (WRC+ is an advanced hitting statistic somewhat similar to OPS that takes things like park factors or era adjustments into account). Christian Yelich was merely average, a far cry from his 2018 MVP year. The team didn’t have a single offensive All-Star.
Awesome pitching and a middling offense is a perfect recipe for close, low-scoring October baseball games. I’m talking about the ones that balance on a knife’s edge for all nine innings and have your heart permanently lodged in your throat throughout. You don’t watch the MLB postseason for blowouts, do you? You tune in for the tension that you love to hate. Milwaukee’s got you covered.
3. Willy Adames
If you watched last year’s postseason in which Adames went 8-for-59 in 20 games with 25 strikeouts and seemed to K every time Tampa had runners on base, you’re probably confused. Adames was dealt to the Brewers in late May for a pair of pitchers you’d probably never heard of before, J.P. Feyereisen and Drew Rasmussen, who are now obviously integral pieces of the Rays staff.
But even though those two gents have been sublime in Florida, Adames made it more than worth it for the Brewers by hitting .285 with 20 homers and an .886 OPS with good defense in just 99 games. He was far and away Milwaukee’s best hitter this season.
But he’s more than that. Adames is a true delight to watch, a smile perpetually glued to his face. When he’s going good, he’s the epitome of baseball joy, a rollicking, chest-pumping, emotive supernova capable of taking over a telecast.
4. The large dinger-knocking adult sons
The Yankees got a lot of love, and deservedly so, for fielding a team that included five enormous individuals at the same time (Voit, Judge, Gallo, Stanton and Rizzo). Voit called it the goal-line package.
But the Brewers finding away to roster both 6-4, 255-pound Tellez and 6-0, 270-pound Daniel Vogelbach all season is also an accomplishment worthy of praise. Neither of them are particularly deft defensively, but you can count on these mammoth dudes strolling up to the dish and taking some absolutely mammoth swings. They can both really sting the ball and have a propensity to come up in big spots.
Like Tellez in Game 1, or Vogelbach’s walk-off grand slam back in September.
You probably know a bit about Vogelbach from his hot first half and All-Star appearance in 2019 with Seattle, so let me educate you a bit about Tellez. His mom called him Rowdy after he was born because he did so much kicking and wriggling while he was in the womb. One time when Jordan Shusterman and I were interviewing him in a minor league dugout, he snagged a fly out of the air and Gronk-spiked it into the ground. He’s a delight and well-worth your rooting energy.
So yeah, that’s my pitch for Milwaukee.
If I changed your mind, let me know @CespedesBBQ and @Jake_Mintz. And if I didn’t and you still want to root for Houston for some reason, that’s cool, too.
Jake Mintz is the louder half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball analyst for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.
