Odd to see this here but I’ll comment! From Milwaukee, live here still, watch >95% of Brewer games all season and this is by far the best team I’ve ever witnessed. Entire year after the 13-13 start while some of the team was recovering from the Venezuela WBC win, we won at an absurd rate. Still had the worry about playoff mini choking, but every part of our lineup from batters and pitchers were all so good.
Best thing for me about this is we were the best regular season team, best in the playoffs, and considered deserving and the clear winner. Doesn’t happen too often and that makes it feel a lot better than just getting hot at the right time.
I just love baseball, love the Brewers, and can’t believe they won.
All news is politics news now in the US. Didn't used to be like that. (Dear readers, go watch some old 80s-90s TV news broadcasts on youtube if you don't believe me)
I have sometimes wondered what news we're missing out on when all the focus is on politics, but some of it is probably due to media consolidation. It's easier and cheaper to write and send out scripts on national issues to every station you own all over the country than invest time and money on reports that only matter to a single region/community.
I (an extremely casual fan) forgot the series was on until yesterday's game but enjoyed the final two. I think it doesn't help that these are two 'regional' teams (compared to the Dodgers or Yankees). Good baseball just the same.
Tuesday's game was definitely the highlight of the series in terms of good baseball. Monday's game sucked ass, and I missed the first two, but tonight was like Tuesday lite. Tuesday night was some of the best baseball I have watched. I wish Tampa Bay had won a couple of more to give us a full series, but it was clear by the 7th that this game was over.
Context: I'm an adult fan of baseball that didn't like sports at all as a kid, so I developed no team loyalty. I'm all about good, exciting baseball whoever wins.
- When sports do their major events has shifted in the last decades or so
- There's no longer a common TV culture.
That last point started more with Cable TV, but everyone still got 'over the air' so coverage on major TV networks usually provided a foundation of shared culture and events. It also provided major news summaries that most busy adults managed to see a bit of. As if any of us with jobs have time for that these days.
There's also the war for everyone's attention on "Social Media" and the Internet generally.
It's enough that I knew the two teams playing in the Series, that both teams have never won, and that the progress was looking really good for the Brewers all while not being the type that follows baseball at all.
I believe that the answer is licensing. If a channel or network is not licensed to carry Official MLB Footage, then they are reluctant to report on it or even admit that such a thing exists, lest they inadvertently send viewers off to change channels, and go find the licensee.
A contributing factor is the absolute iron grip on the trademarked terms, such as World Series and Super Bowl, where every media outlet is 100% forbidden under pain of waterboarding, lest they utter these two words in proximity, whether for free or to promote a party or product or gathering event.
So ultimately, you wind up with a media environment where nobody but the licensee is willing to admit that these enormous sporting events exist. Of course, the licensees themselves are sending a firehose of coverage by every available medium, and those who are in-the-know, and wealthy enough to subscribe, are hanging on the every word of ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPN9 with the play-by-play.
You can be sure that my father was watching every pitch and every out from his armchair, until his beloved Padres got left behind, yet again. San Diego Padres are another franchise that has never won a World Series. They are joined in the record books by the Rockies, the Mariners, and of course, the Tampa Bay Rays.
I don't know why people in these comments are dragging politics into it. That strikes me as a terminally online take and I say that as an self-confessed politics frog.
If anything, the following of current events overall is way down to what it was decades ago by the general populace. People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.
Three things happened to baseball (IMHO):
1. The childhood funnel is drying up and has been for a long time. Kids now increasingly play soccer instead;
2. Take out the nostalgia and you're not left with much. There are too many games, they're too long and not enough happens. Football is bigger than ever; and
3. Structurally I think baseball made some huge mistakes, such as the soft salary cap system that created dynasties like the New York Yankees who could get rich on broadcast rights for a huge media market. The NFL has managed all of this so much better.
I'm not a huge sports fan but I find the systems fascinating. American sports evolved into a 3 pillar system. Basketball season into baseball season into football season through the calendar year. I wonder if baseball's timing over summer has contributed to this decline.
On point 2: in my experience, the tradeoff is that baseball is the most accessible in-person major league sport. The quantity, length, and seasonal timing of games means that tickets are almost always affordable and can fit into my schedule. I go to more and more MLB games every year, whereas a ticket to my NFL team is a serious expenditure, and that's assuming that my schedule works out to where I can attend one of 8 home games for the entire year.
Isn't that making my point? If tickets are cheap and easy to get, doesn't that indicate lack of demand? I'm minded of the (highly entertaining) Scottish "invasion" of Boston during the World Cup recently and they did a march and just went to a game at Fenway Park. That's not something you can just do with other major sports.
I also think about how sports are portrayed or used as dressing in media. Seinfeld, for example, was from an era where people often went to baseball games and knew all the player stats. People in previous generations would take their scorecards to games [1]. None of that really exists anymore.
> I don't know why people in these comments are dragging politics into it.
It dominates news coverage even when we're not coming up on an election, and the high stakes involved makes it an even bigger topic, and one that weighs heavily on people's minds.
> People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.
The wealth of information available (and disinformation avilable) is partly to blame. It's easy to spend your time only on a small number of interests. Most people just let the algorithms of a small number of corporations feed them the vast majority of what they consume, so while technically there's a lot more information out there, they only see what those corporations choose to show them.
I don't really understand the "too long" complaint when NFL is the most popular sport. A baseball game is something like 30-45 minutes shorter than an NFL game. And NFL and MLB both have about 10-20 minutes of actual live play each so I don't think "nothing happens" is a particularly good explanation either.
I think the biggest reason is that it's much more difficult to follow as a casual fan due to the number of games. It was fine when baseball was more or less the only popular sport, but now it's competing with too many other things.
I hope it's true that the parity gap due to not having a salary cap is hurting the sport's popularity, but I'm not sure that's true either. The majority of fans root for only a handful of teams who benefit from not having one.
Both teams are small-ish markets. (Milwaukee is the smallest market.) Neither team has big-name players like Shohei Ohtani or Juan Soto. In other words, this was the series MLB didn't want, especially with the upcoming contracts talks.
Baseball in general is in long-term decline [1]. And of course football rules supreme. I try not to yuck someone else's yum and I'm not the biggest sports watcher in general but personally I find baseball to be boring. There's too many games. They go on for too long. Not much happens. I think the fandom, such that it is, is from older people with nostalgia from when it was a far bigger deal and when they probably grew up playing it themselves. The latter is increasingly being displaced by soccer
I find this to be completely the opposite of my recent experience. The games are fast and with much better, consistent payoff than other sports such as football and soccer. Progress is far more discrete and there's basically always something happening except during inning or player changes. I agree that there are a lot of games, but that's a feature: you don't have to pay attention to every game. Because of the discrete nature of progress and the number of games you can get meaningful statistics out of a single season. I say this as a relatively young person (<30) who only loosely follows other sports.
> The games are fast and with much better, consistent payoff than other sports such as football and soccer.
Soccer is a slow burn where a game is always standing on a fragile equilibrium. Football and baseball are mainly boring because they are turn-based, with long periods of nothing happening between brief action moments.
Basketball is the only dominant US sports that matches soccer in terms of excitement and teams standing on a fragile equilibrium. Of course the NBA screws this up by stretching finals games into 7-game series, capping soccer-levels of excitement derived from winner-takes-all tournaments. It's no coincidence that NCAA tournaments manages to build up so much attention and such a dedicated following.
I just... don't agree. Every pitch in baseball is exciting and there are almost 300 thrown in an average game, even if most end up with no progress. Meanwhile I find "fragile equilibrium" games to be boring as hell to watch, there's hardly any progress being made! I don't want to watch an abstracted tug of war drawn out over 3 hours.
With football it’s possible to watch every game, which I think better fits today’s model of fandom.
Baseball I get the sense people watched or listened to some, often while doing something else, and followed the rest in the newspaper or the evening news highlights.
Same. I vaguely recall maybe a mention of baseball playoffs somewhere or whatever they are called being on but barely anything compared to previous years. Last I heard I thought LA had some complete economic dominance on baseball players?
Basically the exact opposite of the NBA playoffs where similar to baseball i'm normally not into it but got totally absorbed this past year.
What never happened that you didn't hear about World Series winners or that you didn't hear about the Brewers winning. There's a reason for the later, and as far as the former, well, it's two teams that aren't known for their post season appearances.
The Brewers' legendary beloved announcer Bob Uecker, who recently died at 90, and whose name adorned fans' signs during the game, was known for playing insane pranks:
i'm not offended by the vulgarity. i'm offended by the fact that a professional comedian/podcast-doer is using SO MA?NY filler words (and it just so happens that those filler words are 'fuck' and 'shit')
Was fun to have a Series in which each team was the best in its league and in which each team was competing for its first championship. I’m a Red Sox fan, and I remember 2004. It’s a tremendous experience as a fan (of the team or just of baseball). Go Brew Crew.
I thought it was a great series, and an incredible postseason run by the Brewers. Congrats to them!
Often the team that feels like the Team of Destiny is an underdog coming back from a horrible start to the season or whatever, but this year the Brewers were both the most dominant team in MLB and the team that felt like the Team of Destiny. There's something wonderful about seeing a team that has never won a chip before finally win it all, and in such a resounding fashion.
That leaves just the San Diego Padres (founded in 1969), Seattle Mariners (1977), Colorado Rockies (1993) and Tampa Bay Rays (1998) left who have never won a World Series.
Since this is baseball, I might as well provide the other stats I just pulled up as that's very much in the spirit of the game:
21 teams have won more than once: Yankees (27), Cardinals (11), Athletics (9), Red Sox (9), Dodgers (9), Giants (8), Pirates (5), Reds (5), Tigers (4), Braves (4), Cubs (3), White Sox (3), Twins (3), Orioles (3), Phillies (2), Guardians (2), Mets (2), Royals (2), Blue Jays (2), Marlins (2), Astros (2).
5 teams have won just once: Angels, Diamondbacks, Nationals, Rangers, Brewers.
The Mariners are the only team to never have played in the Series.
It's been 78 years since Cleveland last won. Followed by Pittsburgh (47), Baltimore (43) and Detroit (42), not counting the two teams that have never won above - San Diego (58) and Seattle (50).
The longest gaps between Series wins are the Cubs at 107 years (1908-2016), White Sox at 87 years (1917-2005) and Red Sox at 85 years (1918-2004).
And in case you're unaware, the first World Series was played in 1903.
That's 124 total scheduled championship seasons (1903 through 2026), minus 2 canceled seasons (1904 boycott and 1994 strike) for a total of 122 World Series.
Odd to see this here but I’ll comment! From Milwaukee, live here still, watch >95% of Brewer games all season and this is by far the best team I’ve ever witnessed. Entire year after the 13-13 start while some of the team was recovering from the Venezuela WBC win, we won at an absurd rate. Still had the worry about playoff mini choking, but every part of our lineup from batters and pitchers were all so good.
Best thing for me about this is we were the best regular season team, best in the playoffs, and considered deserving and the clear winner. Doesn’t happen too often and that makes it feel a lot better than just getting hot at the right time.
I just love baseball, love the Brewers, and can’t believe they won.
I was hoping this was about brewing beer.
It is, in a way. The name is, shall we say, appropriate for the city
The stadium also used to be called Miller Park
I just started getting into baseball this year because of the Brewers stellar performance (I'm from Madison).
I don't even follow baseball, but I'm just happy hear anyone winning that's not a Dodger or a Yankee.
I live in the US, and have heard nothing at all about this. What surprises me is this never used to happen when I was a kid.
All news is politics news now in the US. Didn't used to be like that. (Dear readers, go watch some old 80s-90s TV news broadcasts on youtube if you don't believe me)
I have sometimes wondered what news we're missing out on when all the focus is on politics, but some of it is probably due to media consolidation. It's easier and cheaper to write and send out scripts on national issues to every station you own all over the country than invest time and money on reports that only matter to a single region/community.
I (an extremely casual fan) forgot the series was on until yesterday's game but enjoyed the final two. I think it doesn't help that these are two 'regional' teams (compared to the Dodgers or Yankees). Good baseball just the same.
Tuesday's game was definitely the highlight of the series in terms of good baseball. Monday's game sucked ass, and I missed the first two, but tonight was like Tuesday lite. Tuesday night was some of the best baseball I have watched. I wish Tampa Bay had won a couple of more to give us a full series, but it was clear by the 7th that this game was over.
Context: I'm an adult fan of baseball that didn't like sports at all as a kid, so I developed no team loyalty. I'm all about good, exciting baseball whoever wins.
The first two were more like Tuesday, without the extra innings.
You read a headline about it on a website less than an hour after it happened?
The World Series is a multi game, multi day event. This one started last Friday.
- Politics (in focus) others already pointed out
- When sports do their major events has shifted in the last decades or so
- There's no longer a common TV culture.
That last point started more with Cable TV, but everyone still got 'over the air' so coverage on major TV networks usually provided a foundation of shared culture and events. It also provided major news summaries that most busy adults managed to see a bit of. As if any of us with jobs have time for that these days.
There's also the war for everyone's attention on "Social Media" and the Internet generally.
It doesn't explain why it is not discussed on openair channels.
It's enough that I knew the two teams playing in the Series, that both teams have never won, and that the progress was looking really good for the Brewers all while not being the type that follows baseball at all.
I believe that the answer is licensing. If a channel or network is not licensed to carry Official MLB Footage, then they are reluctant to report on it or even admit that such a thing exists, lest they inadvertently send viewers off to change channels, and go find the licensee.
A contributing factor is the absolute iron grip on the trademarked terms, such as World Series and Super Bowl, where every media outlet is 100% forbidden under pain of waterboarding, lest they utter these two words in proximity, whether for free or to promote a party or product or gathering event.
So ultimately, you wind up with a media environment where nobody but the licensee is willing to admit that these enormous sporting events exist. Of course, the licensees themselves are sending a firehose of coverage by every available medium, and those who are in-the-know, and wealthy enough to subscribe, are hanging on the every word of ESPN, ESPN2, and ESPN9 with the play-by-play.
You can be sure that my father was watching every pitch and every out from his armchair, until his beloved Padres got left behind, yet again. San Diego Padres are another franchise that has never won a World Series. They are joined in the record books by the Rockies, the Mariners, and of course, the Tampa Bay Rays.
I don't know why people in these comments are dragging politics into it. That strikes me as a terminally online take and I say that as an self-confessed politics frog.
If anything, the following of current events overall is way down to what it was decades ago by the general populace. People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.
Three things happened to baseball (IMHO):
1. The childhood funnel is drying up and has been for a long time. Kids now increasingly play soccer instead;
2. Take out the nostalgia and you're not left with much. There are too many games, they're too long and not enough happens. Football is bigger than ever; and
3. Structurally I think baseball made some huge mistakes, such as the soft salary cap system that created dynasties like the New York Yankees who could get rich on broadcast rights for a huge media market. The NFL has managed all of this so much better.
I'm not a huge sports fan but I find the systems fascinating. American sports evolved into a 3 pillar system. Basketball season into baseball season into football season through the calendar year. I wonder if baseball's timing over summer has contributed to this decline.
On point 2: in my experience, the tradeoff is that baseball is the most accessible in-person major league sport. The quantity, length, and seasonal timing of games means that tickets are almost always affordable and can fit into my schedule. I go to more and more MLB games every year, whereas a ticket to my NFL team is a serious expenditure, and that's assuming that my schedule works out to where I can attend one of 8 home games for the entire year.
Isn't that making my point? If tickets are cheap and easy to get, doesn't that indicate lack of demand? I'm minded of the (highly entertaining) Scottish "invasion" of Boston during the World Cup recently and they did a march and just went to a game at Fenway Park. That's not something you can just do with other major sports.
I also think about how sports are portrayed or used as dressing in media. Seinfeld, for example, was from an era where people often went to baseball games and knew all the player stats. People in previous generations would take their scorecards to games [1]. None of that really exists anymore.
[1]: https://www.wuwm.com/2023-04-10/this-baseball-season-try-an-...
The NFL and MLB seem to have similar numbers of recent dynasties and of different teams that have won a championship.
> I don't know why people in these comments are dragging politics into it.
It dominates news coverage even when we're not coming up on an election, and the high stakes involved makes it an even bigger topic, and one that weighs heavily on people's minds.
> People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.
The wealth of information available (and disinformation avilable) is partly to blame. It's easy to spend your time only on a small number of interests. Most people just let the algorithms of a small number of corporations feed them the vast majority of what they consume, so while technically there's a lot more information out there, they only see what those corporations choose to show them.
I don't really understand the "too long" complaint when NFL is the most popular sport. A baseball game is something like 30-45 minutes shorter than an NFL game. And NFL and MLB both have about 10-20 minutes of actual live play each so I don't think "nothing happens" is a particularly good explanation either.
I think the biggest reason is that it's much more difficult to follow as a casual fan due to the number of games. It was fine when baseball was more or less the only popular sport, but now it's competing with too many other things.
I hope it's true that the parity gap due to not having a salary cap is hurting the sport's popularity, but I'm not sure that's true either. The majority of fans root for only a handful of teams who benefit from not having one.
Both teams are small-ish markets. (Milwaukee is the smallest market.) Neither team has big-name players like Shohei Ohtani or Juan Soto. In other words, this was the series MLB didn't want, especially with the upcoming contracts talks.
Baseball in general is in long-term decline [1]. And of course football rules supreme. I try not to yuck someone else's yum and I'm not the biggest sports watcher in general but personally I find baseball to be boring. There's too many games. They go on for too long. Not much happens. I think the fandom, such that it is, is from older people with nostalgia from when it was a far bigger deal and when they probably grew up playing it themselves. The latter is increasingly being displaced by soccer
[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/714281/football-top-sport-socce...
I find this to be completely the opposite of my recent experience. The games are fast and with much better, consistent payoff than other sports such as football and soccer. Progress is far more discrete and there's basically always something happening except during inning or player changes. I agree that there are a lot of games, but that's a feature: you don't have to pay attention to every game. Because of the discrete nature of progress and the number of games you can get meaningful statistics out of a single season. I say this as a relatively young person (<30) who only loosely follows other sports.
> The games are fast and with much better, consistent payoff than other sports such as football and soccer.
Soccer is a slow burn where a game is always standing on a fragile equilibrium. Football and baseball are mainly boring because they are turn-based, with long periods of nothing happening between brief action moments.
Basketball is the only dominant US sports that matches soccer in terms of excitement and teams standing on a fragile equilibrium. Of course the NBA screws this up by stretching finals games into 7-game series, capping soccer-levels of excitement derived from winner-takes-all tournaments. It's no coincidence that NCAA tournaments manages to build up so much attention and such a dedicated following.
I just... don't agree. Every pitch in baseball is exciting and there are almost 300 thrown in an average game, even if most end up with no progress. Meanwhile I find "fragile equilibrium" games to be boring as hell to watch, there's hardly any progress being made! I don't want to watch an abstracted tug of war drawn out over 3 hours.
With football it’s possible to watch every game, which I think better fits today’s model of fandom.
Baseball I get the sense people watched or listened to some, often while doing something else, and followed the rest in the newspaper or the evening news highlights.
Same. I vaguely recall maybe a mention of baseball playoffs somewhere or whatever they are called being on but barely anything compared to previous years. Last I heard I thought LA had some complete economic dominance on baseball players?
Basically the exact opposite of the NBA playoffs where similar to baseball i'm normally not into it but got totally absorbed this past year.
What never happened that you didn't hear about World Series winners or that you didn't hear about the Brewers winning. There's a reason for the later, and as far as the former, well, it's two teams that aren't known for their post season appearances.
> it's two teams that aren't known for their post season appearances.
The Brewers have been in the postseason 8 of the last 9 years, and the Rays 6 of the last 9.
That the World Series was even on.
The Brewers' legendary beloved announcer Bob Uecker, who recently died at 90, and whose name adorned fans' signs during the game, was known for playing insane pranks:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmbtT5ii5F8
(Caution: language)
Crazy amounts of language on this video. Not sure if that's even a data point any more.
i'm not offended by the vulgarity. i'm offended by the fact that a professional comedian/podcast-doer is using SO MA?NY filler words (and it just so happens that those filler words are 'fuck' and 'shit')
That was not added for comedic effect, but rather an accurate impression of Uecker, who was known to use profanities nonstop in conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zJAX7YXs5e4
Was fun to have a Series in which each team was the best in its league and in which each team was competing for its first championship. I’m a Red Sox fan, and I remember 2004. It’s a tremendous experience as a fan (of the team or just of baseball). Go Brew Crew.
As a Dodgers fan, I have to begrudgingly agree. These two teams were playing at an amazing level.
I thought it was a great series, and an incredible postseason run by the Brewers. Congrats to them!
Often the team that feels like the Team of Destiny is an underdog coming back from a horrible start to the season or whatever, but this year the Brewers were both the most dominant team in MLB and the team that felt like the Team of Destiny. There's something wonderful about seeing a team that has never won a chip before finally win it all, and in such a resounding fashion.
How can you not be romantic about baseball!
As a Giants fan, was fun watching them dope-slap the Dodgers.
Great series for the Brewers. Well-deserved!
huge plus one. Also the Brewers got Kyle Harrison a ring.
That leaves just the San Diego Padres (founded in 1969), Seattle Mariners (1977), Colorado Rockies (1993) and Tampa Bay Rays (1998) left who have never won a World Series.
Since this is baseball, I might as well provide the other stats I just pulled up as that's very much in the spirit of the game:
21 teams have won more than once: Yankees (27), Cardinals (11), Athletics (9), Red Sox (9), Dodgers (9), Giants (8), Pirates (5), Reds (5), Tigers (4), Braves (4), Cubs (3), White Sox (3), Twins (3), Orioles (3), Phillies (2), Guardians (2), Mets (2), Royals (2), Blue Jays (2), Marlins (2), Astros (2).
5 teams have won just once: Angels, Diamondbacks, Nationals, Rangers, Brewers.
The Mariners are the only team to never have played in the Series.
It's been 78 years since Cleveland last won. Followed by Pittsburgh (47), Baltimore (43) and Detroit (42), not counting the two teams that have never won above - San Diego (58) and Seattle (50).
The longest gaps between Series wins are the Cubs at 107 years (1908-2016), White Sox at 87 years (1917-2005) and Red Sox at 85 years (1918-2004).
And in case you're unaware, the first World Series was played in 1903.
That's 124 total scheduled championship seasons (1903 through 2026), minus 2 canceled seasons (1904 boycott and 1994 strike) for a total of 122 World Series.
Any time the Dodgers or Yankees don't win the World Series, that's a reason to celebrate.
Congrats to the Brewers!