The Milwaukee Brewers are going to the World Series, and they got there by doing something nobody else has managed in three years. They beat the Los Angeles Dodgers four straight times.
Milwaukee closed out the National League Championship Series on Thursday night with a 6-4 comeback win at Dodger Stadium, finishing a sweep of a team that had won the last two World Series. The Brewers had already won 103 games in the regular season, the best record in baseball. Now they have the pennant to go with it.
This is the franchise’s first World Series appearance since 1982, a 44-year gap that covers most of the people who will be in the building next week.
The sweep was not a fluke
There is a temptation to call a four-game sweep of the Dodgers an upset. Look at the season records and that argument falls apart. Milwaukee finished 103-59. The Dodgers were chasing a third consecutive title, which is the kind of run that invites everyone to assume the outcome before the games are played.
What actually happened is that the Brewers outplayed them in every phase for four straight games. Los Angeles never found a way to beat Milwaukee’s bullpen, and the Dodgers’ lineup spent the series looking like a group waiting for one swing to fix everything.
Manager Pat Murphy spent his postgame talking about his players as a group of competitors rather than a collection of names, which is about right. Milwaukee does not have the biggest payroll in the sport and did not acquire its way into October. It won more games than anyone and then won the four that mattered most.
What Milwaukee gets for it
Because the Brewers finished with the best record in the majors, they host Game 1 of the World Series on Friday, Oct. 23. They would also host Game 2 and, if the series goes that far, Games 6 and 7. FOX has the broadcast. Start times have not been announced.
Home field matters more for this team than it does for most. American Family Field has been a problem for visiting clubs all year, and the Brewers get to open and, potentially, close there.
The scheduling has already caused ripple effects around the city. The Milwaukee Bucks moved their Oct. 23 home opener to a 3 p.m. tip so it would not run against Game 1.
They still do not know who they are playing
The American League has not settled. Cleveland leads Tampa Bay 2-1 in the ALCS, with Game 4 scheduled for Friday night at Progressive Field after a two-hour weather delay pushed first pitch back. Neither of those teams resembles the Dodgers, and neither one scares anybody on paper.
That is the point worth making about this Brewers team. For three seasons the National League has been treated as a formality on the way to a Dodgers coronation. Milwaukee spent four games proving that the best record in baseball was not an accident of scheduling, and now it gets to host the World Series against a team that also got here by being better than expected.
The Brewers have waited 44 years. They earned the wait being over.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.