Sports

Brewers’ season baffles fan base

Most of the time, the sports world tends to make sense. If you are paying attention, trends reveal themselves over the course of the season, and aspects of a team’s play become somewhat predictable. The first five months of the Brewers’ season were extremely frustrating. Hundreds of Brewers fans, myself included, searched for some way to understand what was coming out of this team.

Not anymore. I've given up. Given up guessing, given up predicting, given up trying to understand, given up being surprised. From here on out, I'm just going to roll with the punches. You have to, by this time, if you're a Brewers fan.

The old baseball saying is that the season is a marathon, not a sprint. In that case, this past season for fans of the Brew Crew has been one of those ultra-marathons — the type that you race to the top of a mountain and to the bottom of a valley all in the same race.

When the season started, it was a month-to-month thing. For the first month of the season, the Brewers looked unbeatable, a team that couldn't possibly miss the playoffs. One month later they looked like the 2001 Brewers — an absolutely dreadful team incapable of executing the most fundamental aspects of baseball.

As the season went on, the whole cycle sped up. They would have hot weeks followed by cold weeks. Awesome games followed by pathetic ones.

By the time the end of August rolled around, they had squandered the 14-games-over-.500 cushion they had as late as June 30 and actually found themselves in third place for a day.

After a white-hot beginning of the season, when Brewers fans, myself included, got drunk off the combination of unsustainable success and symmetrical history (25 years ago the Brewers went to the World Series, 25 years before that, the Milwaukee Braves won the Fall Classic), the fall from the top was one of the most embarrassing and pathetic things I’d ever been a part of. This from someone who once went 16 games into a youth baseball season before collecting his first base hit … on a bunt.

Twenty-five years ago, the Brewers went to the World Series. They lost in seven games, but like a washed-up former high school star athlete, Brewers fans still cling to those glory days for all they are worth. Find another major league city anywhere that throws weekly bashes celebrating a second-place finish two-and-a-half decades ago. Even though I buy into it all as much as anyone else, even I can admit it is kind of sad.

That the only taste of the playoffs I have is from an old VHS highlight tape of the ‘82 season and stories from my parents is kind of pathetic.

It wasn’t just the fact that they were losing, it was that the Brewers had given everybody a taste of what they were truly capable of and then appeared to forget how they did it.

Every aspect of the team was the culprit at one point or another. Shaky defense hurt the starting pitching, which led to a tired bullpen that began blowing leads with some regularity. The reliance on the home run, which propelled them to the hot start, hurt run production once the long ball went missing. An inability to manufacture runs without 400-foot bombs was exposed.

Now, it seems like the Brewers are righting the ship somewhat. They are still in the race and the bats and starting pitching are starting to come around. Still, there are inconsistencies.

This past Monday, the Brewers found themselves in a hole thanks to some shoddy defense, fought their way back into the lead by producing runs with walks and timely base hits only to see the bullpen blow the lead. The game just about epitomized the entire season—so much potential, but the results, somehow, just haven’t translated.

After the rollercoaster ride of the first five months of the regular season, it is impossible to tell what the final month of the season will hold. The Brewers could get amazingly hot and win the division by five games or tank and finish in third, and I would be no more surprised either way. Brewers fans, it’s time to just embrace the uncertainty and enjoy the journey. Win or lose, we haven’t had that opportunity in a long while.

Ben is a junior majoring in political science and journalism. Commiserate about the Brewers with him or tell him how much the Crew sucks at bvoelkel@badgerherald.com.