Commentary: Brewers’ World Series win reminds us what Wisconsin can be

We don’t have a sports section at the Wisconsin Examiner. But when the Milwaukee Brewers went to the World Series for the first time in 44 years, we couldn’t ignore it. Fortunately, the one member of our staff with a sports reporting background, Henry Redman — the sports editor of his college newspaper at Loyola University Chicago— was willing to drive down to Milwaukee to claim a press box seat at American Family Field. Redman covered game four, watching the big screen with the sold-out crowd of Brewers fans who were ready to cheer a historic Series win as their team played in St. Petersburg. It turned out to be a long night, with the Brewers losing at the bottom of the 12th inning. The next night it fell to reporter Baylor Spears, who has plenty of experience covering late-night legislative hearings, to write up game five, and the Brewers’ first-ever World Series win. 

The World Series was a welcome break from the divisive politics of this edgy midterm election season. Every resident of our 50-50 purple state was united in rooting for the Brewers. (Well, almost everyone; Spears reports that the latest Marquette poll found 1% of state residents actively rooting against the home team.)  As Spears and Redman write, “The team, and its huge win, represents a point of unity.”  That feeling, of coming together as a community in a moment of shared civic pride, is a welcome reminder that toxic partisanship is not the only possible atmosphere we can live in. 

As Milwaukee resident from Brookfield Sarah Coleman told Redman while watching game four, “It says a lot that a small market team swept the highest paid team in Major League Baseball. It’s cool to talk about the underdog.” 

The Brewers beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in four games out of four in the National League Championship. The Dodgers’ payroll, the highest in Major League Baseball, is two and half times the size of the younger, scrappier Brewers’. 

Go Brewers!

“It’s nice to enjoy something so positive,” Chrystal Glynn-Skipini told Redman. 

That positivity had an effect on our state’s sour and fractious politics. It lightened voters’ mood and made them less angry, and gave everyone a breather in the heat of a contentious election. It made it harder for Republicans to run their usual play, bashing Milwaukee, the heavily Democratic city President Donald Trump has called “horrible” and generations of Republican lawmakers have portrayed in thinly veiled racist terms as a crime-ridden hell hole. Trump declared last week that “nobody cares” about a World Series featuring two small-market teams. But here in Wisconsin, Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Tiffany was savvy enough to celebrate the Brewers’ win, separating it from the barrage of negative ads targeting his rival Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley.

There’s no doubt that the glow of the Brewers’ World Series victory is a boost for Crowley, who, with current Gov. Tony Evers, helped negotiate the stadium deal to keep the team in Milwaukee. But regardless of politics, the Brewers are for everyone. The players and their manager Pat Murphy acknowledged the outpouring of support from the fans after they won. “I think about the state of Wisconsin, they pushed us through for sure,” Murphy said. 

The last time the Brewers went to the World Series, in 1982, they suffered a heart-breaking game seven loss against the St. Louis Cardinals. Milwaukee had a massive parade to welcome them home anyway, to the players’ amazement. “This was true love, and it was mutual right down to the bitter end,” writes Brewers beat reporter Adam McCalvy. A despondent Robin Yount, the Brewers’ hall of fame shortstop and center fielder, was in no mood for a parade, McCalvy recounts. The players and owner Bud Selig were sure the turnout would be embarrassing. Selig even apologized to the players for agreeing to it. But the fans came out in such numbers they shut down the city, lining the roads while another 10,000 Wisconsinites packed the stadium. “It turned out to be a nice event, and I guess it helped take a little of the sting off. … It showed the class of the fans of Milwaukee,” Yount told McCalvy. 

This time, the Brewers are coming home as winners to bask in their city’s adulation at the championship parade on Friday. 

May all that good feeling carry us through next week and into a better era.