The Monday before the World Series starts, I’m offered a ticket to Game 1 out of the blue. I assume this will use up all of my good karma – surely my car will soon break down, my dog will run away and my wife will leave me. But the last time the Brewers played in the Fall Classic I was 9 months old, so it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I’m going to the World Series.
Like everyone in Wisconsin, I’m acutely aware that this chance may never come again. A 44-year drought, filled with years and years of losing, does nothing if not offer perspective. I want to make the most of it, so I catch the earliest bar shuttle I can, at 3:30 p.m. from Vier North. Onboard, there’s plenty of complaining about the rapacious ticket prices, but mostly, everyone’s just excited. This is, after all, the culmination of years of fandom. A thick fog had settled over the city in the morning, and as the shuttle rounds Kilbourn Reservoir Park, I see the downtown skyline wrapped in mist with the mid-afternoon sun lending the scene a golden hue. I know it’s just weather, but it looks pretty mythical, and today, at least, I’m in no mood to curb my imagination.
This has to be a good omen.
Celebrate this year’s winners of the Betty Awards!
I get to American Family Field three hours before game time. Already, the parking lots are full with tailgaters, and people are streaming into the stadium. Fans have made offerings of Miller Lite cans at the Bob Uecker statue outside the home plate entrance. I don’t want to head inside yet, so I wander around for a while, soaking up the scene and chatting with folks like Peg, who watched the 1982 Series with her parents and now is here with her own daughter, and Cesar, who read newspaper articles about Brewers games at school when his family couldn’t afford tickets.
Everyone’s in a great mood and amped up for the game, but there’s also an emotion that I’ve never experienced at a sporting event before. People keep expressing gratitude for what’s happening, like they know how rare this is and how fortunate they are to be here.
I feel it, too. Honestly, i’ve been feeling it all week, ever since Jackson Chourio snagged that Kiké Hernández liner and, suddenly, the World Series was a real thing that was happening to us, that we got to be a part of.
I head into the stadium just before 6. I’d planned to mosey around the concourse to see what sorts of special events might be going on, but it’s already so packed that after about 15 minutes I give up and just head to my seat. There’s still an hour until first pitch, but the stands are at least half full. I spend the next 60 minutes choking up at the hype videos on the jumbotron, full of callbacks to the ’82 team and paeans to the city, and looking all around me to try and absorb everything, a little dumbstruck to find myself here.
Finally, at 7:16 p.m., Jacob Misiorowski unleashes a 103.5 mph scorcher, and we’re off. Everyone is standing. No one sits for at least the first full inning. Eventually the crowd takes its seats, but only ever temporarily. Every time there’s a Brewers hit, a Brewers walk, two strikes on a Tampa Bay hitter, we’re back on our feet. It’s like that all night: sit, stand, sit, stand, sit, stand. The World Series, it turns out, is great for the glutes.
The Brewers plate two in the bottom of the first, and for a moment it feels like the game might turn into a rout. The Rays are too good for that, though, and things quickly tighten up and get tense. Am I enjoying this? I’m not so sure. Regular season baseball is a laid-back thing. You go to the game, you get a beer, and if, in the end, your team loses, it’s not too a big deal, because there are 161 other games to get things right. Now, though, every pitch is fraught. I’m normally almost pathologically reserved, but tonight I’m screaming with every Chourio hit, every Aaron Ashby strikeout. I absolutely lose it when William Contreras guns down Victor Mesa Jr. trying to steal third. I resign myself to the fact that I won’t have a voice tomorrow. I probably won’t be able to hear anything either. It is loud. So loud.
All game, the fine margins of October are on display. There’s Contreras’ throw to third, which has to be atomically precise to nab Mesa – and is. There’s a Junior Caminero cruise missile that grazes the tip of Garrett Mitchell’s glove for a double. There’s Jake Bauer’s seventh-inning single, which scrapes the left field line by the ball’s seams. There’s a seeming Rays double play to end the eighth, only for video review to show that Cooper Pratt just beat the throw to first.
And then, in the top of the ninth, there’s the Turang-Pratt-Bauers double play that seems to end the ballgame. All 43,250 of us, more than AmFam’s official capacity, erupt. “Brewers Win” graphics flash on the jumbotron. Fireworks go off. The grounds and TV crews start moving onto the field.
But Tampa challenges the play.
Again, Pratt’s foot is the issue. Reviews show it was off the bag by maybe half an inch. Caminero is sent back to second. The Fox TV desk is pushed back through the outfield fence. Trevor Megill returns to the mound. Then, five pitches and three strikes later, it’s over again. There’s a second eruption from the stands, a second round of fireworks. With the stadium’s roof closed, the smoke from all those pyrotechnics is trapped. It lingers over the field as the players celebrate, as if the city’s golden nimbus had migrated here to swathe the night’s heroes – a scene worth of a 44-year wait.
