ST. PETERSBURG -- The Brewers were the last team to spray beer and champagne as Wednesday night turned into Thursday morning, their six-decade quest to win a World Series finally complete. They’d come close 44 years earlier only to lose a Game 7 in St. Louis, and Robin Yount said he’d never get over that until he saw the Brewers win one.
And then, they won one. The Kid, 71, was right in the middle of the celebration.
“It’s been a long time of wondering if it would ever happen, and a lot of disappointment that we didn’t pull it off,” Yount said. “But I’ve always had the hope that while I was still here that we would see a Brewers team win. And it’s reality now.
“I don’t want to say there’s a weight lifted off my shoulders, but this certainly takes the sting off of Game 7 in 1982.”
Yount made rounds of the clubhouse like a little kid, sharing words with 22-year-old Jackson Chourio, who Yount will tell you is light years ahead of where he was at that age. And Cooper Pratt, another 22-year-old who just hit .354 in a monster postseason with hits in a record-breaking six consecutive World Series plate appearances.
For those young players, this is the norm. The Brewers have made the postseason eight times in the past nine years. They have won the National League Central four years running.
But for those former players and front office executives who have been with the organization a long time, they know this is not the norm at all. They know how long it took to get to this point.
“To be honest, I’ve caught myself sort of thinking about the miles that we’ve driven or the handbooks that we’ve put together over the years, the reports that we’ve written,” said Brewers president of baseball operations Matt Arnold, who left the Rays in 2015 to come to Milwaukee to be assistant GM. “The late nights, and making sure that you’re up early to get back after it again. I think about the minutes that everybody has invested to get to this moment.
“It’s not just one season. This is years and years and years of investment of people’s lives to get here.”
Continuity has been a Brewers hallmark in the front office. Farm director Tom Flanagan started as a batboy in 1990. Some of Arnold’s closest lieutenants, like assistant GM Karl Mueller and special assignment scout Scott Campbell, go back to the early days of American Family Field. So do Doug Melvin and Gord Ash, the GM and assistant GM who started the franchise’s turnaround by drafting the likes of Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun and still work for the club.
“It just creates relationships, and you have common people that you see around all the time and share good memories, tough memories. We've had both of those over the years here,” said Christian Yelich. “They take really good care of you as a player here in this organization. I think it's a big reason why if you ask a lot of players who have played here, they speak pretty fondly of their time in Milwaukee.”
You just had to look around this week to see that. Former Brewers players were everywhere -- not just Yount, but Fielder, Braun, CC Sabathia and Bill Hall from the 2008 club that popped the top on Milwaukee’s 26-year postseason drought, and even later comers like former right-hander Jimmy Nelson. He wore his cap from the 2019 postseason. That certainly qualified as heartbreak.
Why did they feel so connected to this 2026 club?
“It’s just good baseball,” Fielder said. “Whenever we were going really good, we looked like this, too.”
“When I showed up to Milwaukee,” said Sabathia, “I had never been in another organization. I was scared to death. I cried all night. I show up in Milwaukee, and it's like, these fans are excited. … The reason why I pitched on three days’ rest is because I didn't want the season to end. I was having a blast. And if it takes for me to pitch on three days’ rest, that's just ... extend this thing, I'll do it. So it was absolutely that team and the organization.”
And, Sabathia said, it was the fans.
“I lived on a cul-de-sac and they would leave cookies at my front door,” he said. “It was literally the best place and experience. I would have stayed if I could have, you know what I mean? But it just didn't work out that way.”
Now Sabathia got to root for the Brewers in the World Series.
He was not alone.
“We have an extraordinary fan base, and tonight was a great visual of that,” said Brewers owner Mark Attanasio, referring to the sea of folks who made Tropicana Field feel like home this week. “I woke up the last two mornings and thought I was in Milwaukee.”
Attanasio and Brewers manager Pat Murphy have spent some time this week talking about what this all means. Murphy is the one who said it will take 10 years for that to sink in, and Attanasio thought that sounded about right.
For now, though, how does this change things for the franchise?
“Oh, it’s forever,” Attanasio said. “I always thought it would be enough just to go to the World Series, but then when you get there you want to win.”
They did it. Yount finally got to celebrate the big one.
It was joy and relief all rolled into one.
“I’m not the only one. There’s 24 other guys that since they were little kids playing Little League ball dreamt about winning a World Series one day, and we came within 3-4 innings,” Yount said. “When you get that close and fall short, it hurts. So to watch the Brewers, after all that time, do it?
“They made history. They took a lot of weight off a lot of peoples’ shoulders, because there’s a lot of people in Milwaukee, Wis., who were waiting just as long as we have. This means as much to them as it does to us as players.”