USA TODAY International Edition
Quirky Brewers kind of team MLB needs in playoffs
MILWAUKEE – The Brewers are the last team Major League Baseball and Fox executives want to see in the World Series. Why do they hate fun? Yes, the Brewers are a small-market team. The smallest of the small markets, to be exact. They don’t have the cachet of the Dodgers or the Red Sox, and they don’t have Houston’s bragging rights. The radio guy rivals the soon-tobe National League MVP for star power. But, man, is Milwaukee fun. Just the kind of wacky fun baseball needs. The Brewers took down the mighty Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers on Friday night with the kind of quirky game you’d normally see in spring training, not Game 1 of the NL Championship Series. Manager Craig Counsell pulled Gio Gonzalez after two innings, the pitcher who relieved him took Kershaw deep and the guy who pinch-hit for him singled in two runs. There was a catcher’s interference call to keep an inning alive, and an overturned call on a steal to extend another one. The closer nearly gave the game away, only to strike out Yasiel Puig. If that’s not enough, the 6-5 victory gives all of Milwaukee a free hamburger. See, wacky. “We’re a fun team to watch,” infielder Travis Shaw told USA TODAY. “I think once people get to watch us a little bit, they’ll enjoy watching us.” You wouldn’t know it from the rabid, towel-waving, sold-out crowd at Miller Park, but baseball is in the doldrums. Attendance was down sharply this year, TV ratings lag well behind the NFL’s and kids don’t dig baseball like they used to. Part of that is the length of games and the late starts; Friday’s game lasted 4 hours and 2 minutes and ended at 12:14 p.m. ET. But the bigger problem is that all the fun has been sucked out of baseball by esoteric stats, shifts and pitch counts. The Brewers are not immune to this. Few other managers have embraced the shift such as Counsell, and he’s a matchup savant. But he’s not afraid to turn traditional philosophy on its head, either. Take Friday’s game. Gonzalez had not pitched since Sept. 30, so he was fresh enough to pitch a complete game. Yet Counsell’s plan was to have him go two innings and let the bullpen take over. Sure enough, he brought Brandon Woodruff in to pitch the third, and he retired the Dodgers in order the next two innings. He also took Kershaw deep to rightcenter to lead off the bottom of the inning and tie the score. “It certainly changed the energy in our dugout from what you think is going to be the kind of grind-it-out game against Clayton,” Counsell said. “That happens; it gives everybody life.” “It’s a breath of fresh air,” Gonzalez said. “You’ve got this kind of stuff where you’ve never been a part of it and now you’re doing it. It’s exciting to see the revolution.” OK, but some pitchers would be less than pleased at getting such a quick hook. When that question was posed to him, however, Gonzalez’s face left no doubt how crazy that idea is. “It’s exciting,” he said. “At the end of the day, everybody’s pitching. Everybody gets a chance to pitch. Which is what you’re playing this game for. Everybody wants to be a part of it. Everybody wants to grab an at-bat.” That’s the most appealing part of these Brewers. They’re playing with the kind of abandon that made them fall in love with the game in the first place. The roster is a glorious mishmash of homegrown products and castoffs reveling in a second chance, so they don’t much care what roles they’re playing or who’s getting the credit. Derek Jeter will rue the day he thought trading Christian Yelich was a good idea, if he doesn’t already. Jesus Aguilar, whose solo homer in the seventh turned out to be the game-winner, bounced around the minors and had a few cups of coffee in Cleveland over three seasons before the Brewers claimed him off waivers before last season. Mike Moustakas escaped the purgatory that is now Kansas City before the trade deadline. “We play like a family,” Aguilar said. “We don’t got like a specific hero. The most important thing is to win games.” And winning games they are, 12 in a row — thus, the free hamburgers from local institution George Webb. Since the NLCS expanded to seven games 32 years ago, the Game 1 winner has gone on to clinch the pennant 23 times. The last team to buck that trend was the Giants in 2012. Which means the whole country could be seeing more of the Brewers. “It’s something different,” Shaw said. “The three teams that are left besides us have all been there, done that. We haven’t been ... so it’ll be a nice change.” If you don’t enjoy what the Brewers are doing, then you don’t really enjoy baseball. And you sure don’t enjoy fun.