Fans aren’t ready for party to end
Energy spurs Brewers to first Game 7 since ’82
If anyone thought all was lost for the Milwaukee Brewers after they fell behind the Los Angeles Dodgers, three games to two, in the National League Championship Series, they forgot to tell the fans at Miller Park.
More importantly, they forgot to tell the Brewers, who assured the first Game 7 for the franchise since the 1982 World Series.
It became obvious immediately Friday evening that citizens of Brewers Nation were not ready for this postseason party to end. Yes, their team was facing elimination and would need wins in both Games 6 and 7 to secure the Brewers’ first World Series appearance in 36 years, but who said that was impossible?
All you have to do is score some runs. The Brewers had trouble doing that in Los Angeles and lost the last two games there, allowing the Dodgers to creep within one victory of their second consecutive Fall Classic.
That issue quickly melted away in Game 6 as the Brewers broke loose for four runs in the first inning, getting the joint jumping. Drawing energy from a spirited audience of 43,619, the Brewers rolled to a 7-2 victory that evened the series and set the stage for winner-take-all Game 7 at Miller Park on Saturday night.
It’s quite simple now for the Brewers. Win and advance to their longawaited second World Series against the Boston Red Sox. Lose and one hell of a ride comes to an end.
The night began with a very familiar face throwing out the ceremonial first pitch. Bud Selig, founder of the club and the man who got Miller Park built, tossed a one-hopper to Brewers manager Craig Counsell, but style points didn’t matter as the crowd roared its approval.
No one in the community enjoyed more the Brewers’ surge into the NLCS than Selig, who still has a downtown office as commissioner emeritus of Major League Baseball. Selig admitted it was hard to root for the team while officially leading the sport but has been more open in his support in his emeritus position.
“What I’ll remember about the last day as the commissioner, or at least my last day at an owners meeting, more owners walked up to me and said, ‘Well, now you can root openly for the Brewers,’” Selig recalled.
“I will say this with great emotion. When I think of the 51⁄2 years it took to get this club (after the Braves moved to Atlanta in 1965), battling against odds that I was too young to understand, almost insurmountable, and all the years that have happened, and now with Mark (Attanasio) running the club, and the guys are doing so well, it’s a great story.”
Selig is way too loyal to the folks at Gilles Frozen Custard to have grabbed a burger, free or not, from George Webb. But he does get out and about in the community. Everywhere he goes, he says the subject is the same: the Brewers.
“It’s been amazing,” Selig said. “I’ve lived here all my life. (The World Series in) ’82 was tremendous. And there were other years that were big, and ’08 and ’11 and that. But this is, wow, wherever I go. And I’m told it’s this way all over the state of Wisconsin.
“It’s really been remarkable. It has been great for this community.”
Brewers fans were not ready to give up on this postseason as they poured into the ballpark for the start of the game, abandoning tailgating early on a windy evening that made it a no-brainer to close the roof and outfield panels. They quickly demonstrated they’d be heard from when Public Enemy No. 1, Manny Machado, came to the plate in the first inning for the Dodgers.
You could step to a microphone in Wisconsin and publicly denounce cheese, brats, beer and Aaron Rodgers, and not hear boos at a level like this. This was epic, deep-throated booing, the kind that Rocky heard at the outset of his boxing match with Ivan Drago in the Soviet Union. Except worse.
Leave it to longtime Brewers killer David Freese to spill wine on the white carpet, however. Leading off the game – a lineup spot he rarely occupies – Freese whacked a home run off Wade Miley, he of the Game 5 starting subterfuge, to temporarily silence the throng.
Shades of Game 6 of the 2011 NLCS against St. Louis, when Freese blasted a three-run homer off helpless Shaun Marcum in the first inning to ignite a 12-6 romp that ended the Brewers' season. But this was just one run and the Brewers would have a big answer, unlike seven years earlier.
It started innocently enough with an infield single by Lorenzo Cain. But, before the Brewers were done, nine hitters would come to the plate, sending four runs across the plate. Jesús Aguilar, who had done virtually nothing since a Game 1 homer, doubled in two runs with two down, touching off the rally.
Mike Moustakas, batting a putrid .095 with no runs batted in, doubled in Aguilar. Erik Kratz followed with a runscoring single, and suddenly it was batting practice against Dodgers pitcher Hyun-Jin Ryu, much to the approval of the home crowd.
By that point, the noise was deafening. And it made words from Counsell earlier in the day absolutely prophetic. In a pre-game media session, Counsell said his struggling offense, which had scored a mere three runs in 22 innings in the losses in Games 4 and 5 in Los Angeles, might get a boost from the home fans.
“I think our crowd is a huge part of this game tonight,” Counsell said. “One of the things we had trouble doing at Dodger Stadium is we were unable to put a lot of pressure on their pitching. Hopefully, that’s something that the crowd can help with. As we get rallies going, that can add to the pressure.”
And the home crowd was more than happy to oblige. Fans can’t do much more than sit on their hands when the offense is going down 1-2-3 every inning. But when a team gets off to an electric start as the Brewers did in the first inning, energy fills the ballpark, bouncing around and around under the closed roof in pulsating echoes.
Suffice it to say Brewers fans were not ready for this party to end. If their team was going to fall short of the World Series, they wanted to make the Dodgers work for it.
They wanted a Game 7. And they got one.