And so ends the Los Angeles Dodgers' reign as baseball's most overwhelming boogeyman. The poster kids for the omnipotence of money, the belief that having the best player means being the best team, the power of the big market over all it surveys—all of that feels less important at this moment than the ability to do the things the Milwaukee Brewers do better than anyone else. The same old song has been replaced, for the moment, by this:
Yes, meet your new overlords. The Brewers pack extraordinary amounts of baseball into every game, play it better than anyone else, and supposedly have no interest in hitting home runs. It was fitting, then, that they gave the nation a little tweak on the cheek Thursday night en route to sweeping the Dodgers out of the postseason when the final run they scored in their 6-4 win came on a moonshot from noted Boston Red Sox ex-pat and devoted homer avoider David Hamilton. The Brewers did all the things that made them the best team in baseball this season, and mostly kept the Dodgers from doing the things that won them the last two World Series—and then they did the stuff that contemporary winning baseball teams do, too, in a typically unpredictable way.
The Hamilton homer, his 19th in 949 career plate appearances across the regular season and postseason, was insult added to insurance. It capped a four-game sweep of the National League Championship Series that people kept trying to deny, all the way through Shohei Ohtani's momentary awakening with a massive nuke in the second inning of Game 4. But it was indeed momentary, and Ohtani struck out in each of his other three at-bats as the coda to a difficult and disappointing year for him. The Brewers, who had been swept brusquely into vacation by Shohei and the Ohtanii a year ago, were the slightly better team by record coming into this postseason and the demonstrably better team by deeds in this NLCS, so much so that anything but four consecutive victories would have been narratively unjust.
Milwaukee, which finished 29th in baseball in homers, hit seven in these four games to just one for the Dodgers, including three more last night. More salient was that Milwaukee's bullpen, save for Dustin May's well-placed but still hittable cutter to Ohtani, allowed only two runs in 21.2 innings of work in this series. They were younger, sprightlier, and in every measurable way fresher, both on the field and in the eyes of the beholder. Even the most devoted Ohtaniphiles had to acknowledge as much, as he did when he admitted after the game that the Brewers "exposed some of the parts of me as a player." That said, Ohtani's troubles were considerably less damning than those of the rest of the Dodgers lineup, which was either entirely dependent upon Ohtani or hopeless, period. After the game, no Dodger disputed the essential notion that they had faced a better team doing what better teams do. None of them could.
The task for the Brewers is, of course, not yet completed: The American League still exists, and the still-confusing specter of the Cleveland Guardians, who went up 2-1 in the ALCS on Thursday afternoon, will have to contend with both a literal looming storm front and the Tampa Bay Rays in their charmingly ridiculous chase to be The Other Team in the World Series. The Rays are ostensibly the superior team, there, the little engine that could and has for years; they would be the perfect mirror to the Brewers. Cleveland, too, is not without its mutant attractions: They have pitching, they made a scary bullpen, and they use speed and defense to obscure the fact that, like the Brewers, they also do not hit home runs. However it shakes out, the World Series promises a festival of fun for people addicted to "the first time X has happened since" items. The only remaining team in the field that has ever won a World Series last did so during the Truman administration, and did it with a player-manager. Ask a statue in your local park about it, because all your relatives from back then are long gone or barely remember.
Of the final three teams, the Brewers have played themselves into the inheritors of the Dodgers' role as prohibitive favorites. But while their résumé over the past decade has been mighty, they are still defined by the thing they've never done, which is win it all, and what they have never been, which is a massive and powerful franchise of international import. This makes them all the more lovable, given that the Brewers are the living, breathing antitheses of all the arguments for a lockout. They are both smart and clever, which are things the culture supposedly honors as virtues but which tend to be forgotten amid all the usual drooling over money and celebrity and audience size. But all that is Fox's problem, not yours, and if you are the type of fan who worries about ratings and networks, you've pretty much lost at life.
Whether it's the Guardians, Rays or Brewers, this will be a World Series that blows up the owners' case for the salary cap in its shoes, and more lastingly breaks the notion that there is only one way to succeed at a 150-year-old game. Smart is good; smart can work. Reinventing the game by refining every small and vital aspect of it to the utmost, to the point where old orthodoxies are rendered useless, is good; that can work. Dynasties are good, too, but they inherently contain the syllable "die." This is all new stuff, which is something that baseball could always use more of, but it is new stuff that retains a few touches of the good old days. There is more than one way to do all this, but it is just more fun to believe that winning baseball is not just about the weight of the money, and that nimbleness of the brain, and the judiciously applied might of the arms and the fleetness of feet, really can win if done right.
This World Series, however it plays out, will feel fresh just by dint of the teams that will be in it, but also in ways that other outlier World Series matchups like Rangers-Diamondbacks in 2023 or White Sox-Astros in 2005 did not. This is baseball without the convenience of label-shopping, won and lost on the merits by teams that have been consistently meritorious. And also, it must be said, by the Cleveland Guardians as well.
