LOS ANGELES — Minutes after the Brewers took the stage and accepted their trophy for winning the National League pennant, manager Pat Murphy stood on the green grass in center field at Dodger Stadium and tried to find the words about how they slayed the dragon.
After a beating, the light bulb in his brain went off.
“We can’t be their whipping boy all the time,” Murphy told me with a satisfied smile.
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Around him, the Brewers players were leaving the field and rushing to the visitors’ clubhouse. A team representative pleaded with Murphy to stop taking pictures and celebrate with his family so he could join his team inside the locker room for champagne.
Murphy, in mock disbelief, said, “We’re doing it again? That’s terrible.” The team representative said, “They can’t start without you. They need their main popper.”
It took a while for Murphy to join his team inside, but when he did, the Brewers were finally allowed to walk away. They stopped their reserved demeanor and compulsion to win and celebrated, according to Murphy, what no one thought they could do.
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The Brewers defeated the Dodgers, 6-4, in Game 4 of the NLCS on Thursday. They won back-to-back defending champs and earned a trip to the World Series for the first time since 1982, ending the second-longest drought in baseball for an appearance in the Fall Classic.
“Where’s my f-king beer?” shouted Brewers closer Trevor Megill, who was far and away the loudest, most out-of-control player on Milwaukee’s winning club. Megill allowed a teammate to pour a bottle of champagne over his head. Then he lit a cigar and danced to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver.
The ceiling in the small, crowded clubhouse at Dodger Stadium was covered in drops of beer and champagne. Plastic sheets were hung over the cupboards, but no one was bothering to stay dry. In a chaotic scene of unique joy that can only belong to teams that have won the pennant, the Brewers drank, smoked and danced their hearts out.
The cry “This is our home!” waved through the visiting club. It was a bold statement of revenge that the Brewers had been waiting to say for exactly a year.
Last October, Milwaukee was swept by Los Angeles in the NLCS. On Thursday night at Dodger Stadium, the Brewers became the first major league team to beat an opponent in the postseason a year after being swept by the same team last season.
“They remember it,” Murphy said of how much the Brewers used last year’s sweep as fuel. “We had the best record in baseball and people are asking us questions like, ‘Was that year a failure?’ We ran into a team that was as hot as they’ve ever been, the pitching was as good as it’s ever been. Now, they added (Tarik) Skubal to that mix. But it goes to show you. It’s the mindset you’re in, at the time you’re in it. And this time, the mindset was incredible.”
The players tried to describe how much it meant to them to knock off the Dodgers. They didn’t need words to demonstrate what they were feeling when Michael Bublé’s bright and light voice filled the room.
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Shohei Ohtani’s catchy song, Bublé’s “Feeling Good,” blared over the alcohol-soaked club’s speakers. The Brewers, who were already on another planet, completely lost it. Players hopped on carts and threw more bottles before singing along to the chorus as if it were the loudest karaoke bar in the universe. The lyrics — “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me and I’m feeling good” — were so apt for the Brewers’ triumph that even Ohtani had to be impressed by their taunt.
“The Brewers are generally strong and a very good team,” Ohtani said through a translator after finally waking up and hitting a three-run home run in Game 4 before the Dodgers’ season ended. “They really showed, exposed some parts of me as a player and I have to give them some credit.”
Jacob Misiorowski, standing tall and awkward on the side of the room with his glasses raised on his forehead, began to smoke a cigar. The 23-year-old Brewers ace couldn’t stop smiling even as he tried to wipe the burning champagne from his eyes.
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“This is crazy,” Misiorowski told me. “We just believed in each other. We did the same thing all year and look where it got us. I blacked out after the final. Like, right now, I don’t have words to describe it.”
Ask people in the organization when they knew the Brewers were going to the World Series, and they all have the same answer: the first day of spring training. Although last year’s Milwaukee team also had the best record in baseball and was special in its own right, the feeling around this year’s club was different from the dance. The Brewers felt like a family.
“You have a lot of players on this team that are some of the best players in the game,” Brewers assistant coach Daniel Vogelbach told me. “We have the best second base in the world. We might have the best pitcher in the world. And our left fielder is 22 years old, and he’s one of the best at what he does. They don’t care about anything but winning for each other. It’s all about each other. They’re selfless. That’s why they’re going to the World Series.”
Once they started celebrating, they couldn’t stop. The sound of empty beer bottles being thrown into carts was quickly drowned out by players attempting the vulgar lyrics to Afroman’s “Crazy Rap (Colt 45 & 2 Zig Zags).” Players stopped short of throwing bottles on FaceTime to their friends and family to show them the bed polish inside the clubhouse.
“I think the Dodgers realized we came in here with a little different attitude this year,” Murphy said.
In Game 1 of the NLCS at home at American Family Field, Milwaukee fell behind early before rallying to win. In Game 2, the Brewers pulled away again before staging a comeback win to take control of the series before going on the road. In Game 3, Los Angeles built an early lead in a must-win game before facing another epic at-bat from eventual NLCS MVP Jake Bauers to win the game and lead the series, 3-0. In Game 4, the Dodgers jumped out to a 4-0 lead before Milwaukee scored six unanswered runs.
They could not be denied. The Brewers trailed the Dodgers in every single game of the NLCS, and they still managed to sweep the series, 4-0. In part, they can credit the Dodgers for feeling that way. It was a deep hunger born from last year’s humiliating finish.
“Watching the way they handled themselves on the field after they swept us last year was kind of eye-opening,” Bauers said. “We won (the Division Series) against the Cubs, and I think we kind of celebrated like that was something. Those guys picked us up, sent us home, and you’d have thought it was a handshake line at a spring training game. That’s something that I carried with me. That’s something that I remembered. Yeah, it was a little bit of motivation to not keep playing until I’m out there.”
The Brewers now have 110 wins between the regular season and the playoffs, and they have four more wins to close before they can be declared champions. They host the winner of the ALCS between the Rays and Rangers, and then it’s time to go. The World Series begins Friday, October 23 at American Family Field.
As much as this series sweep against the Dodgers mattered to the Brewers, their fans and the sport before it went into a potential deadlock, none of it will matter to Milwaukee if they don’t get the job done.
The number they are looking for is 114 wins.
“It’s just like Bruce (Springsteen) said,” Murphy said. “We must be the last man standing.”
