Milwaukee Brewers

Quite confusingly, the first team named the Milwaukee Brewers, which played just a single season in 1901, ended up becoming the modern-day Baltimore Orioles via several other cities and monikers. It wouldn’t be until 1970 that Milwaukee would receive an MLB franchise again, bequeathed to the city from the Pacific Northwest when the Seattle Pilots went bankrupt after just one season (Seattle had played in the inauspiciously named Sick’s Stadium). With their rich history of brewing up tasty beer, the city opted for a reprise of the long-disappeared Milwaukee Brewers name from the turn of the century (ignoring their much more successful team of the 1800s, the Milwaukee Cream Citys, perhaps for obvious reasons). The Brewers began life in the American League, spending the better part of their first decade in the basements of the AL West and AL East. Led by talents like Paul Molitro, the team finally learned how to win more than they lost in the late 1970s, posting three straight winning seasons before qualifying for the postseason for the first time in 1981, where they pushed the mighty New York Yankees to a Game Five decider, which they lost 7-3. The Brewers were back in the playoffs the very next season, squeezing past the California Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels) to reach the franchise’s first World Series. What followed against the St. Louis Cardinals was one of the great World Series, with the two teams slugging it out back and forth, switching series leads twice en route to a Game Seven showdown at Busch Stadium in front of over 50,000 anxious but eager Milwaukee fans. The Brewers took a 3-1 lead in the sixth inning, but the Cardinals forged a rally to win 6-3. Those same fans, while disappointed, must have anticipated that more was to come from their team in the ensuing years, but boy, were they ever wrong. On the heels of coming three innings from World Series glory, the Brewers embarked on one of the most torrid playoff droughts in recent MLB history, spending 24 seasons languishing in the basements of the AL East, then the AL Central, and then ultimately the NL Central Division after the team switched over to the National League in 1998. The team finally got to play in October in 2008, but were dumped out of the NLDS by the Philadelphia Phillies. Since then, there has been something of an encouraging uptick, with the Brewers appearing in the postseason six times in the last thirteen seasons, even winning a pair of NLDS series in 2011 and 2018 and just barely losing out on a second World Series appearance when they fell to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 2018 NLCS in seven games. After another (albeit brief) trip to the playoffs in 2023, Brewers fans will be cautiously optimistic that their long-floundering team can brew up something good in the seasons to come.

Milwaukee Brewers Rivalries

Because the Milwaukee Brewers have shifted divisions so many times and moved from the American League to the National League in 1998, their rivalries have shifted quite a bit over the years. The Brewers’ rivalry with the Minnesota Twins, for example, has cooled in recent years, though memories of the World Series in 1982 still add some heat to their encounters with the St. Louis Cardinals. In recent years, due to divisional realignment along with the close proximity of the two cities (90 minutes by car), a new rivalry has developed between the Brewers and the Chicago Cubs.

Despite the lackluster form of their team over the years, Brewers fans remain fiercely loyal to their team. Baseball tickets aren’t always easy to get your hands on in Milwaukee (especially if the Cubs are in town, when you will see plenty of blue shirts around the stadium). Head to TicketX to find all the most affordable tickets to all the best Milwaukee Brewers games.