On March 17th, 2025, the New York Times begins their preseason prediction for the Milwaukee Brewers with a sentence that has long been repeated.
“We have managed to doubt the Brewers again.”
Today, as I type this sentence, is July 21st, 2025. The Brewers are 60-40, two thirds of the way through a 162 game season. They hold sole possession of the best record in all of Major League Baseball. It didn’t come easy until all of a sudden… it did.
I was 14 when I decided to start following baseball. I chose the Brewers on a whim. Something about it… felt right. I’m from nowhere near Wisconsin, I didn’t know anything about the MLB landscape. I didn’t know the Brewers were on the precipice of perhaps their best season in franchise history in 2018. I just… did it. It was the best decision I could’ve made.
People in my life know I love the Brewers. They don’t know why, they probably assume it to be how anyone else loves a sports team. They’re probably even right about that. But… at the same time I feel as though the Brewers are the only sports team I could ever feel this way about. What prevents me from ever truly enjoying the NBA, NFL, or even the NHL is that pragmaticism I normally cling to that I don’t necessarily have here.
People who switch which teams they root for depending on how good they are in a given year are called “bandwagoners”. They’re normally shunned within mainstream sports circles but honestly?… I support them. Completely. Sports teams are multimillion dollar enterprises owned by billionaires. If they run themselves like complete shit and makes it miserable to be a fan, you have the right as a fan of the sport to root for another team and given them your business instead if it makes you happier. When people whine about their local teams, I encourage them to do exactly this. If you’re stuck watching a half decade plus of incompetent misery, why? There is no reason other than supposed moral superiority to be loyal to rich people who don’t care about you.
This is funny to mention because I’m not only a fan of a team not from near where I’m from, but also a baseball team with a pretty notoriously stingy wallet. Mark Attanasio is not “one of the good ones”. If anything, he sucks more than most owners in baseball do. Yet… I love the Brewers alone. I have never, ever considered rooting for another baseball team.
They don’t pay a lot for their team. They rarely have many stars. They’ve never won a championship. They rarely even seem to get close to it, losing in the playoffs time after time. It’s… why I love them?
If anything defined the 2018-present Brewers, it is resiliency. Every single year, they say goodbye to their best and brightest players. Journalists, hobbyists, analysts, and everyone in between asks themselves how in the world will they patch those holes? It’s something teams normally have a hard time doing. Yet, they remain calm, trust their internal processes, and run another successful and complete baseball team that year. They suffer injuries like every other teams, slumps like every other team.
The rest of the baseball world ever so quietly marvels at how it could be possible. How every year they take the spare and broken parts of baseball’s other 29 teams and make them whole. Players other teams gave up on for free. Players shipped off as “projects” their former organization couldn’t complete. Even I, often times, write off on players who become pivotal pieces of the team. I doubted Corbin Burnes after he had a terrible 2018. He went on to win the highest honor a pitcher can receive 3 years later. They never doubted him, I did.
As a team, as an organization, as a collection of players they make so much of so little. Their defense is always one of the very best, you can trust them to not make mistakes. Their speed is always top notch, you can trust them to maximize on the opportunities they end up making. Very rarely do I see a Milwaukee Brewers player, especially after the first month or two of the season, and ask myself “Why are you here?”. They may not be the best, but it’s not some inexplicable loyalty or misplaced belief. They have a place.
That’s really where my love stems from. They’re the only organization I can look at and confidently say “I trust you. Far more than I trust me.” and simply be allowed to be a fan. I don’t have to exasperatedly gaze at my screen as I see them do something inexplicably preposterous, because when something doesn’t make sense to me in the moment, it usually ends up alright. Even if it doesn’t, it has so many times it’s easily forgiven and forgotten. If they were losing, I could trust that they would one day win again.
I hope that never changes. I know it likely will, and perhaps I’ll have to question my affiliation then. What I do know is after 7 years, my leash has already grown quite long. Why am I sports fan? Because it’s fun. It isn’t any deeper than that. The Brewers let it just be fun. In a world I constantly overthink and analyze all around me, I can mindlessly be a fan of the Milwaukee Brewers. They can have my faith.