Hi, all. So, a couple things before we get to the Brewers:
First, a few of you have written in to ask (very nicely) what exactly this baseball preview is, since, for example, I barely talked about the 2024 Marlins or Red Sox in Monday’s pairing. It occurs to me that I did not necessarily spend a lot of time explaining the preview concept at the start.
The idea here in 2024 is not to do a typical baseball preview. I’ve done those in the past, and they’re fun to do, but I figure (a) You can find those all over the internet (and I’d highly recommend Joe Sheehan’s preview work), and, (b) Stuff is changing all the time (as seen the last couple of days with the Giants both signing Blake Snell and also being complete jerks). This year, I decided to go a different direction and write essays about each team that are (I hope) different and surprising and thought-provoking and will maybe inspire some discussion/arguments/etc.
So, what I’m doing is simply asking a question related to each team and then trying to write what I hope will be an entertaining and unexpected answer. Some of the upcoming essays, I think, won’t be about the current team at all. They might be about something in history or, well, I’ve been leaning more into the fan experience. I hope you like it. If not, I’m sure you’ll let me know, and next year we’ll try something else.
At the bottom, though, I am putting some basic preview stuff—I’m giving you a predicted record, the players on the team that I rank in my top 100 (and I’ll post that top 100 in full at the end), and a last word about something or other.
Second, thank you to all who have signed up for Joe Blogs (using the 20% off code!) and a super-special thank you to those of you who have donated subscriptions. For those of you who have donated (or would still like to donate), look for an email from me in the next little bit, as I’m putting together little thank-you packages that I think you’ll like.
Let’s talk some Brewers fandom!
What does it mean to be a Milwaukee Brewers fan?
On Aug. 26, 1987, the Milwaukee Brewers were in semi-contention in the American League East. They were 7½ games behind the Tigers, but they were playing pretty good baseball and, perhaps gaining. Nobody went into the 1987 season with particularly high expectations for the Brew Crew—they’d had three consecutive losing seasons coming in, along with three different managers—so this surge was fairly exciting, and they had just come off a weekend series that drew more than 118,000 fans.
Meanwhile, that day, they were playing a Cleveland team that HAD come into the season with big expectations. This was the year that Cleveland had been on the cover of Sports Illustrated—a big Chief Wahoo smiling behind Cory Snyder and Joe Carter—with the words: “Believe it!”
It took less than two weeks for the Club to smash that belief—Cleveland started the year 1-10 and concluded its nine-game losing streak with a 16-3 loss in Baltimore—and that explains as well as anything what it means to be a Cleveland fan.
But we’re talking about Milwaukee here.
That Aug. 26 game was tight. Cleveland, in desperation, had just called up a 24-year-old rookie starter named John Farrell—he was absolutely getting lit up in Class AA Buffalo when he got the call—and Milwaukee started its stalwart, Teddy Higuera, and the two matched zeroes for nine innings. Then, in the 10th, Higuera shut down Cleveland 1-2-3, and Cleveland brought in reliever Doug Jones, who promptly plunked Rob Deer. After a groundout and an intentional walk, Jones found himself facing former Cleveland hero Rick Manning with the game on the line.
And Manning heroically knocked a single to centerfield to score the walk-off run.
And the Brewers fans, as you might expect, BOOED HIM MERCILESSLY.
Wait, what’s that? Yeah, they booed him and booed him and kept booing him. Now, some of you might ask: Why in the world would those fans boo him after he hit a game-winning single in the midst of a pseudo-pennant race?