At the time of this writing, the Brewers are just four games over .500, playing an all-but-meaningless game against the Miami Marlins. And to think as recently as two weeks ago, a division title didn’t seem out of the question. A wild card berth was practically guaranteed. The Brewers’ postseason odds were over 80%. Fans with season tickets were putting in their orders for playoff tickets.
As the great poet Elton John once said, the past is another land.
In our disappointment, we might choose to lash out with predictable calls for Ron Roenicke to be fired. But there’s no point in being upset. In fact, shouldn’t we be grateful? Not because the Brewers far exceeded the expectations we all had in spring training (although that’s not a bad reason to be grateful), but because they gave fans the opportunity to give up before the final few days of the season. Now we don’t have to endure the stress of a pennant race or a playoff run.
The 2008 and 2011 playoff teams brought us some fleeting joy, but they also made us gnash our teeth and tear our hair out. The 2008 NLDS and the 2011 NLDS/NLCS were goddamn torture. The last two weeks of the 2008 season probably took as many years off our lives as cigarettes. The fact we can effortlessly transition into football season without being tormented by competitive Brewers team is surely beneficial to our physical and mental wellbeing.
In 2013, the Brewers never recovered from an awful May in which they went 6-22. For most of the summer, fans were able to enjoy the purity of the game without that pesky sense of hope consuming our attention. We got to see the emergence of Khris Davis, Nori Aoki’s “moustache” gesture, one of Marco Estrada’s best seasons, K-Rod’s 300th save, and Carlos Gomez earn a Gold Glove. We had a great time at Miller Park without the weight of history dragging us down.
In 2012, the Brewers were sub-.500 in the first half and ended up trading Zack Greinke – a move that symbolically freed us to move on with our lives while there was plenty of summer left. When the team dragged itself into the outskirts of wild card contention late in the year, they were close enough to give us a warm fuzzy feeling without ever really getting our hopes up. That was probably as good as it gets.
For those of us who can remember as far back as 2010, the Brewers fell apart in April, giving us five months of peace. In 2009, they led the NL Central as late as the first week of July before coming down to earth. Those teams also generously let us off the hook with plenty of time to spare.
They say baseball is a game of failure. It would have been nice if this year’s team hadn’t strung us along so late, but nobody’s perfect. Thank you, 2014 Brewers, for sparing us the strain of meaningful games in mid-September. We are now free to enjoy our Hank the Dog bobbleheads this weekend.
(Image: Joe Sargent/Getty)
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