Inside The Brewers’ NL-Pennant Winning Clubhouse

LOS ANGELES — Minutes after the Brewers got on stage and accepted their trophy for winning the National League pennant, manager Pat Murphy stood on the green grass in the center of the outfield at Dodger Stadium and tried to find the words for how they slayed the dragon. After a beat, the lightbulb in his brain went off. “We can’t be their whipping boy all the time,” Murphy told me with a satisfied grin. All around him, Brewers players were leaving the field and hustling into the visitor’s clubhouse. A team representative implored Murphy to stop taking pictures and celebrating with his family so that he could join his team inside the locker room for champagne. Murphy, in feigned disbelief, said, “We’re doing that again? That’s awful.” The team rep 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 finally had permission to let go. They paused their restrained conduct and compulsion to win and celebrated, according to Murphy, what nobody thought they could do. The Brewers defeated the Dodgers, 6-4, in Game 4 of the NLCS on Thursday. They swept the back-to-back defending champions 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 and most out-of-control player in Milwaukee’s winning clubhouse. Megill let a teammate pour a champagne bottle over his head. Then he lit a cigar and danced to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver. The ceiling in the tiny and crowded visitor’s clubhouse at Dodger Stadium was covered in droplets of beer and champagne. Plastic sheets were hanging over the lockers, but nobody was bothering to stay dry. In a chaotic scene of unique jubilation that can only belong to teams that have won the pennant, the Brewers drank, smoked and danced their hearts out. The chant “This is our house!” rippled through the visitor’s clubhouse. It was a bold declaration of revenge that the Brewers had been waiting to say for exactly one 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 sweep an opponent in the postseason one year after being swept by that same team in the previous postseason. “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, 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 mentality you’re in, at the time you’re in it. And this time, the mindset was incredible.” Players struggled to describe how much it meant to them to knock out the Dodgers. They didn’t need words to demonstrate what they were feeling when Michael Bublé’s bright and easy voice crooned through the room. Shohei Ohtani’s walk-up song, “Feeling Good” by Bublé, blared from the alcohol-soaked clubhouse speakers. The Brewers, who were already on a different planet, completely lost it. Players reached into carts and popped more bottles before singing along to the chorus like it was 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 appropriate to the Brewers’ triumph that even Ohtani had to be impressed by their taunting. “The Brewers are overall strong and a very good team,” Ohtani said through an interpreter after he finally woke up and hit a three-run home run in Game 4 before the Dodgers season ended. “They really showed, exposed, some of the parts of me as a player, and I got to give some credit to them.” Jacob Misiorowski, standing tall and awkward off to the side of the room with goggles pushed up on his forehead, started smoking a cigar. The 23-year-old Brewers ace couldn’t stop smiling even as he tried to blink away the burning champagne from his eyes. “This is crazy,” Misiorowski told me. “We just believed in each other. We did the same thing all year and look where it’s got us. I blacked out after the final out. Like, right now, I have no words to describe this.” Ask people in the organization when they knew the Brewers were capable of going to the World Series, and everyone has the same answer: the first day of spring training. Even though 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 jump. The Brewers felt like a family. “You have a lot of players on this team who are some of the best players in the game,” Brewers assistant hitting coach Daniel Vogelbach told me. “We have the best second baseman in the world. We may have the best catcher 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 other than winning for each other. It’s all for 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 soon drowned out by players rapping the vulgar lyrics to “Crazy Rap (Colt 45 & 2 Zig Zags)” by Afroman. Players only stopped popping bottles to FaceTime their friends and families to show them the bedlam inside the clubhouse. “I think the Dodgers figured out that we came in here with a little different attitude this year,” Murphy said. In Game 1 of the NLCS at home in American Family Field, Milwaukee fell behind early before rallying to win. In Game 2, the Brewers trailed again before staging a comeback victory 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 they ran into yet another epic at-bat from Jake Bauers, the eventual NLCS MVP, 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 couldn’t 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 this way. It was a deep hunger that was born from last year’s humiliating outcome. “Watching the way they carried themselves on the field after sweeping us last year was a little bit 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 swept us, they sent us home, and you would 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 just say, we’ve got to keep going until there’s not another game left to play.” The Brewers have now picked up 110 wins between the regular season and the playoffs, and they have four more wins to lock down before they can declare themselves champions. They await the winner of the ALCS between the Rays and Guardians, and then it’s go time. The World Series begins on Friday, October 23 at American Family Field. As much as this series sweep against the Dodgers mattered to the Brewers, their fans, and to the sport before it heads into a potential lockout, none of it will matter to Milwaukee unless they finish the job. The number they’re after is 114 wins. “It’s just like Bruce [Springsteen] said,” Murphy remarked. “We have to be the last man standing.”