My dad has been a fan of the Brewers for a long time. Until recently, I was not a baseball fan. But during the end of the National League Championship Series, I caught the fever.
"We were watching and I was realizing that baseball could be interesting, like the last two games that we watched were really pretty cool, huh?" I asked my dad, Fred.
"Well, we won, so yeah, they're cool," he responds.
I decided to commit to watching the World Series with him, and lo-and-behold, the Brew Crew has not disappointed. In the bottom of the first inning of Game 1 against the Tampa Bay Rays, rising star Jackson Chourio hit a single to right field. Team captain Christian Yelich followed that up with an RBI triple, driving in Chourio to score the first run of the series for the Brewers.
"Wow! He didn't catch it!" I exclaim after Yelich's line drive. "Good, good, good, good," my dad responds. "No, Chourio's going to score. Yelich'll be on third. Nice."
I realized that my dad knew a lot about all this. Things that I was just starting to get a taste of: the cat-and-mouse game between the pitcher and the batter, stealing bases, the psychological maneuvering.
"How would you describe that sort of showdown between the pitcher and batter?" I ask him.
"Chess match," he sums up. "Yeah, batters have lots of decisions to make. Pitchers have lots of decisions to make. You know, what pitch do they want? And the catcher oftentimes will call for the pitch. He'll give a signal. And if the pitcher doesn't want to pitch that pitch, he'll shake it off until he gets a pitch he wants, then he'll nod."
It's that kind of back-and-forth that gets me hooked. Same as watching players try to steal bases. I see it as playful and mischievous. My dad says it's more daring.
"There are players who, they're not going to try to steal the base. They run like I do," he chuckles. "There are batters who are really fast, and the Brewers have a lot of very fast players. They tend to draft players who are very fast." He says it's easier to steal from first to second against a right-handed pitcher — for instance — than against a leftie pitcher who can see you the whole time.
"The Brewers in general run and try to steal more than most teams. I don't know if they lead the Majors, but if they don't, they're up there really close," he says. "And the thing that's interesting is they got a lot of guys who can steal bases. And they put pressure on the pitcher and on the defense and on [the] catcher."
"There he goes!" my dad says when Victor Mesa Jr. tries to steal third base, again in Game 1, but the Brewers catcher is able to get the ball to the third baseman who tags him out.
I ask him "when you watch a baseball game, what are you watching for?"
"Pretty much everything," he answers. "One of the first things I'm looking for is, does the starting pitcher for the Brewers have control? Does he seem to have his stuff? Is he on top of his game? If he's not, if he's having trouble throwing strikes or getting behind on hitters, that's almost always a bad sign."
"Did you see how that sunk, Maayan?" he asks me after Rays relief pitcher Steven Matz throws the ball late in the seventh inning. "The pitch came in, and then it dove down. That's what this pitcher's strength is."
"You know, in real estate, they talk about 'location, location, location.' With baseball pitchers, it's 'location, location, and location,'" he concludes.
My dad was around for the 1957 World Series-champion Braves – the last time Milwaukee won the World Series. He sees some similarities. When he compares the current team to that winning one, he sees Jackson Chourio as the potential Hank Aaron of the bunch.
"Jackson Chourio hasn't achieved anywhere close to Hank Aaron status, but he's the equivalent of the young, budding star," he posits.
He says Jacob Misiorowski is in line to win the Cy Young award like 1957 Braves pitcher Warren Spann and "that Braves team was very good defensively and this Brewers team is very good defensively."
Another reason for optimism: the pitching crew on the Brewers is very young. "All those Braves pitchers were veterans. They'd been around, I think they were all in their 30s. And these three [Brewers] pitchers are all in their 20s. I think two of them are 24. So that's a big difference."
That may be something for Brewers fans to follow for years to come – no matter the results of this year's series. In the meantime, my dad was very relieved that the dramatic overturned double play in Game 1 of the World Series ended with a strikeout by pitcher Trevor Megill to seal Milwaukee's 3-2 victory. "Awesome!" he chuckles at the whirlwind play. "Nice curveball!"
And of course, he celebrated again Saturday when the Brewers defeated the Rays for a 2-0 lead in the series.
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