Take A Moment To Enjoy What We Had In The 2024 Brewers

What we trusted as true, that Devin Williams couldn’t blow a two-run lead, proved false. There is reason to feel anger, despair, or frustration in the team, baseball, or even, for the most dramatic of fans, in life itself. But there is also a reason to move beyond grief.

The morning after, I felt a touch of gratitude and a lot of hope. Is this denial? Is it just me coping? Maybe. As a Brewer fan, this is just how I need to roll.

But there is also some basis for how I am feeling. 2024 was a transitory season. On that, the pundits were right. They foresaw a wide swath of potential outcomes for this team, with most of them not being as good as we got. This team outperformed the expectations if not the talent. For that, I have gratitude. We got to watch a lot of winning baseball this year.

Being tossed in the first round of the playoffs doesn’t mean this wasn’t a great year. Pat Murphy injected a sense of fun and pride into this team. These seemed to be missing the previous year when they may have won more games but were tougher to love. The 2024 Brewers were so very lovable. They were our kids. We grew with them as they grew into themselves. There were highs and lows, but there was an overwhelming sense of them doing it all together, and we got to be carried along for the ride. That made 2024 a special season and a joyful time to be a Brewers fan.

This playoff series was the culmination of a 2024 season of transition. The Brewer’s top performers in the playoffs were Jackson Chourio, Brice Turang, Garrett Mitchell, Sal Frelick, Tobias Myers, and Trevor Megill. And they will be the core of this team for years to come. This is something to build upon. They were great.

Will every one of them continue to deliver in the playoffs every year? Probably not. There is a lot of randomness in baseball. We should be used to this by now, but it smacks me in the face every October. Being a Brewers fan is like attaching your heart to a rigged roulette wheel and letting it spin, ever hoping for it to hit on your team’s number. The difference is that the wheel spins for six months of a season and a month of playoffs. As a baseball fan, you had better enjoy the ride: the hope, the anticipation, the ups and downs, and the personal stories. Because more likely than not, your team will not win in the end.

So, let us lick our collective wounds for a bit. We just got tossed off the roulette wheel, and it hurts. But it was a hell of a fun ride in 2024, and there is reason to believe 2025 may be even better.