By 4:07 p.m. Monday, the beer gardens at American Family Field were already out of the good lager. By 7:00, a man in a cheesehead costume had explained the pitching rotation to three strangers, unprompted, twice. By 11:25 p.m., the Milwaukee Brewers had beaten the Los Angeles Dodgers 7-4 to take a 2-0 lead in the National League Championship Series, and the city had entered the specific emotional state in which a midwestern population pretends, individually and in aggregate, that this is normal.
It is not normal. The Dodgers are the two-time defending World Series champions, a team assembled with the budget of a small ministry of finance, and they are down two games to a club whose closer walked off the mound Monday like he’d clocked out of a shift at a plant. The last four Dodgers batters of the night made outs in a row against a relief corps the rest of the league spent the offseason trying to name.
The series now moves to Los Angeles, where the Dodgers play Games 3 and 4 in a stadium that seats 56,000 and has never, in the memory of anyone alive, been asked to witness this. Milwaukee’s fans, meanwhile, have begun the ritual phase: the group chats, the bracket screenshots, the uncle who is “not getting excited” while getting excited.
“I’ve been coming here since the grounds crew still watered with a hose,” said Dana Wrobel, a season ticket holder in her nineteenth season, at 11:40 p.m., outside the left-field gate, still in her seat’s glow. “You don’t get excited. You just stop making plans for October. That’s the whole thing. You cancel the bowling league and you wait.”
The history books, which Milwaukee consults the way other cities consult horoscopes, contain one relevant warning: teams that fall behind 0-2 in a playoff series lose most of the time. The books also contain, in smaller print, the 1980s, the 2011 collapse, and last October, which is why Milwaukee reads the books twice and trusts neither.
Game 3 is Wednesday night in Los Angeles. The Brewers have won two games without their best pitcher and without their best hitter, a fact the team’s manager declined to comment on with the flat Midwestern courtesy of a man protecting a secret he doesn’t have.
The good lager was restocked Tuesday morning. The bowling league, in a statement, said it understood.