If you ask the typical baseball fan nowadays what their favourite season is, many will answer 2011 without thinking. That year saw one of the most thrilling final days in MLB history, with Tampa Bay and Boston duking it out for one wild card spot while St Louis scrambled past Atlanta for the other one. The Cardinals carried their hard-earned spot all the way to the World Series, where they came back from a 3-2 deficit to top the Rangers in dramatic fashion.

But stepping into the past reveals a treasury of forgotten seasons capable of vying with 2011 for that ultimate crown. 1991 saw two worst-to-first runs that culminated in the Blue Jays beating the Braves in a ten-inning, one-run Game 7. 1941 had the last season over .400 and the unbeatable 56-game hitting streak of Joe Dimaggio. Even in the far-distant past, 1908 stands out as a year in which the Cubs bested the Giants and Pirates in a three-way pennant tussle that came down to a replayed tie that might not have been a tie at all.

But even when these hidden gems are examined, one season is often forgotten, despite having everything you could ask for. Two divisions went down to the final game, the other two to the final week; the World Series, nicknamed the Suds Series, went to seven games and finished dramatically; two ancient rivals eliminated each other in the last weekend; Rickey Henderson stole his 130 bases; and on and on and on. It was a supercharged season, filled to the brim with spectacle and tension, heroism and tragedy, from its first day to its last.

This is the story of 1982.

The 1982 Milwaukee Brewers’ season comes in three parts, three sections that divide nicely and neatly and tell a story of thrilling twists and turns. It’s quite the tale, I’ll tell you that.

But before we can examine the Brewers’ first (and, at least right now, only) pennant victory, we need to take a step back in time and watch the paths of the city and its team.

That story starts, naturally, in 1940s Boston.

The Red Sox were on the rise in the early 1950s, with slugger Ted Williams leading an impressive team that—well, they hadn’t actually won the pennant since 1946, but they had to at some point. Chasing the AL lead deep into the season, with 1951 marking their sixth straight year in the top three, the Sox were a huge draw, especially with one of the greatest players of all time out in left field. The team brought over 1.3 million fans to Fenway that year, fourth out of the sixteen teams.

Halfway across town, the Boston Braves were toiling in relative ignominy. Third-worst in league attendance despite their huge city and similar standing to the Sox (a late-40s pennant, top-half-of-the-league finishes since), the Braves decided they’d had enough of Boston and packed their bags for Milwaukee. The abrupt end was made more so by the announcement in mid-March that the Braves were moving up the schedule and taking to Wisconsin a year earlier than planned. Two weeks later, they were playing baseball in Cream City.

The Braves’ abscondence prompted a wild shuffle of relocation across the major leagues. St Louis bid an ungrateful farewell to the Browns, who skipped town for Baltimore and became the wildly successful Orioles, at least for the first few decades. The Athletics moved cross-country from Philadelphia to Oakland, taking a brief stop in Kansas City on the way. The most historic move by far, at least at the time, was the departure of New York’s NL teams, the Dodgers and Giants, for sunny southwest California.

These relocations got numerous cities up in arms. Kansas City was infuriated at getting a team briefly, then seeing it snatched from their grasp. So was Milwaukee, as the Braves jumped ship after less than 15 years in the city. The ripple effect crossed generations, with the Braves’ disgruntled departure effectively shaping the future of Major League Baseball well into the twenty-first century.

The Kansas City chapter of the story has already been covered in extensive detail by Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein in the first part of their excellent history of the Seattle Mariners. The gist of it is this: a Seattle miscreant burned down the city’s old baseball stadium, prompting a new stadium and bid for an MLB team. The team had to start play earlier than planned thanks to Missouri senator Stuart Symington’s threats to sue the league if they didn’t return his KC team as soon as humanly possible. With the Royals rushed into play on one half of baseball, the brand-new Seattle Pilots were forced into action on the other.

This did not go well for the Pilots, whose stadium was still two years away from being useful. Having a barely major-league team play over a hundred games there made working on it difficult, too. The team flopped, and MLB quickly decided Seattle was not the right move, not right now. The city would eventually make a fuss and earn the Mariners, which hasn’t gone great. (Again, watch the series linked above.)

The Pilots had to go somewhere, though, and that somewhere was Milwaukee, handily solving that city’s complaints about losing their major-league team. Were it not for the whole Braves/arson/lawsuit/faulty stadium debacle, it’s unlikely the city would have an MLB team today.

But there the Brewers were, and upon moving to Milwaukee, they kept up the Pilots’ main agenda: losing. The team changed cities for 1970, but its first winning record didn’t come until 1978. Attendance was sluggish, as the team got used to having a team unlike the Braves (who’d won two pennants in Milwaukee and downed the Yankees at the height of their power for their second World Series trophy). Things got a little better around the start of the eighties, as the Brewers finished top-three in 1978, 1979, and 1980, then won the division in 1981 and came within an ace of pulling off a 2-0 comeback against the Yankees.

But the Brewers remained the Brewers, and New York won Game 5 by a score of 7-3 to put Milwaukee back on the waiting list. That was where they sat as 1982 began.

Buck Rodgers’ third season in the manager’s chair didn’t start well. The Brewers entered the season with rare pennant hopes, staring down four other teams for the AL East. The 1981 split-season had masked what, in happier times, could’ve gone down as one of the greatest divisional races of all time, as the Brewers would’ve won the pennant by one game from the Orioles, two from the Tigers and Yankees, and two and a half from—who else?—the very Red Sox whose Bostonian domination started this whole mess in the first place.

The Brewers were led by slugger Cecil Cooper, who had already hit 134 of his 241 career home runs. But Cooper was also able to hit for average, with his primary weakness on defence (he was unsurprisingly relegated to the cold corner), and in 1982 he was in the late prime of his 17-year career, as he was to receive high-ballot MVP votes for the third of four straight years. The team’s next-best batter, Robin Yount, had to that point played eight seasons without doing better than a pair of seventeenth-place finishes in MVP voting. He had a 1980 All-Star appearance under his belt, but even that year was a disappointment, as Yount dropped from a .325 average in the first half to a scant .266 in the second.

If we had seen Yount today, with a shockingly unlucky second-half batting average on balls in play, we might have predicted his 1982 leap. Then again, that’s wishful thinking. More likely than not, we would simply see him as one of the faceless supporting cast around Cooper.

The trio of teams (the Yankees would falter in 1982) facing off against Milwaukee had stars of their own. The Red Sox had one of the best bullpens in baseball, with Chuck Rainey and Tom Burgmeier both tossing their way to 40+ inning seasons with an ERA under 3 the previous year. The team was best in the AL in 1981 batting-wise, as Carney Lansford hit .336 to lead a star-studded cast of seven Sox over .280.

The Orioles’ batting, by contrast, was nothing to write home about, as Eddie Murray led Baltimore in batting average without making even .300. But their rotation, led by Scott McGregor and Dennis Martinez, was superb, without a starting ERA over Steve Stone’s 4.60.

The Tigers wrapped up Milwaukee’s rivals, with a consistent starting staff (three starters had ERAs between 3.00 and 3.05), a rock-solid closer in Kevin Saucier (proud owner of a 1.65 ERA and 0.959 WHIP in 49 innings), and a young hero in Kirk Gibson, who led the team in batting with a .328 average that year, earning MVP votes in his third MLB season.

Against that, the Brewers had little but Cooper and arguably the best closer—arguably the best pitcher, period—in baseball: reigning Cy Young winner and MVP Rollie Fingers, who’d tossed 78 innings of nearly perfect relief, as he allowed a paltry nine runs in 8 games and 6 innings’ work. His ERA+? 333.

It remains the highest in history.

But as I have said, the season didn’t start so well. Here’s the first of the three parts of Milwaukee’s year, charted by pennant-race.com:

Red: Boston Red Sox

Blue: Detroit Tigers

Orange: Baltimore Orioles

Gold: Milwaukee Brewers

After a 16-10 start that briefly put them second in the AL East, the Brewers tumbled to a 7-14 record in the three weeks following that point. At 23-24, mired in second-to-last with Boston, Detroit, the Yankees, Cleveland, and Baltimore all ahead, management had had enough, firing Buck Rodgers just 47 games into his third year.

The shock move forced 15-year player Harvey Keunn (who should probably be in the Hall of Fame, what with his 10 All-Star appearances and the 1959 AL batting crown) into the manager’s position. Keunn had already very briefly led the team as interim manager back in 1975, and he’d done well, with a career managerial record of…1-0.

A green manager had just taken over a team that was seven games out of the AL East lead just two months into the season. The team’s stars, Yount, Cooper, and future Hall of Famer Paul Molitor, just weren’t batting, with Yount at .306, Cooper at .360 and in a major slump from his .394 April/March, and Molitor at .288. Fingers was at least pitching decently, with a 2.38 ERA, but the rest of the staff was a mess; out of 26 teams, Milwaukee ranked 19th in April/March and 21st in May in total ERA.

How likely do you think it is that the Brewers win the pennant?

Part 2 played out over most of the rest of the season. Keunn would ultimately go 72-43, a .626 mark, and win the AL Manager of the Year award. The pitching staff stormed up the ranks, their ERA rank by month going from 16th in June to 12th in July to 7th in August. The Brewers compiled five- and seven-game winning streaks in June, an eight-game run in July, and five three-game streaks in August, while in those same months losing three in a row just twice.

The Brewers charged up the ranks, taking third place for good on June 19, moving into second less than a week later, and finally catching up with the Red Sox on July 11. (The Red Sox who, if you recall, ousted the Braves, thus triggering the domino effect that culminated in the Pilots moving to Milwaukee to become the very team that, on August 3, took the lead from Boston, never to relinquish it to them again. In a sense, then, the Red Sox lost the 1982 pennant in part because their early 1950s teams had been too good.)

Yount, meanwhile, had claimed his surprising role as the Brewers’ superstar, batting .331 with 29 home runs and 114 RBIs, totals that would eventually win him the AL MVP. Cooper was also hitting well, but it was Yount who stole the show.

Behind the now-first-place Brewers, the once-mighty Tigers had faded, dropping 11 games out of first by the start of September and never seriously threatening again. That cut the race to three, and on September 9, the Brewers peaked at 4 games ahead of the Orioles and five ahead of the Sox.

But with three weeks to go, as Milwaukee had already proved with that early-season collapse, anything can happen.

One week later, the lead had evaporated.

The Brewers lost three of four to the Yankees, New York’s .500-ish record proving irrelevant as Jerry Mumphrey’s walk-off homer and Roy Smalley’s walk-off single downed Milwaukee. Meanwhile, the Orioles went on an absolute tear, winning sixteen games in a row to go from 61-57 to 77-57 and catch up with the Brewers, sitting two games back heading into the last ten games or so.

Sensing Detroit’s fiery pursuit, Milwaukee mustered its forces and rattled off a desperate six-game winning streak, capped with an eleven-inning victory over the Red Sox in which the Brewers tied it with a bottom-of-the-ninth home run and walked it off on a Gorman Thomas sac fly. That took them from two games ahead to…two games ahead. Of course.

The Brewers managed to pad their lead a bit as September faded, taking two of three from Boston before a season-ending four-game series with the Orioles. With a three-game lead, Milwaukee only needed one win to claim the pennant, but Baltimore had gone 19-9 in September and had saved their pennant hopes with a 6-5 win over the Tigers the night before. Detroit had scored one run an inning from the second through the sixth, and with the Brewers’ win, Baltimore was facing a pennant-deciding loss to the Tigers, down 5-2 with three outs left.

Al Bumbry: single. Rich Dauer: walk. Ken Singleton: walk. Suddenly the bases were loaded with none out, and despite their four-run lead, the Tigers were getting antsy. Jack Morris was pulled for inexperienced reliever Howard Bailey. Bailey hadn’t allowed an earned run all year, and manager Sparky Anderson ensured it would stay that way by pulling Bailey after Eddie Murray’s sac fly cut the lead to 5-3.

Dave Tobik took over, sporting a mid-3 ERA. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone as consistent as Tobik; he saved nine games in 1982, a career high, and had pitched a whopping 98.2 innings that year. And when he struck out Benny Ayala, the Tigers (and Brewers, hundreds of miles to the east in Boston) breathed a sigh of relief.

Cal Ripken Jr, whose Iron Man streak began that year, came up to bat and hit a single.

Jim Dwyer did the same, tying the game at 5-5.

Dave Tobik left the game shakily, with men on the corners, rookie (and Rookie of the Year) Ripken on third, and the Orioles hoping for one last chance at the pennant.

Middling reliever Dave Rucker replaced Dave Tobik on the mound, with the game on the line and .270 batter Gary Roenicke at the plate. Roenicke never earned an MVP vote, never made an All-Star game, never surpassed his ’82 batting average, but in this moment, it was down to him to save Baltimore’s pennant hopes.

Roenicke squared up, picked his pitch, and slammed a lead-taking single over Rucker’s head into centre field.

In the bottom of the ninth, John Flinn set down the heart of the Tigers’ order with three groundouts to make it official: the AL East would come down to one last series.

The first three games were blowouts, none closer than five runs, and Baltimore won them all. The Orioles ran away with the opening doubleheader by scores of 8-3 and 7-1, and neither game was ever very close. The next day, Milwaukee finished fumbling its lead as the Orioles tied the pennant race, plating 11 runs on 18 hits and scoring them all in three terrible innings. Meanwhile, Molitor, Cooper, and Yount took 12 at-bats in the third game and garnered all of one hit.

The race was coming down to the wire. All America was not watching—after all, the Dodgers and Giants were scuffling for the NL West as the Braves clung desperately to their lead—but everyone knew that Baltimore could pull off one of the most impressive comebacks in baseball history.

In the second at-bat of the game, Robin Yount hammered a home run to deep right field. The next inning, Gorman Thomas walked to first, then made it to third on an attempted pickoff, from which he was sent in by Roy Howell’s groundout. Yount came back up in the top of the third and hit another dinger, matched by the Orioles’ Glenn Gulliver in the bottom of the inning.

37-year-old Don Sutton, bound for the Hall of Fame, was pitching the game of his life, a one-run masterpiece that proved exactly why the Brewers had poached him from Houston late in the season. With Cecil Cooper’s sixth-inning homer and Yount’s eighth-inning triple that eventually scored a fifth run, Sutton was sitting pretty with the pennant in his sights when the bottom of the eighth rolled around.

But the Orioles, as they so often had, found strength in an unlikely moment. After Eddie Murray’s strikeout, John Lowenstein and Jim Dwyer walked, followed by Cal Ripken’s fielder’s choice. With runners on the corners and two outs, Sutton was faltering in his eighth inning.

Terry Crowley came up and did his best Gary Roenicke impression, knocking Sutton’s pitch over the mound and into centre field to bring Joe Nolan, the game-tying run, to the plate.

Nolan was a career journeyman, one who was playing with his third team in three years, and despite hitting .309 the previous year, he was having a miserable 1982, the average having plunged to .233. Yet it was on the shoulders of this pinch-hitter that the Orioles’ last playoff hopes sat.

A stumbling, hard-hit Don Sutton, trying to close out an unbelievable Baltimore charge, facing off against a little-known backup from off the bench. It was the perfect ending to the Hollywood sports story that was the Orioles’ barnstorming run. Hall of Famer against pinch-hitter; superstar against journeyman.

Perhaps you might like to watch it yourself?

‘Lined…down the left field line…’

The call doesn’t give it justice. Nolan slammed a massive fly ball off of Sutton, right into the deep left corner of Memorial Stadium. It was perhaps a few feet from the foul line.

‘Oh! It’ll be a hard run to the corner!’

Ben Oglivie put the pedal to the metal and chased the ball at top speed. He’d made seven errors that year, and the ball was perfectly placed, a low liner to the very far corner.

Silence filled the broadcast, the crowd’s roar rising in one tumultuous, hopeful cry. Had he done it? Had little Joe Nolan downed titanic Don Sutton?

Oglivie slid into the corner, out of sight of the camera, out of sight of much of the crowd, out of sight of the commentators.

After several long seconds, the voice returned with the news.

‘…and makes the catch!’

Oglivie had made a miracle catch to save the game. The hit would almost certainly had cleared the bases; it might have been a triple, and was very likely a double. John Shelby, who batted .314 that year in 35 at-bats, would’ve been up with the tying run in scoring position. When he eventually came to bat in the bottom of the ninth, he hit a single. Had Nolan’s hit fallen fair, uncaught by Oglivie, the Orioles might well have tied it.

As it was, the game was effectively over. As ABC simulcast snippets of the Dodgers-Giants showdown, the Brewers put the game away with five top-of-the-ninth insurance runs. Baltimore went down to a 10-2 score, and their miracle would wait another year. (The Orioles would win the World Series 4-1 over the Phillies in 1983.)

So the Brewers went on to the ALCS. Facing off against them were the California Angels, who’d clinched their pennant with a game to spare and were as hot as ever.

The Angels won Games 1 and 2, with Bruce Kison shutting out the Brewers over the last four innings of the latter to preserve a 4-2 victory. But with Don Sutton back on the mound for Game 3, Milwaukee held on to a 5-3 victory despite allowing all three runs in the top of the ninth and letting Doug DeCinces come to the plate as the tying run.

The Brewers tied the series the next night, taking a ramshackle 9-5 win with exactly the same number of hits for both teams and five total errors. Don Baylor’s top-of-the-eighth grand slam that plated four of California’s five runs went practically unnoticed.

So the ALCS came down to Game 5, with the Brewers trying to pull off the two-game comeback to become the first to do so in MLB history. Reggie Jackson, Fred Lynn, Don Baylor, Doug DeCinces, Bobby Grich; Paul Molitor, Robin Yount, Cecil Cooper, Gorman Thomas, Pete Vuckovich. Did Milwaukee have one more miracle?

Both teams scored a run in the first via small-ball, a tie broken by the Angels in the top of the third with Fred Lynn’s two-runners-on single. The following inning, Bob Boone stretched the lead to 3-1 with a single that sent DeCinces home. But reigning hero Oglivie halved the deficit with a fourth-inning homer, and the tension held until the bottom of the seventh. With Charlie Moore on third, Jim Gantner on second, and Robin Yount on first (thanks to a walk studded with numerous fouls), Cecil Cooper came up with the bases loaded needing a run to tie the game. Though 0-for-3 in the game, Cooper sent a beautiful single into short left field. Brian Downing’s throw to the plate was just off, and Gantner gave Milwaukee the lead.

Two singles were all that Bob McClure and Pete Ladd allowed in relief, and the last two innings saw the Angels go down quietly. The Brewers had come back and won the ALCS. For the first time in their history, they were headed to the World Series.

The Brewers ultimately lost the Series. You can’t blame them for blowing a 3-2 Series lead, what with winning four straight elimination games in just over a week before that. And while they couldn’t quite claim the ultimate crown, ‘Harvey’s Wallbangers’ still stand as the best Brewers team ever, led by a brand-new, untested manager, a rickety pitching staff, and a little-known hero by the name of Robin Yount.

What’s more, Milwaukee had realised how good the Brewers were. The 1981 team, despite topping the overall AL East standings, was below-average in attendance; the 1982 team was eighth, a marked improvement. The last rumours that, like the Braves, the Brewers were just stopping by dissipated with the 1982 pennant, and Milwaukee baseball was changed forever.

Even now, the heady days of Harvey Keunn’s brief but magical Brewers tenure are remembered fondly in Milwaukee. And even now, they, like the Angels, the Braves, and the Cardinals, recall the magic of 1982.

🢀 Part 2: California

Part 4: St Louis 🢂