Forty-four years between drinks

Forty-four years between drinks

“Wherever I am, dig me up. Bring me back here. A couple times around the warning track and take me back to the hole where you picked me up.” —Late Baseball Hall of Fame broadcaster Bob Uecker (1934-2025)

I cried Thursday night.

Not because I was sad. Not because I had received bad news or watched one of those television commercials featuring abandoned puppies and mournful piano music.

I cried because a baseball landed in an outfielder’s glove.

It was the final out of the 2026 National League Championship Series. The Milwaukee Brewers had swept the Los Angeles Dodgers and won their first National League pennant.

For the first time in 44 years, my hometown baseball team was going to the World Series.

And I was crying.

Immediately. No dignified pause to collect myself. No opportunity to pretend I had something in my eye. The tears arrived before my brain had finished processing what had happened.

Then I reached for a drinking glass.

Not just any glass.

It was my old WTMJ-TV Channel 4 Milwaukee Brewers glass, featuring the station’s unmistakable 1977–1980 blue-and-gold “Fat Four” logo and the Brewers’ familiar ball-in-glove emblem.

I had been saving it for a special occasion.

Since October 1982.

Forty-four years is a long time between drinks.

The last time the Brewers went to the World Series, I was a 17-year-old high school senior infected with Brewer Fever.

Ronald Reagan was president. Gasoline cost about a dollar a gallon. Michael Jackson released “Thriller.” Telephones were attached to walls, and nobody had dreamed that someday watching baseball would require three streaming subscriptions and a password.

The Brewers were in the American League then, and their 95–67 team was affectionately known as Harvey’s Wallbangers after manager Harvey Kuenn and a 216-homer lineup that treated opposing pitchers with roughly the same consideration a demolition crew gives an abandoned shopping mall.

What a team!

Robin Yount. Paul Molitor. Cecil Cooper. Gorman Thomas. Ben Oglivie. Ted Simmons. Don Money. Jim Gantner. Charlie Moore.

Among those on the mound were Pete Vuckovich, Mike Caldwell, Jerry Augustine, Moose Haas, Jim Slaton, Bob McClure, Pete Ladd, Don Sutton and famed closer Rollie Fingers, whose signature handlebar mustache deserves its own place in Brewers lore.

Five members of that team eventually entered the Baseball Hall of Fame: Yount, Molitor, Simmons, Sutton and Fingers.

And Bob Uecker received the Hall’s Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasting in 2003.

For 54 seasons of Brewers baseball, from 1971 through 2024, Uecker was our soundtrack to summer, making a routine ground ball entertaining and a disastrous inning sound like the opening act of a comedy festival.

The 1982 Brewers were loud, colorful, powerful and gloriously entertaining.

They also came within one victory of winning the World Series.

I know because I was there.

On October 17, 1982, I attended Game 5 against the St. Louis Cardinals at Milwaukee County Stadium.

My seat was in the lower grandstand — Section 3, Row 18, Seat 3.

The ticket cost $18.

Eighteen dollars.

I still have the stub.

For perspective, I checked SeatGeek’s resale listings following Thursday night’s pennant-clinching victory.

World Series Game 1, scheduled for October 23 at American Family Field, featured tickets listed at $2,084, $3,001, $4,403 and a breathtaking $4,421.

Game 2 wasn’t any better. Seats were advertised at $2,116, $2,909, $3,982 and $5,033.

Five thousand and thirty-three dollars.

For one baseball ticket.

I had to push my eyeballs back into their sockets.

For that amount in 1982, you could have purchased 279 of my $18 tickets and still had eleven dollars left over.

Possibly enough to feed everybody a bratwurst.

I suppose I could take out a second mortgage to attend the World Series. The trouble is, one ticket alone costs more than the entire monthly mortgage and property tax escrow payment on my condo.

At those prices, I expect the Brewers to let me play an inning, take batting practice, drive the groundskeeper’s tractor around the warning track, ride Bernie Brewer’s 75-foot outfield chalet slide and take home one of the bases.

Preferably first base. It would look nice in my living room.

A general lot parking pass on StubHub for Game 1, meanwhile, clocked in at $111 for a 9-by-18-foot slab of asphalt.

Back in 1982, Milwaukee County Stadium was electric that October afternoon. More than 56,000 fans packed the old ballpark, a concrete-and-steel cathedral where the beer and pop were cold, the brats and Secret Stadium Sauce were plentiful, and everybody seemed to know somebody who worked at a brewery.

Robin Yount collected four hits, including a home run. Mike Caldwell pitched brilliantly. The Brewers won, 6–4, taking a three-games-to-two lead in the Series.

I was in baseball heaven.

Milwaukee needed one more victory.

Unfortunately, nobody informed the Cardinals that they were supposed to cooperate.

St. Louis won Games 6 and 7, and the Brewers came home without a championship.

Like most Milwaukee fans, I figured there would be another opportunity on the horizon.

There wasn’t.

Following that heartbreaking Game 7 loss, I made a solemn vow.

I wouldn’t drink from my favorite Channel 4 Brewers glass again until Milwaukee returned to the World Series.

I was 17 years old.

At that age, I figured the wait might be a year or two. Five at the outside.

I was an optimist. Also, apparently, naive.

For 44 years, the glass survived move after move through Wisconsin, Illinois and Ohio, traveling in boxes alongside dishes, coffee mugs and other household possessions.

Furniture came and went. Addresses changed. Jobs changed. Entire chapters of life began and ended.

The glass remained, collecting dust.

Every October, another season ended. Every October, the glass stayed unused.

Meanwhile, I finished high school, went to college, married, raised a family, changed jobs, moved around the Midwest and eventually became old enough to receive unsolicited advertisements for hearing aids and retirement planning seminars.

The Brewers changed ballparks, uniforms, owners and leagues. County Stadium disappeared. American Family Field rose nearby, known as Miller Park from 2001 through 2020.

The 1982 Brewers players retired and became old-timers. We lost Harvey Kuenn in 1988, Don Sutton in 2021 and, most painfully for generations of Milwaukee fans, Bob Uecker in January 2025.

Remarkably, most of those beloved Wallbangers are still with us. They’re older now, as are the rest of us who filled County Stadium that October, but the memories of 1982 haven’t aged a day.

Baseball continued.

And then came 2026.

These Brewers aren’t Harvey’s Wallbangers. They’re something different.

Jackson Chourio. Brice Turang. William Contreras. Christian Yelich. Sal Frelick. Garrett Mitchell. Jake Bauers.

On the pitching side, Jacob Misiorowski, Aaron Ashby and JoJo Romero, among others.

A different generation, with different personalities and a different way of winning.

Manager Pat Murphy’s club won a franchise-record 103 regular-season games, combining pitching, speed, defense, timely hitting and a refusal to surrender.

And Thursday night, facing the two-time defending champion Dodgers, they needed every bit of that stubbornness.

Los Angeles jumped ahead, 4–0.

Forty-four years of waiting, and the Brewers apparently decided to test whether their fans’ cardiovascular systems were still functioning.

They rallied. Bauers delivered. Mitchell homered. David Hamilton added insurance.

Then, with two outs in the ninth, Aaron Ashby faced Kiké Hernández.

A fly ball headed toward left-center field.

Jackson Chourio caught it.

The Brewers had won the pennant.

And I lost it.

I watched the players pour onto the field, hugging and celebrating. I watched the champagne-soaked interviews and the smiles of young men who hadn’t even been born when I attended that World Series game in 1982.

I thought about Yount and Molitor. About Harvey Kuenn and Stormin’ Gorman Thomas. About County Stadium, bratwursts and that $18 ticket.

I thought about all the Brewers seasons that had come and gone. The quarter-century playoff drought after 1982. The long stretches when finishing above .500 seemed an unreasonable demand. The 1998 switch from the American League to the National League. And, finally, the resurgence that brought nine postseason appearances between 2008 and 2025, but never another World Series.

And I thought about being 17.

I’m 61 now.

Apparently, Brewer Fever has no known cure.

That’s the peculiar thing about baseball.

The players change. The ballparks change. The uniforms change. Ticket prices become indistinguishable from mortgage payments.

But the memories remain, and sometimes a simple fly ball brings them all rushing back.

After the celebration, I retrieved that old Channel 4 glass.

The same glass I had carried through three states, countless moves and nearly an entire adult lifetime.

I held it up for a celebratory selfie, wearing my new 2026 National League Central Division Champions cap and a Brewers jersey.

But I didn’t drink from it.

Not yet.

I've waited 44 years. I can wait until Friday, October 23, when the Brewers take the field for Game 1 of the World Series.

That’s when I’ll finally fill that glass and raise a toast to Harvey’s Wallbangers, to Bob Uecker, to the Brewers of 2026 and to all those summers in between.

And perhaps to that 17-year-old kid who made a promise in October 1982, never imagining how much life would happen before he could keep it.

The Brewers still need four victories to win their first World Series championship.

I hope they get them.

But whatever happens, they’ve already given me something I didn’t realize I was waiting 44 years to experience again.

For a few wonderful minutes Thursday night, I was 17 years old.

I could almost hear Bob Uecker’s voice coming through the radio. I could see the green grass at County Stadium, Bernie Brewer sliding down from the chalet into the giant beer mug, and hear 56,000 people cheering.

And I remembered what it felt like to believe that the Brewers would be back in the World Series any year now.

It took a little longer than expected.

Forty-four years between drinks.

Friday, October 23, can’t come soon enough.

Vilas County News-Review freelance columnist Eric A. Johnson can be contacted at eric@fyinorthwoods.com.