Lincicome: Rivalries have consequences, and either Cubs or Brewers will find out
By chance and geography, a rivalry is born. Not much before this, really, except ease of travel with a comfort stop near Kenosha, hardly the paraphernalia of bitter animosity. But here comes baseball when it matters and Milwaukee might as well be St. Louis.
The Brewers, once the Seattle Pilots, once in the American League, once managed and abandoned by Craig Counsell, are a checkered bunch, as much afterthought as postscript, bereft of lore but, granted, with the best logo in baseball.
And the best record, too, not that anyone was watching.
Quick, name a Brewer. Andrew Vaughn doesn’t count, being left over from the White Sox. Freddie Peralta? Check the box score.
Anonymity can be a friend, whereas notoriety is treacherous, not meaning to diss Pete Crow-Armstrong again, but only that the more celebrated Cubs may face disappointment while the unapplauded Brewers can retire peaceably.
Is this the stuff or a real rivalry, the historical against the incidental?
Animosity leaks down I-94 more than in the other direction, chiefly because of Counsell turning his back on his old town and team. But $40 million can reshape a lot of loyalty.
The Brewers have done just fine without him, continuing to win the division with Pat Murphy, who was Counsell’s college coach and Brewers bench coach. They remain friends.
Brewers fans know how to hold a grudge, booing Counsell when he returns to American Family Field, the boos a feature more American than family.
There is the irritating habit of Cubs fans filling the Brewers’ park so that it is not always easy to tell who is home and who is away, but that is true wherever the Cubs play. Annoying but not much to build a rivalry there.
The only real competitive occasion was the 2018 season tiebreaker for the division title, won at Wrigley by the Brewers 3-1 with a 2-run eighth. Even so, it meant the Cubs were still a wild card, subsequently losing to the Rockies.
To turn the Brewers-Cubs into the Packers-Bears will take heartbreak on one side or the other and probably somewhere beyond the clumsily named National League Division Series. But it starts here.
Still warm and wet from two celebrations, the Cubs risk believing karma is their friend when what matters most is an effective bullpen, a sad and modern truth of all baseball teams.
Baseball does not need the prevalent T-shirts proclaiming “October,” or the odd boast “Built for Fall.” We are aware. Merchandising insults the urgency built into whatever happens next.
Fantasy being free and fitting, no better finish could there be, I guess, than the Cubs and the Yankees in the World Series, a marquee matchup, if not the rivalry of the Dodgers and Yankees. But that has been done too often.
The Cubs would be the better story, the one for new ears and old values, for anyone who appreciates grit and purpose, and drama and fun, almost a cliché of old newsreels and longing.
The Brewers have their own story to tell, but no match for the Cubs. It is against the Cubs’ nature to become the heartbreakers, the killers of dreams, the heavies in the piece, the unusual suspects, the guests you hide the silverware from.
But these are still the quirky Cubs, a team soaked in myth, always more than grown men in boys’ costumes, indulging curses as alibis, choosing happenstance over logic.
Milwaukee? Didn’t they used to make beer there?
Every baseball fan outside the signal of the seven other playoff stations has to be a Cub fan, that being a curse as well as a tribute.
If these Cubs are not as fresh as once they were, they are special enough to be indulged in memory no matter how many others might come along. It is impossible to wish the Cubs anything but well.
Being the Cubs, they help baseball steal back autumn from football, (maybe there’s a T-shirt there) and the promise of three more weeks of, as an old manager once described baseball in October to me, “consequences,” will determine if baseball gets to keep the loot.
Of “consequences” are rivalries made.