Best thing for me about this is we were the best regular season team, best in the playoffs, and considered deserving and the clear winner. Doesn’t happen too often and that makes it feel a lot better than just getting hot at the right time.
I just love baseball, love the Brewers, and can’t believe they won.
Often the team that feels like the Team of Destiny is an underdog coming back from a horrible start to the season or whatever, but this year the Brewers were both the most dominant team in MLB and the team that felt like the Team of Destiny.
- When sports do their major events has shifted in the last decades or so
- There's no longer a common TV culture.
That last point started more with Cable TV, but everyone still got 'over the air' so coverage on major TV networks usually provided a foundation of shared culture and events. It also provided major news summaries that most busy adults managed to see a bit of. As if any of us with jobs have time for that these days.
There's also the war for everyone's attention on "Social Media" and the Internet generally.
If anything, the following of current events overall is way down to what it was decades ago by the general populace. People overall are incredibly ill-informed about so many things despite the wealth of information available.
Three things happened to baseball (IMHO):
1. The childhood funnel is drying up and has been for a long time. Kids now increasingly play soccer instead;
2. Take out the nostalgia and you're left with much. There are too many games, they're too long and not enough happens. Football is bigger than ever; and
3. Structurally I think baseball made some huge mistakes, such as the soft salary cap system that created dynasties like the New York Yankees who could get rich on broadcast rights for a huge media market. The NFL has managed all of this so much better.
I'm not a huge sports fan but I find the systems fascinating. American sports evolved into a 3 pillar system. Basketball season into baseball season into football season through the calendar year. I wonder if baseball's timing over summer has contributed to this decline.
[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/714281/football-top-sport-socce...
Context: I'm an adult fan of baseball that didn't like sports at all as a kid, so I developed no team loyalty. I'm all about good, exciting baseball whoever wins.
Since this is baseball, I might as well provide the other stats I just pulled up as that's very much in the spirit of the game:
21 teams have won more than once: Yankees (27), Cardinals (11), Athletics (9), Red Sox (9), Dodgers (9), Giants (8), Pirates (5), Reds (5), Tigers (4), Braves (4), Cubs (3), White Sox (3), Twins (3), Orioles (3), Phillies (2), Guardians (2), Mets (2), Royals (2), Blue Jays (2), Marlins (2), Astros (2).
5 teams have one exactly once: Angels, Diamondbacks, Nationals, Rangers, Brewers.
The Mariners are the only team to never have even played in the Series.
It's been 78 years since Cleveland last won. Followed by Pittsburgh (47), Baltimore (43) and Detroit (42), not counting the two teams that have never won above - Padres (58) and Mariners (50).
The longest gaps between Series wins are the Cubs at 107 years (1908-2016), White Sox at 87 years (1917-2005) and Red Sox at 85 years (1918-2004).
And in case you're unaware, the first World Series was played in 1903.
That's 124 total scheduled championship seasons (1903 through 2026), minus 2 canceled seasons (1904 boycott and 1994 strike) for a total of 122 World Series.