Baseball Is a Team Sport

It’s no secret to those who know me that baseball is my favorite sport. I have vivid memories as a boy of buying a pack of baseball cards and hoping that one or two of the cards would offer pictures and stats of current superstars or at least players on my favorite team.

Of course, most of the baseball cards featured lesser-known players, players who made it to the major leagues for only a few years and so had few fans who even knew their names. If baseball cards are compared to playing cards, the cards of the lesser-known players are like the threes and fours of hearts or diamonds.

The reality is that any player who makes it to the major leagues and has his own baseball card has achieved star status, but kids like me knew that there are stars, but then there are superstars.

However, baseball this past season offers a lesson on how superstars don’t guarantee championships. Vacationing this summer in Wisconsin, I was amazed at how the Milwaukee Brewers sailed through the regular season with the best record before streaking through the playoffs into the World Series. By the time this article is in print, the Brewers might have won the ultimate series.

What is amazing about the Brewers this year is that they are a team of relative no-names. Yes, Christian Yelich was a previous All-Star, but he didn’t perform at that level this year. And yes, Jacob Misiorowski will likely win the Cy Young Award this year, but his 2025 record of 5-3, with a 4.36 ERA isn’t anything to brag about. And their manager Pat Murphy’s previous coaching experience was mainly at the college level.

The Brewers are a complete contrast to the team they met in the playoffs, the Los Angeles Dodgers. Compare Milwaukee to Los Angeles, Wisconsin to California, multimillionaires Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman to the no-names on the Brewers’ roster, and it seemed clear that their playoff series this year would mostly end as last year’s did, with the Dodgers trouncing the Brewers.

And yet, somehow the Brewers not only defeated the heavily favored Dodgers but swept them with four straight victories. Talk about a David-and-Goliath story, the Brewers have been just that this year. What opposing teams learned the hard way this season is that the clutch hit to bring a Brewer victory could come from any of the nine players in the lineup. There was no easy out.

The best evidence of that came in the second game of this year’s World Series. The Tampa Bay Rays scored four runs in the first inning, and it looked bad for the Brewers. But they slowly clawed their way back as they’ve done repeatedly over this season, with the score being 4-3 at the end of the fifth inning. Then in the sixth inning, Sal Frelick stepped to the plate. He’s a short player, 5’9” 190 lbs., with only four homers to his credit over the entire season. He likes to wear his socks in the old style up to his knees, and more than once I’ve thought he looks more like a batboy than a player.

But after wearing down the Dodger pitcher, Frelick swung with all his might and hit a ball that cleared the fence—barely—in centerfield and tied the score. It is also the only Brewers’ home run hit to that point in the series. The moment was so unlikely that one of his teammates is reported to have cried when he witnessed it.

Perhaps the Tampa Bay Rays will come back and defeat the Brewers. Baseball is a funny game, one filled with surprises. Even if that occurs, lovers of baseball will long remember the 2026 Milwaukee Brewers, even if we can’t remember more than one or two of their names.

Who is most likely to earn the MVP World Series Award for 2026? If the Brewers win the series, I think we ought to break with tradition and give it to the team as a whole, for it was a team, not superstars, that defeated the best of baseball this year.