Brewers ride CC to promised land

In his last three starts -- all on three days' rest -- CC Sabathia gave up just two earned runs and 15 hits over 21 2/3 innings. Darren Hauck/Getty Images Luke Winn's Mailbag Have questions or feedback? E-mail Luke Winn. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND Follow Luke Winn on Twitter

MILWAUKEE -- All of Miller Park remained in a surreal holding pattern, the end of the 26-year Playoff Drought Era so tantalizingly close, the only thing left in the way being three Mets outs, 900 miles to the East at Shea Stadium. The Brewers' workday was already done, their shirts already untucked -- as is now a standard post-victory ritual -- after downing the Cubs 3-1 in the 162nd game of the year. Cheerleaders stood stoic atop the home dugout, holding pyrotechnic devices in the off position, waiting, like the rest of the crowd, for closure in a wild-card drama that had been tied entering the final day of the regular season. Brewers players, who had arrived at the park Sunday morning with suitcases packed for a potential one-game playoff in New York on Monday, sat scattered about the dugout swilling Miller Lites, and then began a slow retreat into the tunnel. Their stadium had temporarily turned into the World's Largest Sports Bar, with 42,599 patrons and Marlins 4, Mets 2 on the jumbotron.

"LETS-GO-MAR-LINS" reverberated through the closed dome, and soon there were two outs to go at Shea -- then one, and then Ryan Church hit a fly ball into the glove of Cameron Maybin, which sent Queens into shock and Milwaukee, a baseball town too long deprived of a team to love, into ecstasy. The rains came in the clubhouse, champagne and Miller Lite being sprayed liberally and frantically, for this party had been no foregone conclusion: the Mets had led the Brewers by 2½ games just eight days ago, before Milwaukee won six of its final seven. When the initial chaos began to yield, players encircled the 6-foot-7, 290-pound giant in the room, on whose back they had been carried into October. "C! C! C! C! C!" went the chants, and hand after hand reached up to pour spirits over CC Sabathia's head.

To drench him required what was seemingly a case of champagne, but they had 20 of those, and nothing should have been spared on their lefty savior, because he had held back nothing in the season's final nine days. Sabathia made three straight starts on three days' rest, the last one a 122-pitch, four-hit masterpiece to seal the franchise's first playoff trip since 1982. "He's been better than we ever could have imagined," left fielder Ryan Braun said of Sabathia, who went 11-2 with a 1.65 ERA since being acquired from the Indians in a July 7 trade. "Without him there's no chance we'd be in this position."

Sabathia had brought two cousins in from Vallejo, Calif., for Sunday's game; as the festivities in the clubhouse raged, they were out in the Brewers' dugout, clad in Sabathia jerseys, downing beers and soaking in the revelry. "They brought CC out here for THIS," said one of them, Joski Conners, as he pointed with the neck of his Miller Lite bottle out toward the field, where streamers lay everywhere amongst discarded cans and bottles, and fans were hanging over the rails with no intention of leaving just yet. "To make THIS happen."

On Saturday, Sabathia had said there was "no way, no chance" he was letting any other Brewers hurler take the hill for Game 162. He asked manager Dale Sveum for the ball, got it, and there was no way he was being removed before the joyous end. With two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and CC up to 117 pitches, venerated Brewers radio announcer Bob Uecker told his audience, "You'd need a crane to get [Sabathia] out of here. A truck. He's not coming out of this one. Dale Sveum would be in the fight of his life to take him out of here now."

After walking Ryan Theriot, Sabathia forced Derrek Lee into a game-ending, 4-6-3 double play, the capper on a three-month case for both NL Cy Young and, possibly, the MVP. The move the Brewers made for him, shipping off Matt LaPorta and two other prospects, will go down as one of the greatest midseason trades of all time. While Sabathia admitted, prior to his start, that Milwaukee's long history of baseball futility was something he thought zero about, he will be forgiven. With his left arm, he helped re-write Brewers history. Without his left arm, they would be fishing.

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The face of the Brewers' first 25 years of existence, Hall of Famer Robin Yount, hit two homers and a triple on the final day of the regular season in '82 to clinch the team's first-ever playoff trip. He was the most-beloved member of that World Series runner-up squad, and planned to make the trip from his home in Arizona to Milwaukee for the final weekend of the '08 season -- but only as a spectator. Yount kept tabs on the current team with his MLBTV subscription, and had randomly dropped in on them once in September -- on the 14th, when he was on his way back from a card show in Albany, N.Y., and stopped in Philadelphia in time to see them lose the front end of a doubleheader against the Phillies. The next day, with the freshly swept Brewers in a tie for the wild card and just 12 games remaining in the season, embattled manager Ned Yost was fired.

It was around 9 a.m. on Monday in Arizona, when Yount, who was back home, received a call from his best friend, Brewers third base coach Dale Sveum. They had played together for five seasons in Milwaukee, from 1986-91, and still hunt and fish together weekly in the offseason. Sveum inquired over the phone if Yount was sitting down. Then came the news: Yost had been canned, and Sveum was the new manager.

"How'd you like to come back and help me out for the rest of the year?" Sveum asked.

With his wife's blessing, Yount packed and headed for Chicago, where the Brewers were starting a three-game series with the Cubs the following day. Over the next 13 days he served as Sveum's bench coach during the Brewers' tumultuous trip to the finish line, in which they lost two of three to the Cubs, then two of three to the Reds, then swept the Pirates and took two of three from the Cubs to close the season. Sveum, whose trademark (besides his bald dome and unshaven mug) is his steady-and-subdued demeanor, seemed to offer calmer, cooler antidote to the tenseness of the Yost regime, and the Brewers fed off of that over their final 12 games.

Catcher Jason Kendall called Sveum, who continued to throw batting practice daily, and held pregame media sessions with a fungo bat in his hands, a "straight shooter, and one of the smartest baseball men I've ever known." Right fielder Corey Hart said Sveum broke down communication barriers in the clubhouse -- starting by holding blunt one-on-one meetings with every player the day he took over -- and relaxed the atmosphere. ("If you do something wrong, he'll tell you right away, in a mild-mannered way," said Hart, "while Ned might have just not talked to you.") But Sveum's steadiness was severely tested by the Brewers' September roller-coaster; on Sunday, he admitted that the ride had been an "out-of-body" experience. "I know a lot of people think I'm pretty calm, and I am," he said, "but today there are a lot of emotions."

Yount was asked, on Sunday night, what he realistically expected to happen when he received the call from Sveum 14 days earlier. "This is what I was looking for," Yount said. "This is what happens when a team plays like it can play." He lamented that his playoff-clinching celebration with the Brewers had happened in Baltimore rather than Milwaukee. The one unfolding in front of him was almost like a ceremonial passing of the torch, with the ever-present nostalgia of the franchise's only World Series team giving way to a young band of Brewtown stars.

"This one is even better," Yount said, looking around the clubhouse. "I don't think I've had [champagne] since '82, so it tastes even better. It's been a long time."

***

Ryan Braun was born on Nov. 17, 1983, making him a good 13 months younger than the Great Milwaukee Drought, and this season he became the new face of the franchise, agreeing to an eight-year, $45-million contract in May. The '07 NL Rookie of the Year's willingness to embrace the city for the long term -- rather than depart at the time of free agency, as Sabathia is expected to do this offseason, and Prince Fielder may do in two years -- scored Braun huge points with Brewers faithful, which is why it was particularly painful for them to watch him struggle through the final stretch of '08 with an intercostal strain in his ribcage. The injury has been nagging him since it occurred on August 9, and in the first 22 games of September, Braun hit just one home run and batted .207. He called it "the most frustrating thing I've ever been through as a baseball player," and without production from him in the three-hole, the Brewers' offense had a miserable time producing runs.

Braun came to the plate in the bottom of the eighth on Sunday with the score tied 1-1, and his batting line reflecting the same old struggles: He was 0-for-3 against three different Cubs pitchers, Angel Guzman, Neal Cotts and Sean Marshall. A few minutes earlier -- shortly after Mike Cameron's one-out single off Bob Howry -- FOX's national broadcast had shown Florida's Dan Uggla launching a solo homer off Luis Ayala to put the Marlins up 4-2 in the eighth. Braun decided to look for a fastball he could drive on Howry's first pitch, and Howry conveniently left one over the heart of the plate -- which Braun deposited into the Milwaukee bullpen for the most momentous home run of his life.

"It can't get better than that," said Braun, in a comment that was eerily similar to the one he made just three days earlier, when he hit a walk-off grand slam off of Pittsburgh's Jesse Chavez in the 10th inning -- the first grand slam of Braun's career, and the first of the Brewers' season. "The grand slam was pretty special," he said, "but this one was so much more meaningful." It helped seal a trip to Philadelphia on Wednesday for Game 1 of the NLDS, and it allowed the city of Milwaukee, finally, to put 26 years of suffering to rest.

Later, in the clubhouse, reliever Guillermo Mota charged up to Braun and said, "Yo, I got the ball. I snagged it away from [Seth] McClung." Mota had been standing in the Brewers' bullpen in the bottom of the eighth, idle while Sabathia showed no signs of needing backup, and ended up winning the scramble to grab Braun's home-run ball while the rest of Miller Park was being sent into a frenzy..

"Hold on to it," Braun said, digging into a cooler for more Miller Lites. "You can sell it on eBay."

Memento-collecting, at the ripe old age of 24, tends not to be a priority. Over his Brewer undershirt, Braun was now wearing a black tee with three words on the front: "LIVING THE DREAM." He didn't have it made specifically for the occasion -- it had been sitting in his locker for a while -- but, he said, "It kind of speaks for where we're at right now." Champagne was dripping from the ceiling, party detritus was everywhere, and the shirt was soaked all the way through.