After 26 years, Milwaukee has reason to celebrate once more

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When the Milwaukee Braves won the World Series in 1957, and when the Brewers got back there in 1982, baseball fans literally danced down Wisconsin Avenue to Lake Michigan in celebration. Even after the heartbreak of a Game 7 loss in St. Louis 26 years ago, they filled County Stadium on a chilly October day for a thank-you rally and cheered, proud and defiant, as star and future Hall of Famer Robin Yount roared around the warning track on a motorcycle.

"It showed you how hungry the people were there," said Paul Molitor, another star and eventual Hall of Famer on that '82 team. "When you don't have an opportunity to participate for all those years, it builds up."

Now, after 26 long years -- the longest playoff drought in professional sports -- the Brewers and the city of Milwaukee are finally participating in the postseason party once again.

Twenty-six years isn't an eternity but you can see one from there. It's enough time to go from determined singleness to doting grandparenthood, from dating your vet's daughter to vetting your daughter's dates. Players go from Class A to Cooperstown, cars from clunkers to classics, and nations from recession to recovery and back again, all in less time.

Certainly few of those fans could have expected more than a quarter-century to pass before they were celebrating by the lake again and the Brewers were back in October. Neither did the players. "It was kind of a youthful ignorance, I suppose," said Molitor, while sitting in the dugout at the Metrodome in Minnesota before a game one day last week. A native of St. Paul who now lives in a Minneapolis suburb, Molitor played the last three of his 21 big league seasons with the Twins. But the first 15 -- the reason his Hall of Fame plaque has a cap with that old "dog's paw" logo -- he spent in Milwaukee. "I don't know if I expected to get back to the postseason every year. But I certainly didn't think I'd have to wait 11 more years to get to one." Chased it down in Toronto, too, beating Milwaukee back to October by 15 seasons.

Molitor was 24 years old, four years into his career, when he and the Brewers grabbed a half share of the AL East crown in 1981. That was the summer of baseball's first significant work stoppage and its Band-Aid response to the two-month gash in the middle of the schedule was to declare "first half" and "second half" winners. The Brewers entered their first postseason on the strength of a 31-22 second half record, only to fall to the New York Yankees in the fifth and final game of the Division Series.

The Brewers had gotten their taste, though, and wanted more. In October 1982, they went right back. Yount was the American League MVP, Pete Vuckovich went all-in just about every start and won the Cy Young Award and old-school closer Rollie Fingers made 50 appearances, pitched 79 2/3 innings and saved 29 games, third-most in the AL. With popular batting coach Harvey Kuenn taking over as manager for fired Buck Rodgers in the final 116 games, "Harvey's Wallbangers" hit like a softball team, with four players driving in more than 100 runs, three clubbing at least 30 home runs and three amassing 200 hits or more. The Brewers beat the Baltimore Orioles on the last weekend of the season to win the AL East, then rallied from a two-games-to-none deficit to beat the California Angels in the best-of-five ALCS. In the World Series, the Brewers won Games 4 and 5 in Milwaukee to take a 3-2 lead back to St. Louis, only to watch the Cardinals rally to win the title.

That was OK, too, because the Brewers would be back again. Right?

Molitor is 52 years old now. He is trim (Chicago third-base coach Jeff Cox flattered him recently by suggesting that Molitor could make it around the bases faster than most of the White Sox players) but he is more gaunt than lithe, the thick, shiny black hair thinner and more gray. Molitor has been retired for nearly a decade; he gave his Hall induction speech more than four years ago, and while he looks good for his age, he does look his age.

"When you're 24, 25, you do have kind of an expectation of the way things will be," said Molitor, who made it back to the postseason one more time, winning a ring and World Series MVP honors with the Blue Jays in 1993. "I don't know how often I went down to the last week with even a chance to go [to the postseason]. Maybe three or four times in 21 years, where I played games that mattered the last week of the season."

That still leaves him better off than the Brewers franchise he left behind. In the 25 full seasons from 1983 through 2007, Milwaukee finished below .500 17 times. It placed third or worse in its division 23 times.

Of course, the Brewers' drought wasn't close to that suffered by the Chicago Cubs, who already had gone 14 years without a championship when Yankee Stadium opened in the spring of 1923. The Brewers don't have an Ernie Banks, a Hall of Fame player whose career began and ended with nary a postseason trip. (Geoff Jenkins, who played more games, had more at-bats and led just about every other batting category among Brewers players who never reached the playoffs, got there this year with the Phillies and, in a nice touch, will face his old club in the Division Series). But they have mastered a failing even the Cubs couldn't claim: Misery in both leagues. The Brewers missed the postseason in their last 15 seasons in the American League and their first 10 in the National League.

It looked as though the drought might be extended when the Brewers slipped behind the Mets in the NL wild-card race in the final week. It would have been a shame, too, given Milwaukee's first five months -- 80-56 through the end of August -- and the wait people there had endured.

Then came Sunday, when CC Sabathia went nine, Ryan Braun went deep and Milwaukee again went a little nuts.

By Monday evening, more than 14,000 people were down at Lake Michigan again, crowding a lakefront amphitheater for a pep rally-slash-tailgate party sendoff. Jim Gantner, Gorman Thomas and Jerry Augustine, more links to 1982, showed up and were cheered. But there are new heroes now, younger faces, fresh memories. And room in fans' hearts for all of them, past and present.

A wild-card invite isn't Game 7 with a ring on the line, champagne on ice and only two teams left. But for now and maybe for a while, it will do. The wait is over. The weight is off.

Steve Aschburner covered all 17 Brewers postseason games in 1981 and 1982.