A Real Life Odyssey is in Milwaukee

“The Odyssey came out last week?”

Incorrect. It was written thousands of years ago.

But also, there’s been an odyssey occurring in the landscape of baseball for the past decade.

The Milwaukee Brewers have been on an odyssey to find their way home to a World Series, never wavering from their honorable and noble nature of having to find a way to win within the margins that they’ve been provided.

The trials and the tribulations faced year after year resulting in heartbreak have been nothing short of some of the most treacherous, Greek god-influenced massacres, yet they sail on.

2018

2018 was the departure from Troy. They set sail as a contender with Christian Yelich blossoming into a historic soldier with 36 home runs and leading them to 96 wins and coming up just short of the triple crown. 

In steps the wrath of Poseidon: the big market Dodgers blowing them out of the water in the eye of the storm just when land can be reached and eliminating the Crew in Game 7 of the NLCS.

2019

2019, the curse of Poseidon’s wrath led to even more plain misfortune. Yelich continued his dominance as the true franchise player, following up his MVP with an MVP runner-up to Cody Bellinger, only for the Brewers to make the NL Wild Card game where the lead was blown on a misplayed ball by Trent Grisham in right to give the eventual champion Nats the lead, a game in which Yelich would have been playing had he not been injured.

2023

2023, there was mutiny. Manager Craig Counsell had seen enough of the small-market operation the Brewers were running. He jumped ship to manage the rival Chicago Cubs in the division and become the highest-paid manager in history. Did they waver? No. They hired Pat Murphy, who has since won NL Manager of the Year twice.

Even with an elite manager like Murphy, rallying the team with pocket pancakes, they face Scylla and Charybdis where they’re forced to make a choice as a small-market contender. No matter what path they take, they are playing from behind as a team without the budget of the big-market teams. They choose to attack through elite pitching, defense, and development, and even cut costs with some of their most beloved players to load up on assets. No matter how carefully they chart the course, there has been a price to pay in October.

They disturbed a Cyclops after a dominant pitching year, when the eventual NL Champion Diamondbacks outhit the best pitching staff by ERA all year.

There was the bow slipping from their hands in 2024 where Devin Williams, the best closer in the game at the time, gave up a soul-snatching 9th inning home run to Pete Alonso.

There was another storm from Poseidon in which they had the best regular season in the league in 2025 only to be swept by the Dodgers in the NLCS, and it wasn’t even close.

The team has faced sirens of temptation, telling us to give up on them. All they do is get rid of superstars like Willy Adames, Freddy Peralta, or Corbin Burnes to load up for cheaper players, and it will eventually crash out. Every regular season we are proven wrong about them until the World Series approaches.

And that’s exactly what could make this journey great.

Odysseus is remembered for the journey, and what a journey the Brew Crew have been on.

This year feels like the closest they could potentially be to glory. They’ve coasted over the NL Central the entire year and are just behind the Dodgers for the best record in baseball. Jacob Misiorowski looks as scrawny as Tom Holland and is actually a firebreathing dragon ace that holds the record for most 100+ mph pitches, and we keep waiting for the momentum to slow down, and it just won’t. They’re in the top 5 in essentially every batting and pitching metric and have a top-5 farm system in the league with reinforcements on the way. 

Will they turn that into a big name at the trade deadline, going against what they’ve always done to go superstar hunting?

That hasn’t been the Brewers’ way previously. They’ve remained steadfast in what they believe is the ethical way to win ballgames from the very beginning.

And every year, another ship will set sail towards Ithaca.