LOS ANGELES -- In the midst of the crawl of revelers wandering around the Dodger Stadium field looking for people to hug late Thursday night, two old teammates came together in celebration.
It was eye-catching because both are former National League MVP winners with jet-black hair, one retired, one still very much in the thick of it. Both won those MVP trophies while wearing the uniform of a successful franchise with rabid fan support that is nonetheless one of the final five big league clubs without a championship.
That may soon change: The reason Ryan Braun and Christian Yelich embraced, posed for pictures together and generally beamed like happy children was that their Milwaukee Brewers had moved one step closer to removing their name from that final five list of nonchampions by clinching their first World Series trip in 44 years.
“They’ve brought me and all the former Brewers so much pride,” Braun said. “We’re all on group text and talking about this constantly. The way they play as a group, the belief they have in each other.”
The Brewers had just knocked out the two-time champion Los Angeles Dodgers with alarming alacrity, shrugging off a four-run deficit created by a ballpark-shaking three-run homer off the previously dormant bat of Shohei Ohtani and rallying to win 6-4, completing a four-game sweep.
“This place is going crazy and all the momentum’s swinging the other way,” Yelich said. “And we’re like, ‘Hey, just stay together, guys. This is gonna be a great way to win it. Just chip away. This is gonna be a great story.’”
Yelich and his teammates were not wrong. For just the second time in 58 years of existence, 57 if you don’t want to count their one-year expansion stint as the Seattle Pilots, the Milwaukee Brewers are headed to the World Series. The previous time, 1982, happened when the Brewers were still in the American League, so, by winning on Thursday, the Brewers removed their name from another list to avoid: Milwaukee was the only current NL franchise that had never won a flag in that circuit.
“Forty-four years of hope, 44 years of heartbreak, 44 years of believing that we would have our moment, and that moment has arrived,” Braun said. “So I’m sure they’re thrilled to have a team for the current generation of Brewers fans, because a lot of them probably weren’t alive in ’82.”
It’s a start.
“We have an unbelievable opportunity in front of us,” Yelich said. “It’s something that you dream about as a kid.”
The Brewers have been knocking on this door for a decade. Braun was there at the start of it, before retiring in 2020, and Yelich has been there for nearly all of it, save for 2017, when Milwaukee began its streak of competitive seasons. Beginning with that campaign, Milwaukee has since played just two games after being eliminated from playoff contention. Thus, nearly every game Yelich has played in for Milwaukee -- 1,124, including the playoffs, has had something on the line.
But until Thursday, there had been a ceiling to Milwaukee’s penchant for punching above its market weight -- the NLCS, with the Dodgers twice before serving as the brick wall into which the Brewers ran. That the Brewers finally crashed through and did it in Southern California, where Yelich and a number of his teammates are from, made it that much more gratifying.
“I don’t know if you told me as a kid that this would be a thing that happened if I would believe you,” Yelich said. “Which is pretty crazy. It’s just an awesome moment and memory.”
The pennant clincher came just 19 days after Yelich was named as the first team captain in Brewers history, an honor made tangible by the “C” that is now stitched onto his jersey. None of the greats in Brewers history -- Braun, Robin Yount, Paul Molitor, Cecil Cooper -- were so honored.
Yelich has become well-schooled in Brewers history, likely in part because it’s hard to avoid in Milwaukee. The Brewers are pretty history-forward in the way they honor their greats in and around American Family Field. Yount, the Hall of Famer who rates pretty clearly as the best player in franchise history, is a frequent presence. When you walk into the Brewers’ clubhouse, the first thing you see are a row of lockers with jerseys hanging in them -- Hank Aaron (who played his final two seasons with the Brewers after starring for the Milwaukee then Atlanta Braves), Yount, Molitor and Rollie Fingers among them.
“The team does a great job of bringing those guys back, giving them opportunities to come back, and when they do come back, they hang out in the clubhouse,” NLCS MVP Jake Bauers said. “They talk to us. We get to hang out with them.”
According to MLB.com, before Yelich accepted the captainship, he checked with Yount to get his blessing. That’s how much respect he has for the Brewers who came before him. And while Yelich has forged a friendship with Yount over the years, one thing he has never asked about is that long-ago 1982 World Series.
Now might be a good time to inquire, especially since Yount hit .414 in that seven-game thriller against the St. Louis Cardinals.
“Hopefully he’s around and we can have that conversation,” Yelich said. “It would be awesome. He’s a great guy. What an ambassador for the Brewers and just a pillar of the organization.”
To pay a visit to American Family Field is to step into a ballpark that you’d never guess was the home of a team that was oh-for-history on the championship leaderboard. From the scores of pregame tailgaters who populate the sea of parking lots around the park, to the sight of Bernie the Brewer sliding down his chute after a Brewers home run, to the iconic sausage races, to the ritual of singing “Beer Barrel Polka” during the seventh-inning stretch, it is one of baseball’s most distinct game-day experiences.
And even though Milwaukee is baseball’s smallest market, the Brewers draw well, this season bringing in 2.788 million fans, which ranked 11th in the majors. That was more than the Mets and Angels, just to pick on two big-market franchises.
All of this is to suggest that this pennant, and the forthcoming shot at a title, is going to set the state of Wisconsin on its ear.
“We understand who we’re playing for, what it means to the city,” Yelich said. “They’re going to be stoked, and we’re so excited to get back to them. They’ve been unbelievable.”
Yelich wasn’t around for that 1982 pennant, of course, but he’s been around for plenty of baseball success in Milwaukee. Since Yelich joined the team, the Brewers have made the playoffs in eight out of nine seasons. They’ve won six NL Central titles, including the past four. They have advanced to three National League Championship Series and, now, won a pennant. The Dodgers are the only NL team with more wins during that span.
Yet the reality of playing in Milwaukee means that even as Yelich has remained the face of the franchise and a fixture in the community, the team around him has iterated again and again, even as the wins continue to pile up. Thus it is on him to be the exemplar of what it means to be a Brewer.
“You can say you want to win, but you have to do the things and hold each other to the standard of being a really good team,” Yelich said. “And we do a great job of that here.”
The teammates have changed and the Brewers’ style of play has evolved. Craig Counsell left for the rival Cubs, so Pat Murphy took over as manager. David Stearns earned widespread praise for his tenure as the Brewers’ baseball operations honcho but is now with the Mets. Matt Arnold was promoted to replace Stearns following the 2022 season and, if anything, has upped the ante.
Yelich has been the one constant among the position players, with Brandon Woodruff filling a similar role for the pitchers. For teams looking to replicate what the Brewers have done, well, good luck because it’s not a simple formula, but a complex and persistent iteration of top-to-bottom organizational best practices. But the value of having touchstone players like Yelich and Woodruff around is something that can be replicated because the benefits are tangible and intangible, and obvious.
“Yeli, he changed the culture here,” Bauers said. “This is the better part of 10 years of work for him to really change this organization. So I don’t know how he’s feeling right now, but I’m sure it’s pretty strong.”
The break-through edition of the Brewers came together after years of good scouting, good development, good financial decisions and so much else. As the rosters evolved, getting better and better even though the previous versions were already good, incoming players had Yelich and Woodruff to turn to.
“They make the clubhouse go,” All-Star second baseman Brice Turang said. “Their experiences and just teaching us some of their experiences or wanting us to be better in certain aspects of the game or teaching us the game, you learn. Even as you are in the big leagues, you’re still learning all the time. Those guys are the guys to lean on to ask questions.”
But as the Braun/Eric Thames upstarts of 2017 turned into the Yelich/Lorenzo Cain teams that featured the three-headed rotation monster of Woodruff, Corbin Burnes and Freddy Peralta, to the “jumbo infield” teams with Mike Moustakas, Jonathan Schoop and Travis Shaw, the Brewers were very gradually becoming what they are -- a team with a magical combination of youth, veteran presence, athleticism, skill, depth and loads of pitching.
One by one they joined Yelich in the clubhouse: Turang, Garrett Mitchell and Sal Frelick one year; Luis Lara and Cooper Pratt another. William Contreras. The sublime Jackson Chourio. Second-chance hitters like Bauers, Andrew Vaughn, Gary Sanchez. And those are just the position players.
“It’s a special group,” Yelich said. “Guys are willing to do whatever it takes to win. Like nobody nobody has an ego. Nobody cares who the guy is that gets it done. Nobody cares.”
The talent was there in 2026, as it was in 2025, when the Brewers also fashioned baseball’s best regular-season record. But something was different with this bunch. Somehow, with each roster change, the Brewers seemed to get closer, to operate more as one. A hive mentality emerged, an all-for-one ethos that was never mere rhetoric.
And Yelich, as the team’s most recognizable player, meshed easily with the group, which game by game created something that has become recognizable as Brewers baseball. It’s a vibe so apparent and infectious to anyone who has regularly watched the Brewers this season that the team’s marketing arm has canned it into the slogan “Win Our Way.”
“I couldn’t be more proud of him,” Braun said. “He has such a unique impact on this group of young guys, just with his ability to connect, his ability to be humble, to be himself, to come out and grind and compete every day, whether things are going great for him personally or not. He really helps us set the tone for the team.”
As the Brewers were enjoying their best-ever regular season, winning a franchise-record 103 games, Yelich was having his worst. At 34, his OPS+ was a career-low 91 and he posted just 0.1 wins above replacement over 118 games.
Yelich has struggled with injuries and after his monster first two seasons in Milwaukee, he has operated on a lesser, but still admirable, performance tier. He’s still young enough to bounce back from this season’s struggles, but he’s also at an age where it might simply be downhill from here.
With so many young standouts propelling the Brewers along, it might have been natural for Yelich to fade into the background, or to feel left out of the team’s success. That wasn’t the case, yet someone (identity unknown) had a notion and pinged Murphy with the idea of formalizing the essential role Yelich still played, numbers be damned, by naming him captain.
“All young people today coming into the game should be so lucky to be guided by a guy like this,” Murphy said. “He doesn’t bully them. He’s not trying to browbeat them. He’s not trying to convince them of everything. He’s just living his life the way he lives his life, and he’s welcoming. He’s got so many great qualities, and he lives it.”
Yelich isn’t a shouter but instead remains incessantly friendly and accessible. He leads by example, in the clubhouse and beyond. This year he was the Brewers’ nominee for the Roberto Clemente Award for the second time in four seasons. He’s still a viable big league player, a regular on the National League champions. But he has become more than a good player. He has become a steward for the kind of baseball team, and organization, the Brewers want to be.
This is why after the Game 4 clincher, one in which Yelich went 0-for-4, he was one of the most sought out members of the Brewers. Everyone wanted to know what he was feeling, what it meant to him, as a player who’s been knocking on the title door for nine years.
The door is now ajar. American Family Field will host its first World Series game ever on Oct. 23. And when Yelich is introduced before Game 1, the roar will be heard from Kenosha to the Wisconsin Dells. The former Marlin, by way of SoCal, is now the new Mr. Brewer.
“You understand that your performance as a team directly impacts the happiness of the people in the state,” Yelich said. “You don’t take that for granted. It’s been awesome playing here. I’ve really loved it the last nine years and am looking forward to more.”