Alright, who angered the baseball gods?

Look, I’ve understood the Brewers weren’t exactly on the best of terms with the mysterious baseball gods. Not the worst; clearly they hated us much more in the 90s and early 2000s and their recent string of success in the regular season has been a noted improvement in relations with these fickle deities. However, all had not been forgiven, it would seem, as their distaste reemerged as soon as the calendar flipped to October. Outside of the impressive run in 2018, it has been a tough run for Milwaukee in the postseason.

Last October was the icing on the cake. The Brewers were ousted by the Mets in truly spectacular fashion, eliminated in the ninth inning of a winner-takesall Game 3 that will forever haunt me. I’m not sure what we did to deserve the ire of the baseball gods, but boy were they willing to mete out the punishment for such transgressions. Watching your All-Star closer completely implode, in this case blowing a 2-0 lead by surrendering four runs in the final frame, is something of Brewers postseason tradition at this point, but the baseball gods seemed to despise Devin Williams in particular.

Well, Williams is gone, seemingly in an attempt to regain favor with the rulers of the game (or because we refuse to pay anyone any money), as is Willy Adames, who had been the heart and soul of the Brewers since he arrived from Tampa Bay.

It seems that these sacrifices did absolutely nothing to appease the gods of baseball, instead having the opposite effect of earning the Brewers their infinite ire.

In their first series against the New York Yankees, Milwaukee was completely annihilated, giving up 15 home runs in a sweep that made it feel like the Brewers were fielding a high school team. Williams even tried to help us out by almost blowing the only close game of the series, but we couldn’t even take him up on the offer, politely declining to take the free runs he seemed more than willing to serve up. Then the Brewers followed that lovely performance with an 11-1 loss to the Kansas City Royals, completing a four game start to the season where they were outscored by 32 runs.

Now, obviously these are just four games. If this happened in June, I don’t think it would feel as bad. I don’t know if it was the Yankees using their new “torpedo” bats, or because Milwaukee has nine of their top 13 pitchers on the IL, or if the baseball gods truly hate the Brewers, but regardless, I don’t think you could have a worse start to a season. Here’s hoping it’s just the first option and not the last.

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW

BY

NATHANIEL U NDERWOOD REPORTER