Fresh off their first World Series title, the Milwaukee Brewers made a cameo on Saturday Night Live, capping a championship week that took the team from a Florida ballpark to a Milwaukee parade and then to a New York television studio. The Brewers appeared inside Studio 8H during Weekend Update of the October 31 Halloween episode, with co-anchor Colin Jost introducing the segment by saying how the Brewers won their first World Series in franchise history over the Tampa Bay Rays earlier in the week. It was the lightest moment of a heavy week, and the players looked like they were enjoying it.
Why it matters
The title itself was won on Wednesday, October 28, when Milwaukee beat Tampa Bay 4 to 1 in Game 5 at Tropicana Field, closing out a 4 to 1 series win and ending a 57 year wait for a championship. The Brewers won 103 regular season games, a franchise record, beat the San Diego Padres 3 to 1 in the division series, and then swept the two time defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers in the championship series. They compiled an 11 and 2 record in October, reeling off an eight game winning streak, and catcher William Contreras was named World Series most valuable player after eight hits and four runs batted in.
The team returned to Milwaukee the next day with the Commissioner Trophy in hand, and the parade that awaited them on Friday, October 30, drew more than 750,000 fans to downtown Milwaukee. It was one of the largest gatherings in the city history, a sea of navy and gold that stretched for blocks, and it showed how much the team had come to mean to a state that had waited since 1982 for a pennant and had never seen a World Series title. The players rode through the crowd, the trophy held high, and the city celebrated a team that had captivated Wisconsin all season.
What happens next
The Saturday Night Live appearance was the pop culture seal on the week. A World Series champion appearing on the show is a mark of how far the team had travelled from a small market afterthought to a national story, and the Halloween episode gave the players a stage that baseball alone could not. The final Nielsen ratings report is still pending, but estimates show an average of 11.82 million viewers tuned in for the World Series across the Fox network, with Game 5 drawing the highest audience at 14.22 million, and Game 3 the lowest at 8.33 million.
What happens next is the offseason, and it starts quickly. Free agency began on November 2, and the Brewers must now decide how to keep a championship team together in a sport where the champions are usually picked apart by richer clubs. The parade is over, the television appearance is done, and the work of defending a title begins. For Milwaukee, the week will be remembered as the one when a 57 year wait ended, a city turned out in force, and a baseball team became, for a night, a television punchline in the best sense of the word.
