CINCINNATI – The Brewers’ No. 1 fan doesn’t watch every inning of every game, or, really, many innings at all. But Robin Yount still checks the scores every day and checks in on the club whenever he can, like when he went to the bar for a cold drink during a Hawaiian vacation in July and found the Brewers and Dodgers on television.
Yount sat down and watched the game. The Brewers won, so he watched from the same pool bar the following day. They won again.
They have been doing a lot of that lately, just like Yount and the 1987 Brewers did when they started that season with a franchise-record 13-game winning streak. But now there’s a new “Team Streak” in Milwaukee’s baseball lore after a wild Saturday night at Great American Ball Park.
The club that refuses to lose tied the Reds in the ninth inning, scored again in the 10th and then saw the latest unlikely hero emerge when backup infielder Andruw Monasterio came off the bench in the 11th to hammer a three-run home run for a 6-5 victory, pushing the longest winning streak in the Majors this season to 14 games.
It’s a new franchise record, and the longest winning streak in the Majors since the 2022 Mariners won 14 in a row. The only one longer this decade belongs to the 2021 Cardinals, who had a 17-game spree that September.
“Right now, they’re national news. Everybody is talking about the Brewers,” said Yount, who played all 20 of his Hall of Fame seasons in Milwaukee. “I get texts from friends all over the country saying, ‘How about your Brewers?’ I think it’s captivating everybody.”
Ditto for Dale Sveum, the former shortstop who starred in the most memorable win for the ‘87 Brewers during their 13-0 start. His walk-off home run completed an Easter Sunday comeback against the Rangers for win No. 12.
“There’s a guy I golf with all the time and he was like, ‘Do you want them to break the record?’” Sveum said. “I go, ‘You’re asking me if I want them to lose? I don’t want them to lose. I want them to walk away with the rest of the season.’”
Who’s to say they won’t? Monasterio, a 28-year-old from Caracas, Venezuela was the unlikeliest of heroes when you think about it. He didn’t make the Brewers’ Opening Day roster this season. He hit five home runs over parts of three seasons in the Majors prior to Saturday, including one this year. He’d never hit a pinch-hit home run in his career. And not only did the Brewers have zero pinch-hit home runs this season, they had zero pinch-hit home runs in their last 260 games in the regular season dating to Gary Sánchez last April.
With this team, none of it seems to matter.
The Brewers have now won 14 consecutive games started by right-hander Quinn Priester. And when Monasterio connected in the 11th against Reds reliever Joe La Sorsa, it was No. 14 delivering win No. 14.
“That’s something, like, only God or the universe [can make] happen like that,” Monasterio said. “I wasn’t ready for 14 for 14. That’s something amazing.”
But make no mistake, he was ready for the at-bat. Four times prior to the 11th inning, Brewers manager Pat Murphy told Monasterio to be prepared to pinch-hit. On the fourth occasion, Murphy asked, “Are you ready for a big moment?”
“I said, ‘Of course, yeah,’” Monasterio recalled. “But I didn’t know it was going to happen like this.”
“You pull for guys like ‘Mona’ who do whatever you ask,” Murphy said. “That’s the group we’ve got – a bunch of hungry, hungry guys. That’s all I can keep saying because it’s what it is. Guys who come and want to win and want to play. A lot of cliffhangers, guys that are hanging on to the big leagues. You come to this game today and you watch [Joey] Ortiz get pinch-hit for and he’ll be back tomorrow making unbelievable plays. It’s undaunted. They just keep coming.
“You know, the guys we’re doing it with, a lot of people have never heard of Quinn Priester. They never heard of Monasterio, I guarantee it.”
Perhaps they have now. And they certainly know about the way the Brewers have been putting on a nightly tutorial on the value of putting the ball in play. Just consider how they hung in there for most of Saturday night.
They scored their first run when Brice Turang’s catchable line drive instead got over the head of Noelvi Marte for an RBI double. They scored the tying run when Reds shortstop Elly De La Cruz, with a game-ending double play in mind, skipped a 91.1 mph throw past first base, and they scored again in the 10th when Cincinnati left fielder Jake Fraley tripped and fell while fielding William Contreras’ base hit and was injured. And they pushed ahead for good when Turang bunted for a hit leading off the 11th to put La Sorsa in a tight spot with the go-ahead runner at third.
Milwaukee may have even caught a break on the bunt, since La Sorsa appeared to impede Reds third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes as he charged. Because Turang made it to first, Monasterio’s homer was good for three runs, which was huge when the Reds scored twice off Nick Mears in the bottom of the 11th.
The Brewers have been creating those kinds of breaks for months, which is why they have tied their franchise record at 34 games over .500 with victories in 52 of their last 69 games and 29 of 33 to move nine games ahead of the second-place Cubs with 40 games to play. They have had to come from behind in eight of the 14 games during the winning streak.
“There’s just this feeling of, like, ‘So what?’” Priester said. “We play nine innings, we don’t play six.”
Thanks to Priester, himself one of Murphy’s so-called “cliffhangers” as a former first-round Draft pick in his third organization, another franchise record went down Saturday night. Starting with DL Hall getting the final two outs of the second inning in Friday’s epic comeback victory, and ending with Priester opening Saturday’s game with nine up, nine down, seven Brewers pitchers combined to retire 32 consecutive Reds batters.
That’s a club record. The previous mark was 29 in a row, in 1998.
Has he ever seen anything like this?
“Maybe, like, when my 11U team went 49-0, but that was pretty much it,” Priester said, laughing. “It was actually kind of fun, but not as fun as this.”
Bring it on, said Yount, who loves to see the Brewers rewrite the club record books.
“I would be perfectly happy if they never lost another game this year,” Yount said.
