ST. PET ERSBURG, Fla. -- Christian Yelich knew the question was coming. Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy occasionally gathers a group of player leaders for a get-together to ensure everyone, in his parlance, "is on the bus" -- together, committed, unified -- and he began the July 29 meeting with the same question he does every time: "What ya got?"
Yelich had settled on his answer and understood its significance. He is no braggart, preferring to endear through humility, a rare characteristic for a former MVP. This was not going to be humble. The Brewers -- everything they stood for, everything they were, everything they aspired to be -- had compelled him to speak his truth, and that truth, coming from the mouth of the man who two months later would be named the team's captain, became their ethos when Yelich answered first. "We're going to win the World Series," he said.
It's easy for a player to suggest that, easier to think it. Not Christian Yelich, who at 34 is too wise, too wizened, to speak in declarative statements. What-ya-got meetings are not typically the place for such decrees, either, but Murphy encouraged the men in the room -- hitters and pitchers, American and Latin American, young and old -- to speak their truths. Yelich believed to his core that these Brewers were going to purge a half-century of history with one magnificent run. Because the bus was humming. On that date, the Brewers carried the second-best record in Major League Baseball, a game back of the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers, who the previous season had shamed Milwaukee during a four-game sweep in the National League Championship Series.
Yelich was convinced these Brewers were different. They had made the postseason seven of the previous eight years, and never had he suggested they would emerge from October with baseball's ultimate prize. Now, he meant what he said, and he wanted to make sure the others in the room were just as convicted as him. So he followed with a question of his own: "Do you guys all want to agree to that?"
Source: ESPN MLB · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing