Harvey's Wallbangers

Chad Harbach reflects on baseball in Milwaukee:

The mustachioed, beer-bellied shadow of 1982 hangs over everything to do with Milwaukee baseball — not just this season, but especially this season. Those Brewers are fondly remembered by fans in many places, and might be the most famous post-expansion team not to win a title. This year, on the night of Game 5, I found myself committed to a dinner in Nashville, unable to watch the game. When I asked my Tennessean tablemates if anyone had a smartphone on which to check the score, they instantly, and for no other reason than the joy of reciting the names, rattled off the lineup of the '82 Brewers — Yount, Molitor, Cooper, Thomas, Oglivie, Gantner, Simmons, Vuckovich, Fingers. Throw in the handful of guys they forgot, like Moose Haas and Charlie Moore, and you have one of baseball's iconic teams, a supremely charismatic group that won back-to-back MVPs, back-to-back Cy Youngs, a home run title, and a pennant, but no World Series, and which faded to oblivion by the end of the following year. There are reasons for their popularity. Those Brewers were, or at least resembled, a perfect manifestation of their place and time — beer-drinking, bike-riding guys in the city of Miller and Harley-Davidson. At the dawn of Reaganomics, amid the rise of the bond trader and a new corporate ethos, they found themselves already, accidentally, a crazily coiffed throwback to the supposedly freewheeling '70s.

I only remember that team through the baseball cards.  It is at the early edge of my memory, with the baseball strike hanging over everything.  Also, it doesn't help that the 1982 Reds were absolutely terrible.