Brewers fans made themselves heard at Wrigley Field on Tuesday, and ESPN’s Jeff Passan noticed.
Passan took to social media Sept. 2 and quoted a Milwaukee Brewers post showing Christian Yelich’s go-ahead home run in Milwaukee’s 9-4 win over the Cubs the night before.
"Can I ask, by the way, how people in Chicago felt about their home game turning into a road game?" Passan wrote. "That can't happen."
Yelich’s shot came in the top of the sixth, and the noise around his trip around the bases made the point for him. Passan’s line also carried a little extra bite because it echoed something he said earlier this summer - only then, the roles were reversed.
At the end of June, Passan drew some local criticism after using the same wording on ESPN Milwaukee’s "Wilde & Tausch" while talking about a brutal June 28 extra-inning loss by the Brewers to the Cubs at American Family Field.
"Can I ask, by the way, how people in Milwaukee felt about their home game turning into a road game?" he asked. "That can't happen."
The crowd dynamics between these two teams are nothing new. Cubs fans have long shown up in Milwaukee in force, helped by geography and market size: Milwaukee is the 31st-largest market in the country and sits within 90 miles of No.
- Wisconsin’s population is just a little more than half of the Chicago metro area by itself.
Even with that reality, the Brewers keep drawing well. They rank 12th in Major League Baseball in average attendance, with 33,632 fans per game. And if you take out the three American Family Field games against the Cubs this season, that number would fall to 13th - just 20 fans per game behind the Los Angeles Angels.
Brewers fans have also shown they can bring that same energy on the road, especially in Wrigley. The clearest example came in the one-game tiebreaker after the 2018 season, when Milwaukee beat Chicago to win the National League Central title.
They were there again this week for a key four-game series against the team Milwaukee is trying to chase down in the division race. The Brewers now hold an eight-game lead.
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