It was sometime during Saturday morning’s pregame media session that Chicago Cubs manager Craig Counsell facetiously cut off questions about Wisconsin.
He’d been asked about the Milwaukee Brewers’ 13-game winning streak, their jovial manager, Pat Murphy, and the divisional race the Brewers are now running away with after the Cubs spent the first four months in first place. The way things were headed, Counsell might have feared answering questions about the Mars Cheese Castle, the Green Bay Packers receiving corps and his favorite lunch spot at the Wisconsin Dells.
“What did you expect?” I asked him.
The Wisconsin native who left his job in Milwaukee for the bright lights of Chicago has watched his former team turn into baseball’s best story, while the Cubs were doing Cub-like things, falling nine games back by mid-August after a sensational start.
Asked if he could appreciate how “great” a story the Brewers have been, Counsell deadpanned:
“What’s so great about it? I mean, they’re playing good. They’re playing great. They haven’t lost since we played them.”
So is he annoyed by the fact the Brewers never lose?
“Well, the job is to try to win the division,” he replied. “That’s the ultimate goal, and they’re really making that difficult. So from that perspective, yeah. We only get 13 chances to affect it though, right?”
The Cubs, who went 4-4 against the Brewers in their first eight meetings, begin a five-game series against them Monday at Wrigley Field.
It could be a wake if the Cubs don’t wake up. They beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 3-1 on Saturday, while the Brewers won in dramatic fashion again, defeating the Cincinnati Reds 6-5 in 11 innings for their franchise-record 14th consecutive victory.
Counsell didn’t want to bury himself, as many Cubs managers before him have done, by saying something that would be used against him on sports-talk radio, the internet or the Brewers’ virtual bulletin board.
You couldn’t blame him for dodging questions, just as you couldn’t blame the media for asking.
Counsell was a teenager in Milwaukee when the ‘87 Brewers won their first 13 games, setting a franchise record that was tied Friday in a crazy 10-8 comeback win over the Reds after trailing 8-1.
The owner of the George Webb restaurant chain had promised to give away free burgers for one day after 12 straight Brewers wins, and eventually wound up handing out 168,192 freebies after the streak was reached in April 1987. Thanks to this year’s streak, which reached 12 on Wednesday, the George Webb chain will do likewise from 2-6 p.m. Wednesday at all of the restaurant’s 23 Wisconsin locations.
Counsell didn’t recall getting a free burger in ’87 when I asked him about his childhood memories. In truth he said he was more a fan of the burgers from Kopp’s Frozen Custard, another Wisconsin staple.
“Honestly, I’ve never seen a George Webb,” Counsell said, referring to the restaurant, not the person.
I hadn’t seen a George Webb either until 1987, when the Chicago Tribune sent me to Milwaukee to report on a story a month after the 13-game winning streak. Rev. Dominic Peluse, a New York Yankees fan and priest at an elementary school in Franklin, Wis., had promised his 200 students free burgers if the Brewers lost 12 straight.
With the streak at 11 straight, Rev. Peluse said before the May 20th game against the White Sox he was in a “state of frenzy,” realizing how much 200 burgers would cost him. The Sox won 5-1, and the priest was forced to pay off.
Brewers owner Bud Selig, who would later become MLB commissioner, was perplexed at how a team could win 13 straight in April and then lose 12 straight in May.
“There are 26 weeks in the major-league season,” Selig told me that day at County Stadium. “There are times in those 26 weeks when you think you’re never going to lose, and times when you think you’re never going to win. I never thought I’d see both of those so soon. This is not a human experience that I like going through.”
Counsell probably can relate. This is not a human experience he likes going through either. Watching the 2025 Brewers look unstoppable while his Cubs struggle to score runs has been harder to digest than moldy cheese curds.
Everything the Brewers touch seems to turns to gold, as evidenced by the play of former Sox first baseman Andrew Vaughn, who was acquired for pitcher Aaron Civale on June 13 after Vaughn had been demoted to Triple-A Charlotte three weeks earlier.
Entering Saturday, the Brewers were 27-4 (an .871 win percentage) since Vaughn’s debut July 7 at Dodger Stadium, where he hit a three-run homer in his first at-bat in a 9-1 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers. When Vaughn was demoted to Charlotte on May 24, the White Sox were 15-35, a .300 win percentage, and the first baseman was hitting .189 with five home runs, 19 RBIs and a .531 OPS in 48 games.
“I had to understand what was going on and look at myself,” Vaughn told two Chicago reporters last month in Milwaukee. “I had to take the ego out of it. Baseball is our job, and if you’re not producing, sometimes that happens.”
Sox general manager Chris Getz rationalized the deal by pointing to Vaughn becoming a free agent after 2026, saying “where Vaughn is in his White Sox career contractually, it did make some sense to look at ways to help our team currently in finding an arm.”
Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf appreciated the financial savings, no doubt, while Brewers GM Matt Arnold gambled on Vaughn and won big.
Entering Saturday’s game in Cincinnati, Vaughn was hitting .343 with nine home runs, 35 RBIs and a 1.051 OPS in 29 games. His 54 total RBIs are five more than Lenyn Sosa’s 49, which lead the Sox.
“You never know what a change of scenery can do for you,” Brewers slugger Christian Yelich said of Vaughn’s surge. “He’s been a really productive player in this league, and sometimes you get off to rough starts in a season. I’ve had a few of those in my career too.
“If you consistently stay at it, eventually it starts to turn. And it could be that change of scenery, getting into a different environment, a different culture … you never really know. He’s done a great job, he’s a great guy and he fits our group well.”
Meanwhile, the Cubs will enter the showdown against the Brewers as decided underdogs. They need to finish first in the NL wild-card standings to play at home in a best-of-three wild-card series and are neck-and-neck with the San Diego Padres in the race for the No. 4 seed.
“That’s the next goal, right?” Counsell said. “The wild-card series is a three-game series for seeds 3-6. You get the advantage of being at home if you’re the top seed. Otherwise you’re on the road. But a three-game series is a three-game series. We know what can happen in a three-game series. You want it to be at home, but I’m not sure it matters in the playoffs. It matters, but it’s small. That’s what history tells us, at least.”
History also tells us a team can win 13 games in a row and lose 12 straight one month later.
You could look it up.