Brewers Postseason Return Sparks "Rally For October" Watch Parties; Local Sports Bars Brace For "Awkward Silence From Packers Fans"
With a 103-59 record, the Milwaukee Brewers advanced to the postseason, drawing watch parties at venues across the Waukesha area.
WAUKESHA — The Milwaukee Brewers closed the regular season 103-59 and advanced to the postseason last week, a development that has forced Colleen Prybylski, owner of the Third Rail Tap on Barstow Street, to drive to the Sunset Drive donation center and ask, for the first time in the business's history, for something back.
Prybylski donated 212 Brewers stadium cups, 3 vinyl window clings, and 1 felt pennant to the center on September 21, five days before the Brewers' 100th win, in what she has since called "a scheduling error." A donation center employee who has handled Prybylski's seasonal drop-offs for three years confirmed the boxes were still on a back shelf, unsorted, and released them Tuesday without incident.
The cups are now back behind the register. The pennant has been re-hung in a spot Prybylski describes as "Packers-adjacent, going on Packers-shared," 14 inches from a framed 2011 Packers cornerback photo that did not move to make room. She has organized a "Rally For October" watch party for the Third Rail's nine remaining playoff-eligible Tuesdays and Saturdays, catering it with a $4 brat special she is calling, without elaboration, "postseason pricing."
The Odd Energy
Prybylski said the bar's Saturday watch party drew 61 people, a number she has not seen for a Brewers game since the 2023 postseason, and described the room's mood as "an odd energy." Some patrons cheered outright at a fifth-inning double play. Others, she said, ordered a second beer and looked at their phones with what she called "real focus, for a phone that wasn't doing anything."
"Some patrons cheer, others just order another beer and pretend to look at their phones."
— Colleen Prybylski, owner, Third Rail Tap
Prybylski attributed the split to what she called a 14-year backlog of Packers loyalty meeting a Brewers team that, for the first time in recent memory, cannot be safely ignored until November. "You can be a good Wisconsin sports fan and still not know what to do with your face right now," she said. "The Brewers won 103 games. That's not a small thing to sit on your hands for."
Two miles away at Tap Yard Waukesha, bartender Kevin Schroeder, 34, who in late September clocked the Brewers' 100th win at roughly 23 seconds of bar conversation before the room reverted to Packers content, said the postseason has produced a measurable uptick. He now estimates Brewers-related conversation accounts for "a genuine two, two and a half minutes an hour," up from what he called "basically nothing" during the regular season's final stretch.
The Hardest Emotion
Tap Yard manager Renata Solheim, 41, who oversees the bar's television rotation and has final say over which of its ten screens show what, said the Brewers' postseason run has surfaced what she called "the Wisconsin sports fan's hardest emotion to manage: division." She said the word applies both to the baseball standings and to the room itself, which she has taken to splitting six screens for Brewers coverage and four for a Packers injury-report loop that nobody asked to keep running but nobody has asked to stop.
"The Wisconsin sports fan's hardest emotion to manage: division."
— Renata Solheim, manager, Tap Yard Waukesha
Solheim said she has fielded three separate requests to mute the Packers loop entirely during Brewers at-bats, all from the same customer, and two requests to do the reverse, from a different customer sitting one stool away. Both requests were denied on the grounds that the bar does not have a fifth remote and would not know who to trust with it.
What Comes Next
Schroeder said Tap Yard has ordered a second "BREWERS: LET'S GO" sign to replace the one taped above the register since the 100-win milestone, which has begun to peel at one corner from repeated brushing against a Packers schedule magnet that Solheim confirmed will not be relocated for the postseason or, in her words, "for anything, really."
Prybylski, for her part, said she has stopped making projections about how long the Brewers' run will last, citing the embarrassment of having pre-donated 212 cups on the assumption it wouldn't. Asked what happens to the reclaimed inventory if the Brewers are eliminated, she said the cups go back to Sunset Drive, and that the donation center has already told her not to bother calling ahead.