Brewers' Pitching Injuries Leave South Side Tavern Patrons Questioning August Competitiveness

WAUKESHA — The mood at The Sideline, the South Street tavern that has served as an unofficial clubhouse for Milwaukee Brewers fans for the better part of a decade, has cooled by several degrees since the team announced that starting pitchers Brandon Woodruff and Quinn Priester will not return for the remainder of the 2026 season, despite Milwaukee's 73-44 record and its comfortable lead atop the NL Central.

Regulars interviewed at the bar this week described the shift less as panic than as a kind of pre-emptive resignation, a switch that gets flipped in the Milwaukee sports fan's brain the moment a roster starts looking thinner than the schedule still requires it to be. "It's fine. We'll just rebuild," said Tom Heinemann, 54, an electrician who has not missed a Brewers home broadcast at The Sideline since 2008. Heinemann delivered the line without visible irony, which bartender Sarah Chen said has become the tell that a Sideline regular has fully accepted the season's new emotional framework.

"It's fine. We'll just rebuild," Heinemann said again, unprompted, roughly ninety seconds later, this time to no one in particular.

The Numbers Behind The Mood

Chen, who has worked the evening shift at The Sideline for six years, said she tracks the bar's unofficial pennant-race temperature the way other bartenders track a Packers loss: by the drink orders. Domestic beer sales at the tavern were up 8 percent week-over-week comparing August 1 through 8 against the prior week, a spike Chen attributed less to celebration than to what she called "settling in" behavior. "When people start ordering the cheap stuff instead of debating the tap list, that's rebuilding mode," Chen said. "Nobody's savoring anything right now. They're just drinking through it."

More telling, Chen said, was a development she logged Wednesday night: three separate regulars, unprompted and in three separate conversations, asked her whether she had any early read on the Milwaukee Bucks' draft prospects, a subject with no calendar relevance whatsoever, as the NBA season does not begin for another four months. "That's the earliest I've ever seen the Bucks talk start," Chen said. "Usually that's a September thing, once football's actually on. We're not even to football yet."

"When people start ordering the cheap stuff instead of debating the tap list, that's rebuilding mode. Nobody's savoring anything right now. They're just drinking through it."

— Sarah Chen, bartender, The Sideline

A Bright Spot, Acknowledged Reluctantly

Patrons were careful to note that the team's actual position, first place in the NL Central with a winning percentage most franchises would frame and hang in the clubhouse, does not fully justify the tavern's mood. Several cited right-hander Jacob Misiorowski, whose season has drawn open Cy Young Award talk in national coverage, as the one subject that could still reliably pull the bar's conversation back toward October. "Misiorowski's the reason I'm not fully rebuilding in my head yet," Heinemann said, before adding that he had, in the same breath, already downgraded his personal preseason prediction from "World Series" to "hopefully the second round, if the bullpen holds."

Chen said she has not changed anything about how she runs the bar in response to the shift, aside from quietly pulling two extra cases of domestic beer for the weekend based on the week's ordering trend. She said she does not expect the mood to fully reverse unless the team makes a notable move before the trade deadline, or unless enough regulars simply forget, by September, that they ever said "rebuilding" out loud. "Give it two weeks," Chen said. "Someone will get a big series win and suddenly it's a different bar in here."

Heinemann, for his part, said he intends to keep showing up for every home broadcast regardless of tone. "Rebuilding mentality doesn't mean I stop coming," he said. "It just means I stop expecting anything good to happen before I order."