The Brewers deserved this. Say that plainly, because it's true, and because it has nothing to do with what's actually wrong with how baseball just celebrated it.
Milwaukee went 11-2 through the playoffs, swept the two-time defending champion Dodgers to reach the World Series, then beat the American League's best team to win it. That's a team that outplayed everybody in October. William Contreras won World Series MVP hitting .381 with four RBIs, throwing out runners, winning challenge after challenge on replay. Jacob Misiorowski took the ball in the clincher and pitched through cramping legs until he couldn't anymore. Trevor Megill came in for two innings and finished it. Nobody who watched this team needs convincing the parade is earned.
So why did the biggest camera shot of the night belong to a guy who never put on a uniform?
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MLB's Commissioner's Trophy has, since it was created, gone first to the owner of the winning team, alongside the GM and manager. That's by design, built into the ceremony from the start. The commissioner hands it over, and legally, the owner is considered its owner. Watch the footage from Wednesday night and that's exactly what happened: the commissioner presenting the trophy to Mark Attanasio, with Attanasio then crediting the city and the fans for the win. He wrote checks while players hit home runs and blocked the plate. That's real work, but it isn't the work a World Series ceremony is supposed to honor.
Compare that to hockey, where the Stanley Cup goes to the team captain first, a tradition going back to the 1950s that NHL owners have never tried to insert themselves into. Nobody in that sport thinks the person who signs the payroll deserves to touch the trophy before the players who won it. Baseball never bothered to ask the same question, because the people who control the ceremony are the people the ceremony flatters.
The argument for this setup is that ownership financed the roster and took the risk, so the trophy handoff is meant to honor that investment. Owners matter to building a winning team. But an investment return isn't a championship moment, and mixing up the two is how you end up with a commissioner shaking an owner's hand on the mound while the actual World Series MVP waits his turn.
Baseball is heading into a labor fight between owners and players this winter, with growth in media revenue already slowing. The league chose this exact moment, the one night all year when the sport gets unified, uncomplicated attention, to put the ownership box front and center on the field. Contreras got emotional talking about his family and his home country. That's the moment people will remember, and it happened after the owner got his turn with the hardware first.
None of this diminishes what Milwaukee did. A franchise that had never won it, from one of the league's smallest markets and lowest payrolls, beat a stacked Dodgers team and then the league's best team to get here. That's the story. The sport just keeps insisting on telling a different one first, and until it stops, the parade will always look a little like a shareholder meeting that happened to have confetti.
