LuisG

Ten years ago a catcher out of Puerto Cabello, Venezuela won the World Series and drove in a run with a double in Game 7. Tonight his younger brother won one too, and they gave him the Most Valuable Player award for it. The older one is Willson Contreras. The younger one is William. Tonight the Milwaukee Brewers beat Tampa Bay 4 to 1 and won the first championship in the history of the franchise, 57 years in. William Contreras caught it, and when it was over they handed him the trophy for the best player in the series. Now here is the part that will get you. Willson plays for the Boston Red Sox. He was in Hawaii. On Wednesday he got on a plane, flew to Florida, and sat in the stands at Game 5. He watched it wearing his little brother's Brewers jersey. Go back to where the two of them came from. Puerto Cabello is a port city on the Venezuelan coast. Three boys came out of that house. Willmer is the oldest. Willson is the middle one. William is the baby. Two of the three became major league catchers. That does not happen. Willson got there first. The Chicago Cubs called him up on June 17 of 2016 and two days later he hit a home run in his first career at bat. That October the Cubs won the World Series for the first time since 1908, and in Game 7 of it, the most watched baseball game in a generation, Willson Contreras doubled and drove in a run. He spent seven years with the Cubs, three with St. Louis, and Boston traded for him last December. Then in 2022 both brothers made the All-Star team in the same summer. They were the fifth pair of brothers in the history of baseball to play in the same All-Star Game. Be straight about it. A World Series MVP is one week. Willson won a ring at 24 and the ten years after it have had plenty of hard parts in them, including getting moved twice. William is going to find out the same thing every champion finds out, which is that the next season starts anyway. And neither of them is the reason Milwaukee won. Jacob Misiorowski threw 5 and two thirds scoreless innings tonight and a 22 year old rookie set a record getting six hits in a row. But think about the two of them for a second. Two kids from the same house on the Venezuelan coast, both of whom ended up squatting behind home plate for a living. One of them won the most famous World Series anybody alive can remember. And tonight the other one won his, while his big brother sat in the stands in a borrowed jersey with the family name on the back.