Three years ago, William Contreras didn’t want to come to Milwaukee.
Now, he says he can’t imagine ever leaving.
As the Milwaukee Brewers are set to begin their postseason run on Oct. 4 as the top-seeded team, the starting catcher penned a letter in the Player’s Tribune on what playing in this city has meant to him since arriving three years ago and how he believes the 2025 squad can raise the World Series trophy.
Here are some takeaways:
William Contreras on coming to Milwaukee
In December 2022, the Brewers acquired Contreras in a trade with the Atlanta Braves, an organization he joined when he was 17 years old a decade ago. He made the big-league team in 2020, won a World Series in 2021 there and became a first-time All-Star in 2022. Then he was traded.
It shocked him.
Contreras remembered how he felt.
“My agent calls and tells me, ‘Atlanta traded you.’ I told him: ‘Trade me back.'” Contreras wrote. “I’m like, ‘MILWAUKEE?! OK. Nobody talk to me.’ Nah — it’s just crazy to be traded like that. Crazy. I barely understood what a trade means. But what choice do you have? So I try to accept it.”
But then he changed his mindset.
“I try to think, William. Be honest. What you KNOW about Milwaukee? Yes, for a Venezuelan kid, and even just coming from Atlanta, it’s a different world, a different culture. But then I get here, and I get to know things.… It’s an amazing place. The organization, the fans, it’s such a great baseball city. Funny how it changes. Now if I think about that trade, I got lucky.”
William Contreras on first playoff appearance with Brewers
Contreras hasn’t missed the playoffs since coming to Milwaukee, though it’s been postseason disappointments the last two years.
In 2023, Contreras was devastated when the Brewers were swept by the Arizona Diamondbacks in the wild-card round at home.
“I left the field, I’m actually crying tears. I’m feeling so responsible,” Contreras wrote.
But in the clubhouse he was seeing a different emotion from some of his teammates.
“But then I’m seeing guys who are leaving, it’s five minutes after the game, and they almost look happy,” Contreras recalled. “One guy, he’s even saying to me, ‘Yeah. Now I’ll go fishing.” I’m like, What is this??? We had to move on from that type of mindset. Something was missing, to be great.”
William Contreras on Bob Uecker
Last season, Contreras said was “all about Bob Uecker,” the legendary Brewers radio announcer who died in January at age 90.
“What a legend,” he wrote.
Contreras said his team knew the 2024 playoffs would be Uecker’s last given his declining health. The team wanted to deliver a championship with him here to see it.
“No one better than you. Keep doing what you’re doing. No one better than you,” Contreras recalled Uecker telling him. “Those words honestly meant everything to me.”
Then it was heartbreak for Contreras and the Brewers against the New York Mets.
William Contreras on the 2025 season: ‘So special’
2025 came and nobody again thought much of the Brewers. But Contreras thought back to Uecker’s message. “No one better than you.”
All they did was set a franchise record in wins with the best record in baseball during a sensational summer.
To Brewers fans, Contreras says “the journey of this team has meant so much. This team, it’s so special. And for the first time since I won a ring, I’m really feeling that feeling again.”
Why does he feel this way? Unidad. A team full of guys who are united, he says.
“I’m really looking around our locker room, our ballpark, and it’s that same unidad,” Contreras wrote. “It’s funny … I still have a little regret, years later, for being rude to my agent about the trade. “MILWAUKEE?!” Wow. What a wrong way to react. Now, I hope I spend my whole career here — and I hope to be on the first World Series winner in Brewers history. It’ll happen, I bet. It’s like Bob always said: ‘No one better than you.'”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Brewers’ William Contreras has Bob Uecker on mind in Player’s Tribune
