Brewers: “Beast Mode 2.0” Adds To Recent History Of Base Hit Celebrations

It seems like almost every year now, the Milwaukee Brewers have some sort of celebration they do after every base hit. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time to find what it will be. It appears the Brewers have found it for 2021.

For the past several years, the Brewers have been a franchise known for having fun out on the field. It’s a reputation that has spread across baseball, and players have taken notice of that.

It seems as if every successful Brewers team in recent memory has had one of these celebrations. Now, in 2021, as the Brewers have gone on a three game winning streak and try to put themselves back on track, a new celebration has emerged.

“The Tiger”, or Beast Mode 2.0, is the Brewers new base hit celebration and brings a little nostalgia as well.

This celebration was the brainchild of Manny Pina.

Pina, the longest tenured Brewers player, made the claw motion in the clubhouse in Kansas City and said “I am the tiger”. Naturally, the entire clubhouse enjoyed it, and they’ve taken it and run with it. That’s typically how these kinds of things start, an inside joke in the clubhouse that they bring to the field and fans just fall in love with it and it becomes a thing.

The Tiger celebration is still in the early stages, but will become a more popular thing as the season goes on and players use it more often. How do I know? Because that’s what happened with the entire recent history of Brewers base hit celebrations. Let’s run them down.

The recent history of Brewers base hit celebrations

2011: Beast Mode 1.0

Prince Fielder’s sons were big fans of the movie Monsters, Inc. and one of the characters, Sully, puts his arms out when he wants to scare someone as monsters stereotypically do.

They called it “beast mode” and the Brewers took it and ran with it. Fielder, Ryan Braun, Nyjer Morgan, and the entirety of that Brewers lineup used that as their celebration. It was the basically the core piece of the personality of that team. They were all in beast mode all the time.

The fans made the gesture back on base hits, shirts were sold merchandising it, signs were made about it.

When thinking back to that 2011 postseason run, it’s difficult for the Beast Mode celebration to not be a major piece of that memory. Remember Nyjer Morgan’s walk-off single in the NLDS? Remember the celebration? Morgan ran into the arms of his teammates with his arms fully extended in Beast Mode. One of the most iconic images in Brewers franchise history is Morgan doing the Beast Mode.

It was the first postseason series victory for the Brewers since 1982. Beast Mode brought the Brewers to new heights, and set the foundation for future base hit celebrations.

2017: The Gauntlet gets thrown

The Brewers were in the early stages of a rebuild that a lot of people were expecting to take several years. Instead, Brewers fans and the front office fell in love with a roster that was having a ridiculous amount of fun for a group that was expected to be one of the worst in the league.

It started early in the year, with Orlando Arcia believed to be the mastermind behind The Gauntlet. After every home run, the Brewers would form a line of players in the dugout and do a series of jumping elbow bumps with Arcia typically being the final player in the line for one big final elbow bump and then Arcia and the homering player would scream in exuberance.

Fans would look forward to Brewers home runs not just because that meant the Brewers scored, but because that meant we got to watch another run of the Gauntlet. The bigger the home runs, the more exciting Gauntlet runs there were.

The excitement and fun of that team surged them to a better than expected finish, just one game shy of making the postseason. It also helped push the front office to move their chips into the center of the table and go from a rebuild to going for a World Series.