ST. PETERSBURG — The most valuable baseball in the history of the Milwaukee Brewers, the hallowed totem at the end of a grail quest 57 years in the searching, sat stuffed in the back pocket of the uniform pants of Jake Bauers, a quintessential Brewer in that he was discarded by six organizations before he was dipped into the River Styx that is Milwaukee.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Bauers said. “I was thinking about keeping it.”

This was the baseball Bauers caught in his first baseman’s mitt upon it being thrown by Brice Turang, after the second baseman caught a ground ball that resulted from a pitch by Trevor Megill, who until he found the restorative springs of Brewers baseball was out of baseball and trying to reinvent himself by throwing against a concrete wall between cars in an underground parking garage. It was the baseball from the last out of a 4–1 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays in World Series Game 5 on Wednesday that clinched the first world championship in Brewers history.

Erick W.…