People in baseball keep warning me: Don’t get carried away with the Milwaukee Brewers.
The Brewers’ batted-ball luck is insane, they say. Their 53-17 record since May 24 might be a classic case of peaking early. Come the postseason, they could be headed for another quick flameout.
All true. But even though the Brewers’ 14-game winning streak ended Sunday with a 3-2 loss to the Cincinnati Reds in 10 innings, their record is best in the majors by six games. The team that opened the season with the sport’s eighth lowest payroll is putting the competition to shame.
There’s a lesson here, if anyone in baseball cares to heed it. The lesson is in every ball the Brewers put in play and every runner they advance, every cutoff man they hit and every extra base they take. The Brewers are not perfect – Sunday’s loss included a critical error to open the ninth by Brice Turang at shortstop and two botched bunts in the late innings. But they at least try to play the game properly at a time when most teams place too little emphasis on fundamentals and too much on the next big analytical thing.
This is not to bash analytics, which provide tools to evaluate players and help them improve. Every team recognizes data and technology as essential elements of the game. And the Brewers, lest anyone forget, began their run of six postseason appearances in seven years under the methodical, analytically driven David Stearns.
But as organizations rush to develop greater power in both hitters and pitchers – a trend players eagerly embrace, knowing it is incentivized by the game’s pay structure – the team concept often is lost.
Can someone please explain why clubs fixate on enhancing pitchers’ fastball velocities and hitters’ exit velocities but fail to properly instruct players on running the bases and hitting the cutoff man? Why can’t organizations focus on both?
The Brewers are an outlier, exploiting a new market inefficiency – knowing how to play baseball. They obsess over little things, in part, because they generally do not pay for superstars who do big things. Most Brewers make too little money and possess too little service time to defy their detail-oriented leader, manager Pat Murphy. And the team’s highest-paid player, left fielder Christian Yelich, practices what Murphy preaches, inspiring his teammates to do the same.
Brewers star Christian Yelich (right) has helped his teammates buy into manager Pat Murphy’s attention to details. (AP Photo / John Froschauer)
Murphy, who seems destined to be the first skipper to win back-to-back Manager of the Year awards since Bobby Cox in 2004 and ’05, can get away with pulling two regulars off the field, as he did on April 26 with outfielder Sal Frelick (for missing a cutoff man) and third baseman Caleb Durbin (for getting picked off).
He also can get away with explaining his benching of a player, in this case shortstop Joey Ortiz on July 7, by saying, “Yeah, the manager’s pissed. I want him to give me his best approach at the plate every day, and we’ve given him a lot. We’re playing him every day, and he just can’t have lapses at the plate.”
Managers generally refrain from employing such tactics with established veterans. Managers in large markets might be even more reluctant to call out players. As New York Yankees GM Brian Cashman said Friday, “I think leaders, managers, coaches are more inclined to try to support and help players that are going through a lot as they try to navigate their struggles. Struggles are part of the game. It’s just louder in a bigger market.”
In any case, the danger with making too much of the Brewers is that, for nearly two months, no one talked about Uecker Magic or anything of the sort.
On May 3, after the Brewers fell to 16-18 with a 6-2 loss to the Chicago Cubs, Murphy lamented, “It seems like we’ve misplaced our edge a little bit.” For nearly seven weeks, the Brewers failed to register a comeback victory. During their 14-game winning streak, they came from behind eight times, including an 8-1 deficit against the Reds on Friday night. They were in position for another comeback win Sunday when William Contreras hit a two-run homer in the ninth inning, but their bullpen could not hold the lead.
Have the Brewers benefited from good luck? Of course they have. Through May 24, their batting average on balls in play was .283, below league average. From May 25 through Saturday, their BABIP was .322, the highest in the majors by 11 points. And their overall batting average, slugging percentage and weighted on-base average all exceeded their expected numbers by rates that ranked first or second in the league.
Offensive regression, then, is inevitable. One rival official said even 70 games – nearly half a season – is not enough for him to believe in the Brewers’ formula. But in nearly two seasons under Murphy, little in their identity has changed.
In both years, the Brewers have ranked first in FanGraphs’ base-running metric. In both, they have been top five in both defensive efficiency and Statcast’s new team-level fielding metric. In both, they flashed occasional power, but still ranked in the bottom half of the league in homers.
But last year’s club, which won 93 games before falling to the New York Mets in the wild-card round, was not as good as this one. Through Saturday, the Brewers had dramatically improved their strikeout rate (from 18th last season to fifth this year) and contact rate (from 11th to fifth). They also had widened the gap to the next-best base-running team by improving their extra-base taken percentage from last season (from 13th to second) and reducing their outs on the bases (from the fourth highest to tied for the second lowest).
Oh, and one more thing, before I commit the same oversight author Michael Lewis did in “Moneyball” by giving too little credit to A’s pitchers Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder and Barry Zito: The Brewers’ pitching – and pitching development – is outstanding.
After starting the season with an injury-depleted staff and getting shellacked at Yankee Stadium, the Brewers entered Sunday ranked third in the majors in ERA. As MLB.com’s Mike Petriello wrote, they routinely turn castoffs into mainstays. Quinn Priester, Jared Koenig and Trevor Megill are among the examples on the pitching side.
One concern for the Brewers is that their staff will wear down in the postseason, where they have been eliminated five straight times in their opening round since extending the Los Angeles Dodgers to seven games in the 2018 NLCS. The rotation ranks in the bottom five in innings. Reliever Shelby Miller was the only pitching addition at the deadline.
Another early knockout would lead to another series of questions about whether the Brewers did enough before the deadline, and whether they spend enough in general. Advocates of a salary cap – read, the owners – also would cite a rapid elimination as further testament that a small-market team can’t win the World Series, ignoring that the 2015 Kansas City Royals did win it, that the 2020 Tampa Bay Rays participated in it and the 2024 Cleveland Guardians came within two wins of making their second Series appearance in nine years.
The current economic system is far from perfect, leaving small-market teams at too great a disadvantage, but how to correct it is a conversation for another day. Even if the Brewers fall in an expanded and increasingly random postseason, it will not detract from what they have accomplished, and the lessons they are imparting – or should be imparting – upon the entire sport.
Since losing center fielder Jackson Chourio to a strained right hamstring, the Brewers are 14-1. Since promoting trade acquisition Andrew Vaughn to replace Rhys Hoskins, who remains on the IL with a sprained left thumb, they’re 28-5.
In addition to hitting nine homers in 113 at-bats,Vaughn further established his Brewers bonafides last Monday, executing a suicide squeeze for his first-ever sacrifice hit, pro or college. The Brewers entered Sunday tied for fifth in sacrifice bunts and sixth in sacrifice flies, and also were second in stolen bases. They scrap. They drive opponents to distraction. They beat teams in any number of ways.
“I think we need to take a page out of the Brewers’ book,” Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder Bryan Reynolds said Wednesday. “They just do everything right. They base run, they take the extra base, they put the ball in play, swing at strikes. I think we could benefit a lot from trying to have the same kind of game style.”
It’s not just the small-market teams that could benefit, it’s every team. Here’s to the little things that make baseball beautiful. Here’s to baseball’s version of David using slingshots on the sport’s Goliaths. Here’s to the Brewers, however long they continue the fun.
(Top photo of Caleb Durbin celebrating a home run with Brewers teammates: Jason Mowry / Getty Images)
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