American Family Field, Milwaukee (Why are the Brewers the winningest team in baseball?)

 What makes for a winning team? The Milwaukee Brewers have the best record in baseball, 80 percent of the way through the season, so they are doing something, probably several somethings, right. But what?

Watching many different teams, in many different cities, over the course of the last few years, I’ve become fascinated by why some teams always win (Dodgers, Yankees, Brewers!) and some never do (Angels, Marlins).

The organizational angle

At the moment, the Brewers are 13^th among the 30 teams in attendance, in a stadium that is 12^th in capacity in MLB this year. They rank 20^th in payroll, 18^th in average age of the players. All of this sounds very middle of the road, although it’s worth noting that according to one website, Milwaukee is the smallest market to have an MLB team, just slightly smaller than Cincinnati, so they definitely have better than average fan support.

But none of these are very good indicators of on-field success. I put together a spreadsheet to look for correlations over the last few years, and winning correlates slightly with each of these things (except stadium capacity), but none of the correlations are particularly strong. Last year’s World Series would seem to refute this. It featured the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees, two teams who ranked in the top four in payrolls, attendance, and market size, and the Dodgers were 2^nd in average player age, the Yankees 9^th. But the year before, it was the Texas Rangers and the Arizona Diamondbacks,  and while the Rangers were 4^th in average age and 7^th in payroll, neither was above average in any of the other categories, except market size, where they both are in the above average, but not near the top.

The Brewers have made the playoffs six of the last seven years. For the first part of that stretch, I thought it was because of shrewd management. In 2015, they named a 30-year-old, David Stearns, as the youngest General Manager (in charge of figuring out which players to hire, fire, promote, demote, etc.) in MLB, and he then hired Craig Counsell, who became the winningest field manager in Brewers history. I thought it was more Counsell than Stearns, others thought it was more Stearns, but whatever the reason, the Brewers started to outperform expectations on a regular basis.

Then, after the 2023 season, Counsell left to manage the Brewers’ biggest rivals, the Chicago Cubs, with a contract which made him the highest-paid manager in MLB history, and Stearns left to take the GM role for the New York Mets, a rich, but underperforming team. The Brewers didn’t miss a beat. They finished ahead of the Cubs again last year, and are well in front of them this year, and the Mets squeaked into the playoffs on the day after the season ended last year, and are hanging on to the final Wild Card position this year, so it’s not just Counsell and Stearns.

The on-field angle

What I find fascinating about the Brewers is that they are an excellent team made up of very good, but not necessarily excellent, players. They’ve scored more runs than all but one team in the majors, and given up fewer than all but two, so it’s no surprise that they’re winning, but what I find fascinating is that they don’t have anyone who is having a truly outstanding season – there’s only one major hitting or pitching category where a Brewer leads the league. Their most effective hitter is Christian Yelich, but he’s 33 years old, and not nearly as good as he was in 2018 and 2019, when he finished first and second, respectively, in voting for Most Valuable Players. They’ve got Jackson Chourio, an exciting 21-year-old who looks like he could become excellent, but isn’t yet. William Contreras is a very good catcher, and getting better, and Rhys Hopkins is a better than average hitter as a first baseman.

Freddy Peralta is a very good pitcher, bordering on excellent. He leads the majors in “wins”, a traditional metric that is becoming less important, the only Brewer atop any major statistical category. Perhaps more importantly, Peralta is seventh in the majors in earned run average, a better measure for a starting pitcher. The rest of their regular pitchers are all performing well above average.

It makes sense that a team without an obvious weakness would be winning, although how you get everyone on your team to have a good year at the same time is a mystery every baseball team owner, general manager, manager, and fan wants to figure out. Incidentally, the Brewers are not heavy on veteran players. Yelich, at $24 million per year, is the highest paid, and Hoskins is at $18 million per year, is next. Contreras and Peralta are both between $6 million and $8 million per year, but most of the players we’ve seen start for the Brewers are making the major league minimum. Depending on how many years they’ve been in the majors, that’s somewhere between $760 thousand and $1 million per year, still hefty by most people’s standards, but a fraction of what the biggest stars make.

Sometimes, a team will have a magical season, when a bunch of players have their best seasons simultaneously. To me, the classic example is the 1984 Cubs, who won 30 games more than they lost, and made the postseason for the first time in nearly 40 years. Their “Daily Double” of Ryne Sandberg and Bobby Dernier both had the best seasons of their careers. Given that Sandberg’s was a Hall of Fame career, that’s saying something (he ran away with the MVP that year). Pitcher Steve Trout had the best season of a good career, and pitcher Rick Sutcliffe and first baseman Leon Durham each had one of the best seasons of a very good career. As a result, the Cubs had their first winning season in 12 years. Not surprisingly, none of their key players did as well the next season, and they didn’t have another winning season for five years.

But that’s not the Brewers. Their veteran players are all having good, but not great, seasons (except maybe Peralta), and they’ve got rookies playing at the level they had hoped, and the other young players are all playing a little better than last year. Getting all that to happen the same year seems unlikely, but the Brewers seem to do it year after year.

The bottom line – the World Series

Of course, winning in the regular season doesn’t mean you win the World Series, which is what fans remember most. In fact, the Brewers are one of only five franchises in MLB who have never won a World Series (none of the others have been playing longer), and in their previous 55 years in Milwaukee, they’ve only made it to the Series once, in 1982. Incidentally, Kerry and I went to our first World Series game that year, having spent the day standing in line to get standing-room-only tickets to Busch Stadium in St. Louis, where we lived. Counsell’s Brewers came within a game once, but never made it. One Brewers fan told us, “They always break our hearts.”

Once you get to the postseason, it’s a different game. You don’t need as many good pitchers, because there are more days off and you don’t worry as much about wearing out a player. There’s also some luck. The Brewers have very clearly been the best team in baseball since mid-July, but can they keep it up in October?

In 2007, the Colorado Rockies were stumbling along in August, then caught fire in September, and lost only one game between early September and late October. But after winning the National League championship (in a sweep), they had to take a week off to wait for the American League entry in the World Series to be determined. They weren’t the same team after that layoff, and ended up getting swept (they’re one of the other teams that has never won a World Series).  

Maybe this is the year for the Brewers. At the least, they’re having a magical regular season.

We’re also rooting for them for an idiosyncratic reason. Each of the first two seasons of our ballpark quest, the team that eventually won the World Series (Texas in 2023, the Dodgers last year) was a team whose park we’d been to that year. The Brewers are one of our hopes for this year, although Toronto and Philadelphia are also extremely likely to make the playoffs. Maybe we’re the luck one of those teams needs.

The game: Arizona Diamondbacks 3, Milwaukee Brewers 2

The game was the reverse of the previous night’s game, in many ways. The Diamondbacks got a lead, and the Brewers kept threatening, but could never quite get there. They left two runners on base in the 7^th, left the bases loaded in the 8^th, and got a runner thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double in the 9^th. Overall, it was a well-played game (one play included a clutch hit by the Diamondbacks, a good decision to send a runner from second to try to score, and an even better throw by Yelich to nail the runner at the plate).