After a second straight year watching major stars walk out the door, the Milwaukee Brewers have the best record in baseball
After the Milwaukee won the National League Central in 2023, the winningest manager in franchise history, Craig Counsell, left for more money with the Chicago Cubs. The respected head of baseball operations, David Stearns, was hired by the New York Mets. One of their two ace pitchers, Corbin Burnes, was traded to the Orioles for two players who’d barely played in the majors. Their other ace, Brandon Woodruff, had surgery on his throwing shoulder and would be out for all of 2024.
Despite these losses, the Brewers improved from 92 to 93 wins in 2024 and comfortably won the NL Central again, something very few expected. But after a heartbreaking loss in the NL Wild Card Series, the hits kept coming. All-Star closer Devin Williams was traded to the Yankees for an undersized mid-level prospect and a starter who couldn’t stay healthy. Willy Adames, the popular shortstop who served as clubhouse leader while pacing the team in homers and RBI in 2024, became a free agent, and the Giants swooped in with a lucrative offer the Brewers could not match.
Once again, the Brewers were expected to take a step back, and for a while, it looked like they had. On May 24th, the Brewers were 25-28 and fourth in the NL Central, and fans were contemplating a deadline fire sale that would reset the team around its younger players. But on May 25th, the Brewers scored three runs in the eighth to steal a 6-5 victory over the Pirates. Since then, they are a remarkable 51-16 and have two of the three longest winning streaks in baseball this season, an 11-gamer in July and their still active 12-game streak that started on August 1st. They’ve been the best team in baseball by far over that span, and have turned a 6.5-game deficit in the division into a 7.5-game lead.
How did the Brewers again defy the odds and manage to improve after significant losses? There’s not a single answer but instead multiple factors, some easy to understand and some more mysterious, that have led to this incredible stretch.
For those familiar with the Moneyball story, there are some comparisons between the 2002 Athletics and the 2025 Brewers. The A’s managed to improve on 2001’s 102 wins despite losing three star players to teams with more resources: Jason Giambi, the 2001 MVP runner-up; Johnny Damon, the speedy center fielder; and Jason Isringhausen, the closer. In 2002, general manager Billy Beane replaced those players with relative unknowns or over-the-hill former stars and, against all odds, Oakland improved to 103 wins.
Like those Athletics, the Brewers are constrained by financial limitations; they play in baseball’s smallest market and have one of its most shallow-pocketed owners, Mark Attanasio. According to an MLB Trade Rumors roundup at the end of 2021, Attanasio was tied for 27th in net worth among owners, and according to Spotrac, the 2025 Brewers are 20th in the league in active payroll and 23rd in total payroll.
The core conceit of Moneyball is, essentially, that the Athletics identified undervalued skills. In that case, the skill was on-base percentage, but as Michael Baumann notes in a recent piece about the Brewers’ surprising outfielder Isaac Collins, the skill changes depending on the era.
For Collins, the undervalued skill was swing decisions. But the Brewers have identified baserunning and defense as market inefficiencies in addition to good plate discipline. After winning team Gold Glove awards in 2023 and 2024, the current Brewers rank second in Statcast’s Outs Above Average, third in Total Zone runs above average, and fourth in FanGraphs’ all-encompassing defensive rating. On the basepaths, they’re first, by far, in FanGraphs’ baserunning runs above average metric (14.4, with second place at 9.0) and in the top five in Baseball Reference’s version. They are second in the league in stolen bases.
The Brewers’ roster is littered with speed and defense. Brice Turang, Sal Frelick, Jackson Chourio, Collins, Blake Perkins, Caleb Durbin, and Joey Ortiz all fit this bill. Out of that group, all but Ortiz has been above average offensively this season.
Most Brewers fans and several prominent national writers were clamoring for a splash at the trade deadline. Eugenio Suárez’s name swirled in rumors for weeks. But the Brewers instead did what they usually do: they moved in the margins, sent out only Nestor Cortes Jr. (who’d made only two appearances for the club) and a minor prospect, and acquired a solid bullpen arm, Shelby Miller, and another speedy defensive type, backup outfielder Brandon Lockridge.
Had the Brewers not gone on a massive winning streak immediately after the deadline, that may have rankled some. But this strategy is core to what the Brewers do: they do not sacrifice promising prospects for short-term talent unless they have to. This approach, which isn’t always popular, has led to unprecedented depth both at the major league level and in the minors, where the Brewers were recently ranked as the number one farm system in the league by Baseball America.
For a deeper dive into the Brewers’ depth, check out my recent piece at Brew Crew Ball. But the basic point is this: while the Brewers don’t have any superstars, they relentlessly put solid ballplayers on the field. There just isn’t anyone bad on this team. Ten position players on the current 40-man roster have at least 1.2 WAR, nine of whom have an OPS+ over 100. 16 pitchers have thrown at least 25 innings for the Brewers this season; an unbelievable 14 of them have an ERA+ of at least 117. No other team in baseball can boast this type of depth.
Putting players in a position to succeed
Milwaukee did make one trade early in the season in which they gave up a good prospect (Yophery Rodriguez, who was in their top ten prior to the season) and a competitive balance draft pick. That was for Quinn Priester, the former first-round pick of the Pirates who struggled in Pittsburgh before getting traded to Boston, where he didn’t make the opening day roster.
Priester looks like he should be a power pitcher, but it wasn’t working for him. He was walking too many and not striking out enough. But the Brewers saw in Priester not a failed strikeout pitcher, but a player who had a good sinker that could induce a lot of ground balls that their excellent infield would eat up. They made a minor tweak or two, added a cutter, and focused on attacking the zone with moving fastballs. After a few starts Priester locked in. The results have been excellent: he’s 11-2 with a 3.49 ERA in Milwaukee.
Priester is just one example of the Brewers understanding their players’ strengths and weaknesses. They continually put players in positions where they can lean on their strengths and hide their weaknesses, and don’t ask them to do more than they’re capable of. Their depth allows them to keep players out of roles in which they’d be asked to do too much, and management’s trust in their guys has given long enough leashes to players like Ortiz, Turang, and Durbin so that they could find their way through struggles and thrive.
There’s still some mystery about this team. How did they unlock Andrew Vaughn, even if some positive regression was likely after his horrid first half in Chicago? Why does it seem like pitchers just get miraculously better upon arriving in Milwaukee? These are the things that for years bothered Brewers fans in the opposite direction when it was the team in St. Louis who seemed to have the “Cardinals Devil Magic” (that some are now referring to as “Uecker Magic”).
But this team isn’t a complete mystery. Frelick, Turang, and Vaughn are former first-round picks, and Chourio and Ortiz were blue-chip prospects. Woodruff, Christian Yelich, William Contreras, and Freddy Peralta are all established stars. Matt Arnold and the Milwaukee front office have done an incredible job filling the gaps, and the results speak for themselves.
The last question is whether the Brewers will resemble the Moneyball As when it comes to postseason success, or a lack thereof. They’ll be hoping that’s one place where they break the mold as they seek the first World Series title in the franchise’s 55-year history.
