The Brewers Have Perfected Regular Season Baseball

For the fourth year in a row, the Milwaukee Brewers are National League Central Division champions. They have made the postseason in eight of the last nine seasons, won the NL Central in five of the last six, and have the fourth-most wins in Major League Baseball dating back to the beginning of the 2018 season.

The Milwaukee Brewers have perfected regular-season baseball, and it’s a feat that they deserve an endless amount of praise for.

The Brewers are the smallest market in professional sports. They live in an MLB landscape where it is far from a level playing field, playing with the deck stacked against them and two hands tied behind their back.

It’s a dog-eat-dog sport that is twice as difficult for the little guys. And yet, the Brewers have managed to be better than most for the past eight seasons. For that, there is no amount of praise that is too much for what this team has accomplished.

The Winning Formula

For years, the Brewers have been model breakers. Preseason projection systems and win total predictions always seem to underestimate the ball club. And frankly, it’s easy to see why.

This is a team that not only isn’t in play for marquee free agents, but one that must constantly replenish its talent pool by trading away its most valuable assets in order to stay even remotely relevant. It must rely on its talent identification and development to hit on transactions time and time again, all while continuously replenishing a farm system that is essential for keeping the major-league club afloat when they are as cash-strapped as any team in the game.

And yet, their success all comes back to an intangible element that is the backbone of Murphy’s managing philosophy: It’s about the people.

“The success that people think we’re having, it’s about the who, and the who is everything for me.”

That was Murphy’s famous line from an interview with Bob Costas in the midst of their historic 2025 season. It’s the people that the Brewers entrust with running the organization, from their front office to their scouting department to every level of the minor leagues.

It’s the people the Brewers want to bring into the organization who are bought into the way things are done in Milwaukee and believe that a team that does things the way they do, in a market their size, can reach the ultimate goal, despite the perpetual disappointment that has followed them in October.

It’s the people who have been the foundation of what this team has become for the past decade.

Not every ballplayer can succeed in Milwaukee, nor can every player who thrives in Milwaukee necessarily thrive elsewhere. There is something about what the Brewers do and how they approach the game that seems to get every last drop out of each one of their players — something the projection models can never accurately predict.

The Brewers have the 19th-ranked payroll in MLB and are on track to win the most games in MLB for the second straight season, something that has not been done since the 2010-11 Philadelphia Phillies. In 2025, when the team won a franchise-record 97 games, they finished 22nd in payroll.

By some miracle that is borderline indescribable, this is a team where the salaries, expectations, and stats don’t matter. This is a team that, despite never having reached the mountaintop, manages to stay the course season in and season out. It gets its players to buy into its philosophy: Do the little things well.

It’s a mantra that fans have heard countless times over the past decade.

“The Brewers do all the little things well.”

It’s probably gotten old to some — heck, probably most — but, whether you like it or not, it’s simply true. Over years and years of continuous improvement, the Brewers have gotten to a point where they are better at the game of baseball than most, if not all, other 29 teams in MLB.

Does that mean they will win the World Series?

It does not, because rarely does the best team end up hoisting the trophy at the end of the season. And the Brewers are playing a game in which the odds say they shouldn’t stand a chance.

But this is a team that, on top of constantly outplaying its payroll, continues to defy what is possible in the sport of baseball. They don’t care what their chances are. All they care about is winning, and they’re doing it better than anybody.

Always Finding a Way

The Brewers rank third-to-last in home runs on the year, yet they’ve scored the second-most runs in MLB. In a game where home runs reign supreme, the Brewers find other ways.

This is a team that walks as much as any, hits as many singles, doubles, and triples as any, plays some of the best defense in the league, and, despite constantly turning over a rotation of fresh faces — whether it be a result of injury, regression of performance, or the aforementioned need to constantly get ahead of trades before the market of baseball passes you by — has one of the best starting rotations in the game and an elite bullpen to boot.

These are things that don’t happen in today’s day and age of baseball.

A team loses its ace, especially a team of Milwaukee’s stature, not just once or twice, but on multiple occasions, and that should be a hill too steep to climb. But where there is a Burnes-sized void to fill, a Peralta steps up. And when he becomes the next ace to replace, a Miz is there to capture the hearts of Brewers fans everywhere.

It’s a pitching replenishment cycle that shouldn’t be possible, yet the Brewers have made it the norm.

Milwaukee has the second-lowest bullpen ERA dating back to the beginning of the 2023 season, the year after the club shockingly traded its all-world closer, Josh Hader, at the deadline. But where there was a Hader, there was a Devin Williams. And where there was a Williams, there were a flurry of other arms capable of stepping in and helping this team win games.

They’ve established themselves as a premier pitching factory across the industry where, no matter your age, your makeup, your history, or your pitching style, the Brewers will optimize your potential.

The Brewers rarely have the most intimidating offense on paper, but the buy-in from guys one through nine in the batting order makes it one opposing pitchers do not want to face. What they lack in home run prowess they make up for in discipline, fundamentals, and trusting others in the lineup to get the job done.

And that’s an area the Brewers do better than almost anyone.

This is not a winning formula that is built upon a multi-million-dollar bat or one specific arm. When a Quinn Priester falters, a Kyle Harrison is there to pick up the slack. When a Harrison hits a snag, there’s a Logan Henderson to fill the void.

When there’s a hurt Sal Frelick or a struggling Joey Ortiz, there’s a 21-year-old Luis Lara and Cooper Pratt ready to step up on the biggest stage. The story goes on, and on, and on. And that is the point.

Whether you are the Game 1 starter in a postseason series, the cleanup hitter, the utility player off the bench, or the eighth man in the bullpen, you are just as important to the winning formula as the next guy.

And that is how the Milwaukee Brewers get buy-in from their people.

Don’t Take It for Granted

To some fans, a fourth straight division title might be meaningless. At the end of the day, the goal is to hoist the Commissioner’s Trophy at the end of the season and call themselves world champions. And at the end of the day, the Brewers have won just 11 playoff games across their recent run of regular-season dominance, with nothing to show for it.

And if you are one of those fans, I completely sympathize with you.

But to those fans, I plead with you to take a step back. Block out the thought of playoff baseball for a moment and think about what the Brewers have provided to the city of Milwaukee for the past few years.

Baseball is a long, grueling, and relentless sport that we plan our schedules around for six months of the 12-month calendar.

That doesn’t include free agency, where fans spend countless hours mocking up the perfect offseason plan in their heads that will get their favorite team back into postseason contention, or spring training, where families plan vacations to take their children out to Arizona to watch exhibition baseball and mingle with the players. Baseball is a year-round sport. It’s never-ending and all-consuming, and that is what makes what the Milwaukee Brewers are doing so special and important.

Having meaningful baseball to tune into night in and night out for nearly a decade is something that, truly, cannot be taken for granted.

There are fans of a majority of the other teams across MLB who would give anything for a fraction of the success the Brewers have had for nearly a decade. And there was once a time, not too long ago, when Brewers fans were in their shoes.

There was a time when 81 wins was celebrated immensely. When ending a season with a winning percentage that did not start with a .400 was cause for celebration. There was a time when snapping a 25-year postseason drought was celebrated as if the Brewers had won their first-ever World Series title, because to some fans, they never thought they would see the day, and they had no idea if — or when — it would ever come again.

The type of success Brewers fans have been able to witness was once unfathomable, and that often gets lost in the team’s infamous postseason struggles.

It’s something I myself have been guilty of in recent years as someone who grew up watching the team and has had the privilege to watch, cover, and plan my schedule around the golden era of Brewers baseball.

But it shouldn’t be overshadowed.

Because this type of regular-season run, in this sport, for this type of organization, is something that should never go overlooked.

We are less than two weeks from postseason baseball. Soon, all the Brewers’ success — not just this season, not just last season, but the many seasons that came before this — will be largely forgotten as media members make their playoff picks and fans envision their ball clubs being the last one standing.

That’s the nature of October. Everything that came before it suddenly feels like it doesn’t matter.

But before the chaos of October baseball begins, take a second to appreciate what is happening in Milwaukee.

Because this is baseball. You don’t know when a run like this might end, and you don’t know when it will come around again.

So appreciate every second.