Brewers Back on Track

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The Brewers appear to be back on track on several fronts following a 5-1 stretch last week, but it’s tough to ignore the role the schedule may have played in their recent success. The Brewers have faced teams with a winning record just five times in the early weeks of the 2022 season and are 2-3 in those games. They’re 13-5, meanwhile, against the Cubs, Orioles, Pirates and Phillies.

Major League Baseball’s clear disparity between the haves and have nots adds an extra wrinkle to the challenge of trying to evaluate the game’s best teams after their first few weeks of play. At the end of the day Sunday the Brewers were 15-8 but had faced opponents with an average winning percentage of .450. Their average opponent the rest of the way has a .476 winning percentage.

That gap will grow even wider this week after the Brewers play their first three games against the 3-19 Reds: Following the series finale against Cincinnati the Brewers will have played 26 games against teams with a .414 winning percentage and will have 136 remaining against teams who are winning at a .483 clip. Their remaining schedule will still include 26 of their 27 scheduled games against the Giants, Dodgers, Padres, Mets and Braves, and interleague games against every American League East team except the Orioles.

Advantage Remains

Even as the Brewers’ schedule gets tougher, it still remains an advantage: This year the National League Central includes three teams (the Reds, Pirates and Cubs) who are clearly not trying to compete. Those three teams face the Brewers a combined 57 times this season, making up 35% of the Crew’s schedule, and at the end of the day Sunday FanGraphs had the trio projected to lose 95, 93 and 89 games this season, respectively. Collectively, they’re a big part of the reason that the Brewers’ average game this season is against a team that currently has a .472 winning percentage.

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The Brewers aren’t the first team to benefit this way from sharing a division with bad teams, but they will be one of the last to experience it at this magnitude: Starting in 2023 MLB is changing its schedule format, reducing the number of regular season games for division foes from 19 to 14 and using the extra space to expand interleague play.  The schedule still won’t be “balanced,” but the impact of playing in a stronger or weaker division will be somewhat reduced. After making up more than a third of the Brewers’ scheduled games in 2022, the Cubs, Pirates and Reds will account for just 26% of them in 2023.

Of course, beating up on bad teams is a tried-and-true path to reaching the MLB postseason. The Brewers’ franchise history offers up some clear examples:

  • Last season they went 29-9 against the dismal Pirates and a Cubs team that tore down its roster during the season, with games against those two teams accounting for 20 of the Brewers’ 28 games over .500.
  • The 2011 team shared a division with three 90-loss clubs: the Pirates, Cubs and the Astros, with the latter going 56-106 as their rebuild bottomed out. The Brewers went 34-12 against those three teams on the way to their first division title in almost 30 years.
  • The 2008 team’s route to the postseason went through two 90-loss cities, with the Crew going 14-1 against the Pirates, 6-0 in their games against the Giants and 70-71 against everyone else.

It isn’t the Brewers’ fault that several of their frequent opponents aren’t trying to win, of course, and they also aren’t responsible for the fact that their schedule is heavily frontloaded with weak opponents. All they can do is make hay early against favorable competition and hope the momentum carries over once they start facing better clubs.