Photo via Milwaukee Brewers - mlb.com/brewers
Willy Adames and Joey Ortiz celebrate
Willy Adames and Joey Ortiz celebrate
The Brewers are a franchise known for long winning streaks, but this early in the season it’s hard to top the possible impact of the run they’re on right now.
On Wednesday, May 22 they lost 1-0 in the final game of a road series against the Marlins to drop to 28-21 on the season. The next day while they were off, some of their potential postseason rivals won and the Brewers’ postseason odds at FanGraphs dipped to 63.8%. It was a long way up from the 30% odds they opened the season with, but at that point they were still a team with a long way to go to get to play in October.
On May 24 they opened a stretch of 13 games in 13 days by beating the Red Sox and since then they’ve been on a roll. They won two out of three in Boston, then returned home to take six out of seven from the Cubs and White Sox. Those three wins against the Cubs carried a lot of emotional weight for Brewers fans still angry over Craig Counsell’s decision to leave Milwaukee for Chicago, but in the standings they were even more significant: The Brewers opened their current hot streak just a game and a half up on their rivals, but they dramatically cooled the Cubs’ chances of winning the NL Central. The Cubs have lost 13 of their last 18 to fall into third place, seven and a half games back.
Seven Game Lead
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This is now just the fifth season in franchise history where the Brewers have led a division by at least seven games at any point. Only the 2021 team (14 games), the 2011 team (10 1/2), the 2023 team (nine) and the 2007 team (8 1/2) have ever had a larger cushion, and three of those four clubs followed through and reached postseason play. The Brewers’ high-water mark this season is now even higher than one of the franchise’s greatest cautionary tales about early excitement: The 2014 team led the NL Central for 159 of the season’s 181 days before collapsing late and missing the postseason, but their largest lead was only 6 ½ games.
The Brewers will open play on Monday with an 85.4% chance of reaching the postseason, but that’s more than just a reflection of how well they’ve played lately: It’s also a statement on a relatively weak NL Central. While none of the teams in the division are truly terrible (the Reds are in last and on pace to go 71-91), no one appears poised to make a significant run, either. The Cardinals’ win over the Phillies on Sunday night made them the Brewers’ top contender at 28-29 on the season and put them on pace to be just the fourth sub-.500 postseason team in AL/NL history. FanGraphs now projects the Cubs and Cardinals to each finish with 81 wins this season. If that holds true, the Brewers could go 46-57 the rest of the way and still win the division.
The more likely outcome, mathematically at least, is that the Brewers will roughly match their preseason expectation over the next four months. Most of the preseason projections had the Brewers as roughly a .500 team and if they play .500 ball the rest of the way they’d finish with 89 wins, tied for the eleventh-most in franchise history. Even that would be quite the accomplishment for a team that appeared to be taking a step back when they traded away a former Cy Young Award winner during the offseason.
No team can win their division in May, and the Brewers have taught their fans that lesson in painful fashion before. The wins the Brewers have accumulated and the lead they’ve built over the last month still count, however, and they’ve raised the likelihood that the 2024 season will go down in history as an unqualified success.
