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Milwaukee Brewers - Mother's Day 2022
Even after a rough weekend in Atlanta the Brewers enter play on Monday with a chance to be just the second National League team to reach 20 wins. If they do so, they’ll be among elite company in franchise history: Only three teams in the franchise’s previous 53 seasons have won at least 20 of their first 30 games.
Banking a large number of wins early is, of course, a key step towards a successful season. Since MLB adopted the two Wild Card format in 2012 there have been 20 teams to win at least 20 of their first 30 contests. Sixteen of those teams went on to reach the postseason, 14 won their division and five of them went on to win a World Series.
With that said, getting hot early is not a guarantee of future results. The most memorable seasons in Brewers franchise history, on the contrary, largely revolve around recoveries from slow starts: The 1982 Brewers were 23-24 when they fired manager Buck Rodgers and eventually got hot under Harvey Kuenn, the 2011 team started 20-21 before turning a corner in May, and the 2018 team started April with a 5-9 stretch.
Meanwhile, some of the best starts in Brewers history have come from teams that struggled to retain that momentum. Here are the three previous teams to win at least 20 of their first 30 contests:
1987
By the time they reached the 30th game of their legendary season “Team Streak” had already told a pair of wildly disparate stories: They opened the season with a franchise record 13 consecutive wins and 17 of their first 18. They improved to 20-3 with a win over the Mariners on May 2 to become the fastest Brewers team ever to 20 wins, blowing out the previous record by a full 10 games.
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A little more than a week later, however, the pendulum had already swung back: After opening with 20 wins in their first 23 games the Brewers lost 12 in a row and 16 out of 18, a slump that largely coincided with MVP candidate Paul Molitor’s stint on the disabled list. That Brewers team eventually righted the ship and went on to win 91 games but finished third in the American League East and missed the postseason.
2007
After a long run of futility and a 25-year postseason drought, the 2007 team brought the first signs of hope back to Milwaukee: The Brewers won 20 of their first 30 games for just the second time in franchise history and opened up a five-game lead in the National League Central. A week later their cushion had swollen all the way to eight games, which at that time was the largest divisional lead in franchise history.
What came up that season also went down, however: The Brewers followed their 20-10 start with a pair of 10-20 stretches, one running from mid-May to mid-June and another from the end of July through the end of August. In the end they won just 83 games and missed a clear opportunity: The Cubs won the division at just 85-77, becoming just the sixth team in MLB history to play a 162-game season and reach the playoffs with 85 wins or less.
2014
The best start in Brewers franchise history belongs to the 2014 club, which won eight in a row in early April en route to a 21-9 record after their first 30 games. They led the NL Central by as many as 6 ½ games at one point late in that stretch, opening up a lead they would hold for 159 days that season.
The momentum of a hot start could only carry this team so far, however. They were 19 games over .500 on June 28 but went just 31-48 the rest of the way, falling out of the postseason picture in the season’s final month and finishing in third place at 82-80. They followed that with an abysmal early start in 2015 that eventually cast the franchise into a full-on rebuild.
Back in the present, the 2022 Brewers have certainly gotten an assist from a weak schedule, but a simple fact remains: A win on Monday night would put them 20% of the way to the first 100-win season in franchise history with just over 18% of their schedule completed. They may be following an easier-than-usual path to get there, but the 2022 Brewers are well on their way to making history.
