Photo via Milwaukee Brewers - Facebook
Milwaukee Brewers Jackson Chourio - Sept. 18, 2026
Milwaukee Brewers outfielder Jackson Chourio bats a three-run home run at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore (Sept. 18, 2026).
A national TV audience got to spend some quality time with the Brewers on Sunday night during their 3-0 win over the Orioles, and one of the unique aspects of this team was on full display.
Twenty-four-year-old likely Cy Young Award winner Jacob Misiorowski started the game on the mound and worked three scoreless innings in one of his final tuneups before a likely start in the team’s first postseason game. 22-year-old shortstop Cooper Pratt had a pair of hits and was the subject of the on-field postgame interview. 22-year-old Jackson Chourio reached base twice and stole a pair of bases. 24-year-old Kyle Harrison worked out of trouble in a scoreless relief outing.
Even with the youngest Brewer, 21-year-old outfielder Luis Lara, on the bench the organization’s youth movement was Sunday night’s big story. The 2026 Brewers aren’t baseball’s youngest team but, as this graphic from the Peacock broadcast showed, they’ve been significantly more successful than the other teams following this path:
Image via Peacock/NBC Universal
MLB 2026 Youngest Teams graph - Peacock
Even that graphic, however, doesn’t quite capture the volume of contributions the Brewers have gotten from the game’s youngest players. Through Sunday, this season Brewers batters have come to the plate 6077 times and Brewers’ pitchers have faced 5781 batters for a total of 11,858 unique events. A Brewer 24 years old or younger (player seasonal age as defined by Baseball Reference) has been at the plate or on the mound for 2549 of them, more than 21%. That percentage is likely to go up in the postseason as Misiorowski and Logan Henderson are likely to pitch a higher percentage of Brewers innings and Chourio, Pratt and Lara will likely all be in the lineup regularly.
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Young Players
In recent baseball history it hasn’t been unusual for successful teams to rely on a significant number of young players. Since 2000 (through Friday's games) there had been 972 instances where position players age 24 or younger had batted at least 50 times for a team that went on to win 82 or more games and 1052 instances where a pitcher the same age faced at least 50 batters for an 82+ win team. There is some overlap between the lists because of pitchers hitting and players qualifying in multiple seasons, but all told there are about 2000 player seasons in the pool.
Over that same sample there have been 387 winning teams across full seasons, and 121 of them have gotten at least 2,000 plate appearances/batters faced from players age 24 or younger. The list includes three World Series winners: The 2016 Cubs, 2017 Astros and 2021 Braves. Even when only sampling teams this century, however, a changing baseball trend appears. From 2000-2019 about five winning teams per season met this criteria. From 2021-2026 (again, through Friday’s games) there had been 17, less than three per year. There were none in 2025, the only full season in the sample without one. As of Monday morning, the Brewers were the only team that had done it this year (the Pirates, currently 79-77, could join them). The sport has plenty of young stars right now, but the teams leaning heavily on youth generally aren’t winning. The Brewers, who enter play on Monday with the sport’s best record, might finish as the lone exception to this trend.
Beyond that, however, is the question of what this means for October. Entering this season there had been 377 82+ win teams this century and overall that group won 25 World Series (leaving 2020 out of the sample), meaning about one in every 15 winning teams gets to hoist the trophy at the end of the season. Over that same stretch there have been 120 winning teams that got at least 2000 plate appearances and batters faced from players 24 or younger and they’ve won three World Series for a success rate of 1 in 40. Across a quarter century of data the younger teams are almost three times less likely to win a championship.
The 2026 Brewers have had the most successful regular season in franchise history, and they’ve gotten there at least in part by defying modern baseball trends on offense. To win in October, however, they’ll have to overcome another set of data pointing in the other direction.
