The Best Regular Season in Brewers History Was Built from Within

For the 2026 Brewers most of the pieces of the most successful regular season in franchise history were already in the organization before the first pitch was thrown.

by

Brewers On Deck Circle

There are a variety of impressive things about the Brewers’ record-breaking 103-win season, but one potentially overlooked note is this: They did it with almost no help from outside the organization.

During the franchise’s current run of eight postseason appearances in nine years many of the seasons follow a recognizable pattern: The Brewers have spent much of the early portion of the season mixing and matching lineups, shuffling through organizational depth and available players until, eventually, they’ve settled on a group that works around June or July and won down the stretch with a team that only partially resembles their Opening Day roster.

Consider, for example, the 2025 team. Quinn Priester was arguably the second-best pitcher on the roster (trailing only Freddy Peralta) and he was added in an April trade. Andrew Vaughn, who added a massive spark to the offense, came over in a trade in June. At the trade deadline they also added Brandon Lockridge and Danny Jansen. According to Baseball Reference, those four players made the 2025 team about 5.4 Wins Above Replacement better.

Some other examples:

  • The 2023 team added Trevor Megill, Carlos Santana, Mark Canha and Josh Donaldson on their way to 92 wins and an NL Central crown.
  • The 2021 team might have made the biggest in-season acquisition of the current run when they traded for Willy Adames in May. They also added Rowdy Tellez, Eduardo Escobar and reliever Hunter Strickland.
  • The 2018 team got big contributions from late March signee Dan Jennings, minor trade addition Erik Kratz, trade deadline addition Mike Moustakas, August waiver claim Jordan Lyles and waiver trade additions Gio Gonzalez and Curtis Granderson.

email newsletter iconStay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.

SIGN UP

By contrast, 13 players who appeared in at least one game for the 2026 Brewers were added to the organization after Opening Day. Here they are, ranked by Wins Above Replacement:

The players on that list were acquired for varying purposes and at varying levels of cost, but their cumulative result is significant: In a season where the Brewers won 103 games, the sum total of contributions they received from players acquired during the year was about eight tenths of a win below replacement level. Bryse Wilson, who was signed as a free agent after being released by the Cubs in July, was easily the highest rated contributor of the group before a rough outing on Friday brought his numbers down a bit.

There are a variety of reasons why the Brewers were able to weather this lack of external help. The first is some good fortune with health from their position players. The Brewers had 10 position players appear in at least 100 games this season. They’re one of just three teams in the majors this season that were able to do that, and they’re the first Brewers team to do it since 2017. As a team the Brewers collected 6299 plate appearances this season, and that group of 10 players accounted for 80% of them.

Top-Rated Farm Clubs

Another reason is the fact that they were able to transition some of the players from their top-rated farm system relatively seamlessly into MLB contributors. Folding young players into a contending roster can be a challenge as there’s no room for growing pains, but the Brewers were able to quickly and successfully assimilate Logan Henderson, Cooper Pratt, Luis Lara and Shane Drohan into their roster and reaped the benefits of doing so.

In most years the Opening Day Roster is a highly hyped, then mostly forgotten footnote in an MLB season. For the 2026 Brewers, however, most of the pieces of the most successful regular season in franchise history were already in the organization before the first pitch was thrown.