After a long winter, Cactus League play feels like that first warm breeze of the spring for the first couple of weeks. Within a month, however, exhibition baseball has worn out its welcome. Very few, if any, tears were shed on Sunday afternoon as the Brewers loaded onto a bus and wrapped up their 40 days in the desert.
The Brewers did experience a good deal of success in the Cactus League, however, finishing with a 19-10-2 record that included a 10-2-1 stretch from March 10 through Thursday. They were both the Cactus League and National League’s best team this spring, edging out the Cubs in both cases.
Many or most spring training games, especially early in exhibition play, are largely decided by minor leaguers playing the late innings. Succeeding in that environment would seem to suggest that the Brewers received better contributions from their organizational depth than many of their peers. Until allowing 16 runs on Sunday, the Brewers also had the Cactus League’s best earned run average and spent much of the spring as the only Cactus League team to crack the top ten in that statistic.
The last time the Brewers were among the five best spring training teams was 2011, when they went on to win 96 regular season games and the National League Central. Anecdotal evidence aside, what does this mean for the regular season? The answer, unfortunately, appears to be “not much.” Recent history suggests that success in the exhibition season has little to no correlation with winning once the games begin to count.
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Consider, for a moment, the five teams that finished spring training with the best records in each of the last five seasons. Those 25 teams combined to go 2086-1964 in the regular season for an average record of 83-79. This group includes the 2014 Angels (98-64), the 2015 Royals (95-67) and the 2016 Nationals (95-67), but it also includes the 2016 Twins (59-103), 2015 Athletics (68-94) and 2016 Diamondbacks (69-93). Teams in this group made the postseason 40% of the time, about 10% more often than one would expect from a random sampling.
On the other end of the spectrum, consider spring training’s underacheivers: The five worst teams from each of the last five exhibition seasons combined to go 1987-2059 in the regular season, an average record of 80-82. Six of the 25 teams in this group won 90 games or more, including the 2016 Cubs (103-58). Teams in this group reached the postseason 28% of the time, roughly the equivalent of a random sampling.
The difference between the final results of the groups at the top and bottom of the exhibition standings is small at best, with the leaders averaging about three more wins. The difference in playoff odds could be significant but could also be chalked up to small sample size.
Looking at numbers from the opposite direction produces an even murkier division between the good and bad teams. Since the start of the 2013 season nine teams have finished a regular season with 98 or more losses. Those teams went a combined 135-138 during exhibition play for a .494 winning percentage. Meanwhile, over that same time frame eleven teams have won 97 or more regular season games. They combined to go 169-168 in the spring for a .501 winning percentage.
Certainly the Milwaukee Brewers had a nice spring, as winning always beats the alternatives. There is little evidence, however, to suggest that any of that will matter when the Brewers play the Cubs and Cardinals ten times in their first 13 games. And, unfortunately, if the Brewers get off to a slow start then any momentum from a hot spring will likely evaporate quickly.
