The Milwaukee Brewers Win At Everything
In the top of the fifth inning of Monday’s Game 3 of the World Series, Milwaukee captain Christian Yelich hustled into second base off a ground ball hit by William Contreras. He was called out on the field, ending the half-inning. The play looked well worth a challenge, but with two outs, I still decided that it would be a good time to take a shower. When I came out of the shower, the Brewers had scored eight two-out runs, extending their lead to 10-0. It went like this: single, single, double, double, single, double, flyout. And then the Rays just had to play through the rest of the game to get to the next one, where they will be fending off a sweep.
The first two games of the series showcased the Brewers’ historic skillset as pesky fighters who never go away. Neither of their starters, Jacob Misiorowski and Logan Henderson, were at their best; Game 1 featured some uncharacteristic wobbles in the fundamentals from both teams, and Henderson gave up four runs in the first inning of Game 2. Each game featured some ninth-inning weirdness, with Game 1 ending after a video review and smoke on the field from some overeager celebratory fireworks, and Game 2 ending on an unreviewable checked-swing call with the top of the Tampa Bay lineup up to bat.
That is to say that when the Brewers took their 2-0 series lead, they did so by winning tight games where things went poorly. There was the team that never dies. There was the team that kept on winning, but in a manner where no matter how much the total number went up, you couldn’t help but be surprised at their continued success. By contrast, the Brewers’ performance in Game 3 was the sort of thing you’d expect from a team that won 103 games in the regular season. That is, the sort of game you’d watch and come away with the conclusion that the victors were, unequivocally, the best team in baseball.
No Brewers starter had made it out of the sixth inning in the postseason, but in Game 3 Robert Gasser did so facing the minimum number of hitters; the Fox broadcast noted that he was the first lefty to do so since Sandy Koufax in 1965. All of the Brewers’ eight fifth-inning runs were scored against the Rays’ bullpen, but first they loaded the bases against their former teammate Freddy Peralta, who had been mostly excellent after being traded to the Rays. And there was still a little bit of traditional Brewers spice in there as well: Across that entire eight-run inning, the Brewers didn’t hit a single homer.
There are cynical ways of framing how teams with low payrolls manage to achieve continued success, like “extracting value.” But as outlined by Michael Baumann in FanGraphs, the Milwaukee’s organization methodology feels anything but cynical. A better way of putting it is “getting the best out of the guys you’ve got.” The operational currency within systems like those of the Brewers or the Rays is trust: The coaching staff understands what players need, and how to maximize their strengths. The point is not to rebuild from scratch, but to do what you do best even better. The players trust that the coaching staff will lead them to brighter places. In the Brewers’ case, you wind up with Jake Bauers and Andrew Vaughn performing far above their prior ceilings. You wind up with a team that doesn’t punt games. You wind up with a team that never dies.
Last year, the Brewers were unceremoniously swept out of the playoffs, by way of a large helping of Shohei Ohtani being the greatest player of all time and playing the greatest baseball game of all time. This year, they got the opportunity to show a different way of steamrolling opponents, through concentrated, relentless team effort. A minor beauty of the modern game is giving new ways for a team to fundamentally shine: Contreras has gotten seven ABS challenges correct across the World Series, on top of his 1.141 OPS.
Game 7s are the ultimate dream, but it’s difficult to resent the narrative tidiness of a Milwaukee sweep. Somehow, it only makes sense.
