No Offense Quite Like the 2024 Milwaukee Brewers Has Ever Graced October

[Matthew Trueblood]

No team good enough to reach the postseason has ever had the balance of power and speed the Brewers bring, and they add their offensive value in those dimensions with an extra benefit, too: efficiency.

Image courtesy of © Michael McLoone-Imagn Images

It's not really the identity of this Brewers team, but something wild happens when you sit down with the numbers, even for a moment. You realize that, despite their understated offensive profile, this is one of the most explosive teams who have ever reached October.

By and large, stolen base totals don't correlate very well with overall team quality. That's not because stealing bases isn't valuable, but it reflects a couple of things that were true for a long stretch of baseball history, and one or two things that are true even now. Firstly, stealing bases is very valuable, but getting caught erases some of that value, so a team's baserunning value only continues to grow if they steal at a fairly high success rate. Secondly, for a lot of the game's history, there were a lot of players who were pretty bad, overall, but who carved out lots of playing time for themselves by being fast. Teams overvalued speed for much of the game's history, especially once integration took full effect and expansion altered the landscape of the sport.

Until a couple of years ago, of course, stealing bases was also viewed by a lot of smart, forward-thinking teams as unduly risky strategy. If you're getting caught three times in every 10 attempts, you're barely breaking even, and sometimes you need to be even more successful than that. The league's average success rate tended to hover right in that range, and as the game became more focused on risk aversion and more vulnerable to groupthink, managers started shying away from the steal, just as they did from the bunt.

Thankfully, with the implementation of the pitch timer came a set of necessary supplemental rules that made it easier to steal bases. Everyone in the league seemed to take that as a big, flashing sign reading, "GO!", and stolen-base rates have exploded since the start of 2023. That's why, when I say that the Brewers have a historic offense, it has to be taken with a small grain of salt.

Still and all, you can't deny the coolness of this, or the truth of it. With two steals (one by Garrett Mitchell and one by Willy Adames) Sunday, the Crew surpassed 200 stolen bases for the season. They're now at 201, in fact, and they've only been caught 42 times. In the divisional era (before which steals were hardly prevalent, and were scored much differently in some cases), there are only 12 teams who have qualified for the postseason in a year in which they stole 180 or more bases. 

 

Query Results Table

Season	Team	HR	SB ▼	CS	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS	OPS+	R/Gm
1976	KCR	65	218	106	.269	.327	.371	.699	103	4.4
1985	STL	87	314	96	.264	.335	.379	.714	100	4.6
1982	STL	67	200	91	.264	.334	.364	.697	95	4.2
1978	KCR	98	216	84	.268	.329	.399	.728	103	4.6
1975	OAK	151	183	82	.254	.333	.391	.724	106	4.7
1980	HOU	75	194	74	.261	.326	.367	.693	101	3.9
1987	STL	94	248	72	.263	.340	.378	.718	89	4.9
1995	CIN	161	190	68	.270	.342	.440	.782	106	5.2
1979	PIT	148	180	66	.272	.330	.416	.746	99	4.8
1976	CIN	141	210	57	.280	.357	.424	.781	120	5.3
1980	KCR	115	185	43	.286	.345	.413	.758	108	5.0
2024	MIL	174	201	42	.249	.326	.405	.732	103	4.8

Provided by Stathead.com: Found with Stathead. See Full Results.
Generated 9/23/2024.

As you can see, this group comes mostly from the heyday of AstroTurf and teams who leaned extremely heavily on speed, at the expense of power. Half of these teams hit fewer than 100 home runs all year. The Brewers already have more homers than any of them hit, even with six games to go. Notice, too, though, that the Crew have been caught fewer times than any of these teams, despite having more thefts than a fistful of them.

There are other points to make here, but before we do, let's spend a little more time with the table above. What a list! Six of these 11 teams won the pennant, and the 1980 Astros and 1976 Royals only missed doing so after truly classic Championship Series showings. The 1976 Reds (the last gasp of the Big Red Machine, the most electrifying offense in baseball history), the 1979 Pirates, and (yes, alas) the 1982 Cardinals won the World Series. These are teams led by the likes of Joe Morgan, Pete Rose, George Brett, and Ozzie Smith. They had supporting sluggers like Mike Schmidt, Willie Stargell, Dave Parker, Johnny Bench, and Jack Clark. Their speed demons, from Willie Wilson and Omar Moreno to Barry Larkin and Cesar Cedeno, are some of the game's half-forgotten legends.

This Brewers team is far more efficient in the way they take bases and far more loaded with power than any of those teams. Of course, it stands out less, because the aforementioned rules changes in 2023 make it easier to steal and the Crew are not the only team who have done so, and because the league hits far, far more home runs than it did in any of the seasons to which we're comparing this Milwaukee group. Still, the facts are the facts.

Christian Yelich is a bit like cheating here, isn't he? He hit 11 home runs and stole 21 bases in 22 tries before back trouble ended his season. Here's the thing: Even if you strip out Yelich, you're left with enough steals to make this list and a better success rate on attempts than any of them had. You're also left with more homers than any of those teams hit.

Not including Yelich, the Crew have three players who have stolen 20 or more bases, in Brice Turang (46), Blake Perkins (22), and Jackson Chourio (21). They've also gotten 19 of them from Adames and 17 from Sal Frelick, each at high success rates. Jake Bauers has 12 steals in 13 tries. This team can attack you on the bases from anywhere in the lineup.

Just as importantly, though, they can hit the ball over the fence, with little warning. Rhys Hoskins, William Contreras, Adames, and Chourio all have more than 20 home runs. Bauers, Gary Sánchez, Joey Ortiz, and Garrett Mitchell all bring plenty of power in their own right, and if you reimagine Ortiz's season with better health in the middle of the summer or extrapolate Mitchell's eight homers in barely over 200 plate appearances, they look like 20-plus homer threats, too.

This team has thrived in the past because of their ability to relentlessly develop solid pitching depth, and that's very much part of this year's story, too. Their core identity, this year, is not pitching, but the defenders arrayed behind them. They're an elite fielding group, and it's allowed their good pitchers to have success beyond that level. With those lingering narratives from previous years and some of the personnel issues that have plagued them at times, it's hard to think of this as an unusually dangerous offense for an opposing pitching staff come October. Nonetheless, that's the reality of this situation.

In Chourio, this team has its superstar, a bit too young to be fairly expected to shine like Brett or Morgan in October but very much that caliber of talent. In Contreras, they have their steady, well-rounded and utterly fearsome slugger, akin to Clark or Parker. In Adames and Hoskins, they have specialized sluggers to make every sequence a dangerous one, and in Turang, Perkins, and Frelick, they have the gnats who can eat a great starting pitcher alive now and then. There are a lot of paths to wins and advancement in the postseason for this Brewers team. If it's possible, they're subtly historic.

 

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[Kripes - Brewers]

Nice try Matt! You've got us statistically, but that feels awfully optimistic given the cold and hot nature of this team. They don't have prolonged slumps, but an ill-timed slump in a short series playoff environment sends the team home early. They've got to want it more, and make fewer mistakes than the competition. I can't wait to see it all unfold and who is left standing at the end!

[Team Canada]

I'd be curious how this team compares historically in the 2-out run scoring department. Yesterday was a perfect exemplar of the crazy amount of 2-out hits they've come up with this season.