'Doesn't Indicate Where Your Program's At': Brewers Staying Grounded After Latest Playoff Frustration

[Jack Stern]

The Brewers shouldn't let another year of postseason heartbreak diminish confidence in their process. Early indicators are that the club's decision-makers have the proper response.

Image courtesy of © Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

Postseason baseball has not been kind to the Brewers in recent years. The long faces and tears throughout American Family Field and comments from players, coaches, and executives in the aftermath of a blindsiding elimination illustrated how hard it hit the team and the fanbase.

It’s almost impossible to deeply engage with baseball without experiencing some level of the emotions the sport invokes. Part of the job for professionals, from the front office to the playing field, is separating those emotions from the decision-making process that requires the most rational thought to best position a club for success.

The Brewers have remained grounded in their approach to evaluating players and building rosters amid a series of emotional postseason exits. If their manager’s comments last week were any indication, the organization is not letting the latest gut punch change that.

David Stearns drew ire for his “bites of the apple” explanation after trading Josh Hader at the 2022 trade deadline, but the process he described is the correct road map to winning a championship in baseball’s smallest market. The playoffs feature plenty of randomness. Every World Series winner needs its share of breaks in October to push it over the top. The more years the Brewers can make the tournament, the more chances they have of the stars aligning in their favor.

In a way, the approach has been validated several times. The cruel twist is that the Brewers have been repeatedly sent home by the team that got hot at the right time and surprised much of the baseball world. The New York Mets, who defeated them in this year’s Wild Card Series, look like the latest entry in a nauseating trend.

“The Mets are the hottest team in baseball, and we ran into them,” Pat Murphy said in his end-of-season media availability last Thursday. “And it’s just happened that the last four or five years, we’ve run into the hottest team in the National League in the first round of the playoffs. That’s been documented.”

Entering 2024, all nine teams to bounce the Brewers from the postseason in franchise history have reached the World Series that same year. Excluding 1982 and 2018, when the Brewers were eliminated in the World Series and Championship Series, respectively, still leaves opponents seven-for-seven in winning the pennant after downing Milwaukee earlier in October. The Mets are four wins away from continuing the phenomenon.

Research has repeatedly proven that the playoffs are a crapshoot. The talent gaps on paper between two good teams can easily be closed--or even reversed--for a few games. Murphy reiterated it.

“It’s not a matter of being good enough, making the right call, and all that kind of stuff. A lot of it just happens at this time of year in baseball," he said. "Getting through these games, a lot has to go [your] way, and a lot has to happen. That’s our game.”

Despite the frequent talk about how playoff baseball is different than its regular-season counterpart, the reality is that it’s exactly the same game. The winner has to score more runs than the loser, and driving the ball for extra-base hits is the most efficient way to do so. Teams keep runs off the board by executing pitches, mixing looks, and making plays in the field.

The context is what changes. The stakes are higher, the atmosphere is more charged, and the sample size is smaller. Little moments – some within a player or manager’s control, some not – and individual performances for a few games that would go unnoted during the regular season can swing a team’s October fate and erupt into narratives.

No outcomes are guaranteed in baseball, whether it’s the regular season or the postseason. The difference is that everything is under the microscope during the latter.

Bad luck is not unusual in baseball. Nor are three-game skids for Willy Adames, William Contreras, and Rhys Hoskins. Failures by veteran pitchers to cover first base and off nights for Devin Williams are rare, but they are not unprecedented. Treating specific instances differently because they occurred in a playoff series is a dangerous error, one the Brewers are correct to avoid. Losing in the playoffs is not necessarily a symptom of an inherent flaw in a team’s makeup, nor is it evidence that the winning opponent is somehow better built to succeed in October.

“It’s not like we’re at this level, and then whoever wins that playoff game is at the next level,” Murphy said. “We beat the Mets five out of six [games] during the [regular season].”

It may be tempting to think otherwise after first-round exits in five straight postseason appearances. However, it’s hard to label the Brewers a demonstrably bad postseason team based on that sample, when the roster has looked drastically different each year.

For a perennial contender, the Brewers have undergone significant annual turnover. The final outcome was the same, but the events and players behind each year’s playoff shortcomings differed. Murphy noted that every march to the postseason has been a unique experience with its own challenges, not the same group attempting to pick up where it left off a year ago.

“Someone says, ‘The Brewers got the regular season figured out. Now they’ve got to figure out the playoffs.’ That’s absurd that you’d say that, if you really know baseball. We don’t have the regular season figured out. It’s a grind every freaking year to get to be where they have been. I’ve watched it. I’ve felt it.

“It isn’t a matter of, ‘Well, the Brewers are just always good.’ That is a fact, but it’s a different type of rebuild almost every year.”

None of this means the Brewers will not seek to improve. No competitive organization is complacent. However, don’t expect the club to make many – if any – decisions based on a three-game series loss. The reality is that while there can be smaller takeaways from a team’s postseason performance, the small samples of October baseball are not the proper backdrop for the comprehensive and precise evaluation that keeps a well-oiled organization running.

“Playing one game or a three-game series in the playoffs doesn’t indicate where your program’s at,” Murphy said.

Better indicators are the Brewers’ 93 regular-season wins in 2024 and 666 since the start of the 2017 season--the sixth-most in baseball during that span. It would take substantial evidence for the Brewers to lose faith in the philosophy that has produced such success. The repeated playoff losses, as frustrating as they are, do not provide it.

Every postseason that does not end in a Brewers championship will sting. However, there should be solace in the fact that the club consistently reaches the dance almost every year. Each season presents an opportunity just as realistic as the last.

This era of Milwaukee baseball has another built-in layer of optimism. Unlike past offseasons, the front office will not be tasked with retooling significant portions of the roster. The Brewers boast a young position player core, most of which is set to remain intact for the long haul. That continuity means lessons learned in 2024 can carry over to next year and beyond.

“We could have played in the World Series this year,” Murphy said. “Just look at what’s going on. We’ve beaten all the teams that are going to be there. Look how consistent we were this year. We were capable of winning it.

“I think players will take away that, ‘Wow, I can do this.’”

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[Michael Trzinski]

Probably no solace to disappointed fans, but let me ask this question: would you rather win 81 games every year and miss the playoffs?