Brewers (Sproat) vs Cubs (Imanaga): 5/18/25, 6:40pm

[Brock Beauchamp]

Just in time for their first matchup of the year, the Cubs and Brewers hold the 1-2 positions in the NL Central. This is gonna be a fun one.

	WED	THU	FRI	SAT	SUN	TOT
Trevor Megill	0	0	16	0	0	16
Shane Drohan	0	0	0	0	0	0
Jake Woodford	0	0	0	0	19	19
Grant Anderson	0	16	0	0	29	45
DL Hall	0	18	0	0	21	39
Chad Patrick	0	0	0	52	0	52
Abner Uribe	19	0	11	0	0	30
Aaron Ashby	14	0	23	0	0	37

[BarremlensTSSC]

[igor67]

Ashby available for games 1 and 3, with Miz in game 2 excellent strategy.

[BarremlensTSSC]

The nature of my baseball fan psychosis:  I will 100% turn this game off (and that's true for the rest of this series) if it starts to go sideways. 😂

I'm pretty good at this point just enjoying the ride when it comes to MLB regular season fandom, but there's too much of the bitter little 10 year old left in my psyche to stick around and watch the Cubs do well against the Brewers.  Too much latent "trauma" from watching childhood friends who were "Brewers fans" become Cubs fans once WGN started broadcasting the Cubs nationwide via cable in the late 70's.  I know that sounds bizarre to anyone under 50, but if you ever wonder why you run into random Cubs fans north of Madison/Fondy/LaCrosse who don't have family ties to Chicagoland and who say their "Dad is a Cubs fan, so..." dollars to donuts that's why.  I was more than happy to listen to Uecker on the handheld transistor radio that ran through batteries like water but a LOT of folks in the part of small town Wisconsin space-time continuum in which I grew up became Cubs fans between 1978 and 1984 because they could watch the games on TV.  (Many briefly came back and acted like they never left in 1982, and then pretended they'd always been Cubs fans after 1983.)  

Let's Go Brewers!  (clap-clap-clapclapclap)

[sveumrules]

PECOTA quite handily (94.0 wins to 86.9 wins) and FanGraphs by a narrower margin (88.4 wins to 86.2 wins) are still favoring the Cubs at this point in the season.

However, we know that PECOTA and the default FanGraphs projections have less than stellar histories when it comes to forecasting Brewers win totals. If we flip FanGraphs over to their Season to Date mode it swings things in the Brewers favor at 97.4 wins versus 93.2 wins for Chicago.

The midpoint of the two FanGraphs projections is 92 wins. Over the eight full seasons from 2017 to 2025 the Brewers won 734 games, or 91.75 per season.