Medium Ball: How Discussions of the Brewers Offense in Extremes Missed the Mark

No one is arguing, exactly, that small ball isn't valuable. All the little things that broadcasters with World Series rings from the 1990s talk about relentlessly do matter; they do help a team score runs. We count sacrifice bunts, sacrifice flies, times hit by pitch, stolen bases and more because they each represent advancement toward scoring, and they can be accomplished without truly winning the battle at the plate. The majority of the time, as the batter, you lose the battle, so it's important to be able to do positive things without winning the battle, at times. Small ball is brittle, though, because you have to do several of them in just the right sequence to create a run. It's very hard, in particular, to score multiple runs in an inning or four or five runs in a game using small ball.

Certainly, no one is arguing that the long ball isn't valuable. Hitting a home run is easily the best thing a batter can do. Its only vice is its obviousness; there's no question about whether hitting homers drives scoring. Every year, more than a third of the runs scored in the majors come home when the ball is hit over the fence. You need to hit homers sometimes to maintain a strong offense. Home runs are a brittle source of value, too, though, because unless the pitcher you're facing has extremely underwhelming stuff or makes a mistake or two, it's hard to hit them. Going to the plate with the plan of hitting a homer can lead to bad swing decisions and a lot of easy outs.

The constant debate is over whether small ball or the long ball is more important. Most fans have a preferred style, and they champion it relentlessly. The reality is that most games are won by the less brittle things that fall in between a couple hundred huge plays and a couple hundred tiny ones. Most at-bats end in something other than small ball or the long ball. A team can more reliably excel in those wide swaths of encounters, where the skill of the game reveals itself in tiny dribs and drabs. The 2026 Brewers were that kind of team. THey won games with ruthless medium ball.

If you add up each team's sacrifice bunts and flies, their times hit by pitch and their stolen bases and you subtract their times grounding into double plays or being caught stealing, the Brewers don't come out as the leaders. It's not even especially close. Milwaukee was eighth in baseball with 131 net positive events from small ball, but the Marlins and Nationals each had more than 175. The White Sox, Guardians, Red Sox, Rays and Padres all played small ball better than the Brewers.

You surely heard this enough times during October not to need it said, but the team also finished tied for 28th in home runs, at 154. Only the Blue Jays hit fewer dingers, and nine teams hit at least 50 more. Were the Brewers remotely dependent on either small ball or the long ball, they'd have ended up with a league-average offense, or worse.

But what about medium ball? If you simply add walks, singles, doubles and triples for each team, the Brewers come out first for 2026—and it's not close. They had 1,952 of those positive events, and their ratio of positive events in all plate appearances that didn't end in either small ball outcomes or the long ball was the highest in the league. The Yankees and Reds had fewer than 1,600 medium-ball contributions. Nineteen of the 30 teams had fewer than 1,700. The Brewers didn't lean on small ball, really. They certainly didn't hit a special number of long balls. On all the plays that didn't fall into either of those buckets, though, their superiority over the rest of the league shined through. 

That made room for the lethal sequences in which they seemed to eviscerate an opponent by running a carousel on the bases, as they did against the Padres in the bottom of the ninth inning in NLDS Game 2 and in the top of the fifth against the Rays in World Series Game 3. It also allowed them to score in shorter sequences than a true small-ball team, though. The signature hit of this team was the RBI double with a runner on first. They had 67 such hits in the regular season, eight more than any other team, and four more in October.

When William Contreras drove home the penultimate run of the champions' season with a double to the left-field wall in World Series Game 5, Christian Yelich scored all the way from first base. He'd reached via hit by pitch. He scored because he's fast and read the play well. There was small ball in it, but that wasn't a small ball play. It was medium ball, and while that sounds less than heroic, it was the way the 2026 Brewers set themselves apart. They could score fast or slow, but they were harder to stop than a team selling out for power or one that wanted to dink and dunk you to death. They struck a balance rare even among the best teams in the league each year. The debate will continue among the less learned, but those who watched closely know that small ball vs. the long ball is a false dichotomy. The best team in baseball found a happy medium this year.

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