Every Flavor of Perfect: Brewers' Bullpen Dominance Demonstrates Their Broader Brilliance

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It's only been 10 days since the Brewers began their 2026 postseason play. In that short a time, according to Baseball Reference, Aaron Ashby, Trevor Megill and Abner Uribe have combined to give the team 20.7% of a championship. The near-spotless performance of this bullpen—headlined by Pat Murphy's most trusted trio, and epitomized when five relievers retired all 15 batters they saw in Game 2 of the NLCS Monday—has been the throughline during the team's 5-1 start to a playoff run they hope will end with their first-ever World Series championship.

Championship Win Probability Added (cWPA) is a stat kept at Baseball Reference, using in-game WPA and the context of playoff series to translate contributions to individual wins into contributions to that ultimate one. It's a fascinating framework to study, because it makes clear how important a great run of relief pitching can be. Ashby has been worth 0.10 cWPA in his five appearances. Megill has delivered another 0.068, and even Uribe—whose outings have been slightly rockier—has added 0.039 in cWPA.

Their value is a testament to the rest of the team's performance, in some respects. It's also an affirmation of their varied and formidable talents. Ashby has mowed down Padres and Dodgers batters with his usual assortment of nasty stuff, though there's one wrinkle: he's leaned on his changeup more in these games than was his wont all year, at the expense of his curveball. Perhaps feeling he can best command the pitches that move arm-side for him, he's emphasized the sinker and that change, only going to his breaking balls when the element of surprise is on his side or when he needs to press a lefty to expand the zone.

These 10 days have been Ashby in a nutshell: always available, and deeply proud to take a share of the burden that might otherwise fall on his teammates in the bullpen. He's also unique in his ability to work multiple innings within games, without needing the same recovery most pitchers do after such a significant stint. All of that is made near-miraculous (rather than merely impressive) by the fact that a few years ago, Ashby's career was on life support. He suffered such a serious shoulder injury that he missed all of 2023 and failed in his efforts to return as a starter in 2024. Only late in that campaign did he find a foothold in the bullpen.

By the time he got hurt, Ashby had already signed what then looked to be a ludicrously team-friendly long-term extension, which can keep him in Milwaukee through 2029. When he went roughly 22 months between stints as a full-fledged big-leaguer, that deal began to look like a disaster. The Brewers had gotten their gamble right, though. They were betting on his talent, but also on the makeup of a kid they found in the fourth round of the draft and plucked from a junior college in Missouri. Becuase of the latter, the former eventually found a way to shine.

All the ways in which Uribe's story is different from Ashby's are obvious. All the ways in which they're similar lie below the surface. The team signed Uribe for a very modest $85,000 out of the Dominican Republic back in 2018, but between injuries and the lost pandemic season, he only toed the rubber during the regular minor-league season 38 times from that signing date through the end of the 2022 season. He pitched 65 innings (plus a handful in the Arizona Fall and Dominican Winter Leagues) over the first 56 months of his employment with the Brewers.

That makes him almost as unlikely a bullpen iron man as Ashby, but that's what he's been over the last two years. He fired 75 regular-season innings last year, and another six in October. This season, he spent a stint on the injured list, but still got to roughly 60 innings, and he's angling toward a heavier postseason workload than last year's. Along the way, the team had to wait out not just injuries, but some emotional maturation. Uribe has plus makeup, but in a very different way from Ashby, and the team was deeply disappointed in his approach to the game as recently as 2024. Since then, he's turned a corner in that regard. He even stepped into the void left by the absence of Freddy Peralta this year, playing a cohesive role among the other Latin American players on the team. Like Ashby, he throws 100 miles per hour and still induces ground balls. Like Ashby, he's overcome a great deal to get this far, and it shows. They're very different, but they reflect the same extraordinary blend of patience and insight on the Brewers' part. They're willing to wait and try multiple times with players. They often find value—even huge value; even, say, 10% or 4% of a championship—in players on whom other organizations might have long given up.

That brings us to Megill—a player on whom other organizations actually did give up. The Padres took Megill in the 7th round in 2015, but he made no headway with them; they didn't even protect him from the Rule 5 Draft when the time came. The Cubs couldn't help Megill avoid giving up homers, so they left him exposed to waivers, where the Twins picked him up. Minnesota was dissatisfied with his ability to stay off barrels, too, though, and Megill wore out his welcome in all three organizations with a personality that can swing from jovial to prickly in a hurry.

All along, though, he struck people out, and he threw a fair number of strikes. The question was whether there was anything he wasn't fully tapping into, in his arm, which might allow him to limit opposing batters' power better. The Brewers were willing to bet on doing so, and on their ability to communicate more productively with the talented righty than his previous employers did. They barely had to give up anything to land him in a trade with Minnesota in early 2023. By the end of that very season, though, he was an important part of their relief corps.

He's now sixth in team history with 81 saves. He gave up just one home run in 2026, and it's five (including the playoffs) since the start of last season. He surrendered seven in less than 24 innings with the Cubs in 2021. He's also become a voluble but loved member of the team's pen, espousing the power of friendship and smiling his way into the middle innings every night, before transforming into the red-eyed beast who shuts games down so remorselessly.

Megill's style is very different from that of Uribe, and if you look closely, it's different than almost every pitcher the Brewers develop for themselves. They have a preferred set of shapes and looks for their homegrown pitchers, which looks most like Ashby and Uribe. The high-rise fastball and hard, vert-only curveball is not a plan the team creates for most of the pitchers they draft or sign as amateurs. However, the team isn't edded to one way of doing things—not by a long shot. They make pitchers the best versions of themselves, by being flexible as well as focused. That's a reasonable way to frame their approach to personalities, too.

On a team famous for its turnover, the department of the roster where every team experiences the most turnover has some noteworthy stability. Ashby, Uribe and Megill all pitched in the postseason for Craig Counsell-managed teams (Uribe and Megill in 2023; Ashby in 2021). They've been together for a while, now, and although there's a chance Megill is traded this winter, at least two of the three are likely to be back next year, and the year after.

The way the team waited out long periods without getting anything substantial from Uribe or Ashby; the way they developed each and found the right roles for them; and the way they adapted to Megill's skill set instead of demanding that he adapt to them are all microcosms of the team's deft approach to acquisition and development. They make fine symbols. With just a bit more good luck, though, neither the team nor its fans will have to settle for symbols or for championship WPA much longer. These three emblematic hurlers might just be the catalysts of a championship itself.