How the Brewers Remade Their Offense to Win in October

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Maybe the best place to start is with Brice Turang. He's where the story of the 2026 Brewers' dominance seemed to kick off, at least on the offensive side. Turang finished 2025 on a tremendous hot streak, when he began turning on the ball just often enough—not often, still, but just often enough—to produce above-average power for the first time in his career. When he returned in 2026, though, he'd paired that minor adjustment with a bigger one: steeper swing tilt, which wasn't costing him any bat speed but allowed him to generate loft more easily. For the first several weeks of the season, he hit like a potential MVP.

Turang went into a funk after that, though. Some poor swing decisions crept in. Developing that slightly altered approach that made him more dangerous was one thing. Maintaining it turned out to be another, harder thing. That's the nature of hitting in the major leagues. The cycle of adjustment and counteradjustment can never stop.

Meanwhile, his teammates were still playing a brand of offensive baseball that better matched what Turang was like pre-swing change. With Jackson Chourio and Andrew Vaughn each sidelined by hand injuries early in the season, the lineup had almost no power much of the time. No matter; they made it work. Their isolated power (ISO, the difference between one's slugging average and their batting average) was .123 in April and .112 in May; the league's ISO was .156. But the Brewers walked a lot, stole a lot of bases, and strung together hits with runners in scoring position—that, most of all. For what felt like the umpteenth year in a row, they were defying the gravity of the game and hitting better with men on base or in scoring position than anyone else in the league. It started to get widespread attention. It became, literally, a national story.

By the time Ben Lindbergh's story at The Ringer came out on June 15, though, the team had already made a subtle but important change. They were famous for their patience, and for their opportunism. They were famous for letting the ball travel (i.e., contacting it deeper in the hitting zone) and for going the other way. Lindbergh's story laid out those traits as part of the team's way of coming up with all those clutch hits, and that was true—except that the team was already abandoning that strategy.

As we discussed above with Turang, you can't let opponents know what you're doing until you're ready to stop doing it. The Brewers had already seen some teams start pitching them differently in big situations, and when they started getting calls with inquiries like Lindbergh's, they knew it was time to change up. More importantly, though, they had been talking all along about a lurking problem with their magic formula: it was nautralized by the caliber and style of pitching they would see in the playoffs.

The clutchness and situational hitting of the Brewers dates back to Craig Counsell's tenure, but so does their legacy of October frustration. Counsell's only series win in the playoffs came in 2018. When Pat Murphy took over in 2024, there was no immediate change. Even in 2025, the team only eked out a Division Series triumph over the Cubs, then got swept by the Dodgers. They needed to do something differently, this time, if they wanted to get over the hump and turn from a great regular-season team into a championship-caliber playoff team.

One key figure in that endeavor would be Daniel Vogelbach, the round, ribald, utterly beloved new hitting coach. As a player, Vogelbach was famous for his take-and-rake approach, letting his patience border on passivity but proving dangerous when he did cut loose a swing. The Brewers hired him in early January, and by the beginning of March, he was like the Pied Piper for many of the team's hitters. He didn't try to impart his own hitting approach on the squad; that would have been a foolish way for (say) Sal Frelick to hit. He did, however, start them down the path toward unlocking more pop.

In June, the Brewers stopped being runners-in-scoring position superheroes, and they've never really resumed that. When it matters most, their hitters still show the ability to return to the approach they once had, because each has only changed what they're looking to do in small ways. Those changes are real, though, and to commit to them with enough conviction to make them work, they've each had to give up a little bit of that opposite-field, let-it-travel, find-grass game. By margins you could fail to notice (and which the Brewers hoped, all along, opponents would), they're getting more dangerous, if a hair less well-rounded. Their June ISO was .190, and it's only dipped back under .154 in one month since.

Every hitter had to make a slightly different adjustment. Garrett Mitchell moved his contact point forward about an inch and a half, and became about 2° less oriented to the opposite field at contact. He still hits the ball on the ground too often to be a true slugger, but through the midpoint of May, he had just one home run, and his stat line was being propped up almost entirely by walks. Since then, he's walked considerably less, but he hit 10 home runs and batted .277/.358/.446 the rest of the regular season. Famously, in the playoffs, he's belted two huge home runs and a triple.

With Mitchell, it's catching the ball farther out front and getting around it a bit more, which means being slightly more aggressive. For other Brewers, though, it's less about the horizontal angle of the bat at contact and more about whether it's working uphill enough at that point. Turang, Jake Bauers and (once he came back from that broken finger) Chourio all steadily raised their average attack angles as the season went on.

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That generally means you're catching the ball farther out front, too; it's just a different adjustment than Mitchell's. Nor does a steeper attack angle have to mean that. For Bauers, it did, by about the same amount as Mitchell. For Chourio, working uphill more didn't require being earlier and getting the ball farther in front. Instead, it was about changing what he was looking for and how he shaped his 'A' swings. Which thing any individual needs to do depends on their typical timing signature and their swing plane, plus their feel for contact. One size most certainly does not fit all.

One piece at a time, the Brewers became more capable of turning on a plus fastball—or taking one out of the park to center field, as Turang did in NLCS Game 1. Murphy had a hand in the adjustments; he's always involved in discussions about the team's broader offensive philosophy. Vogelbach became the fulcrum of the shift, though. He and the other hitting coaches on staff helped players understand why the team was slightly altering a gameplan that had worked well for so long, then tailored the course of adjustments to each guy.

Most of the responsibility for the transformation fell on veterans—an odd word, in most clubhouses, for a player as young as Chourio or Turang or as seemingly little-established as Mitchell or Bauers. Those guys have that role on this team, though. The team called up Cooper Pratt and Luis Lara during the season. They relied on Joey Ortiz for lots of defensive value, and on William Contreras for leadership and gameplanning with the pitching staff. They needed to be able to let those players focus on other duties. The shift in how this offense works would have to come from the guys whose main job is hitting.

Speaking of which: Christian Yelich. Already close with Vogelbach dating back to their time as teammates, Yelich was the first to attach himself to the new hitting coach and make clear how much he would trust him, early in spring training. That facilitated much of the change Vogelbach effected in other players over the course of the season. Trust would be paramount in doing a few things differently without losing what had made the club great, and Yelich's leadership ensured that that trust would be there.

This isn't about the narrative of which you've already read too much—the theory that only hitting the long ball works in the playoffs, because great pitchers never give up three hits in a row. It's not about reducing the team's reliance on sequencing, per se. Instead, it's about handling the specific types of pitching that become pervasive in October. The Brewers' old team approach was great for 162 games. They didn't ditch it; they still have some of that DNA in the lineup right now. That approach ensured they would get to the tournament.

Once the tournament began, though, they knew they would need hitters who had been tuned and trained to punish even great hurlers, and 'punishing' them has to include extra-base hits, as well as key walks and walkoff singles. Each change was small, but several Brewers made them, and the cumulative effect of their changes has been big. They might not be the clutchest team in history, anymore, in terms of a batting average with runners in scoring position. As the Dodgers and Padres have already learned, though, they're clutch in another, more vital way.