Brewers Video
The challenge here won’t be figuring out where to place the Brewers ordinally. The Cardinals are a narrow but clear favorite to win this division, and the hierarchy of the three teams trailing behind the Brewers is very clear. We do want to do two things that could be tricky, though. First, we should calibrate our expectations by estimating how close the Brewers are to being better than St. Louis. Then, we should assess how much of a fight the Cubs, Pirates, and Reds will put up, to get a sense of how many wins the Brewers might pile up in case they end up fighting for a Wild Card berth.
Beating the Busch Bullies
They’ve only won two of the last seven division crowns, but the St. Louis Cardinals still feel (and, perhaps, will always feel) like the hegemon of the division. They won the division fairly easily last season, running away from the Brewers down the stretch, and although they’ll miss all of Yadier Molina’s intangible value and the very tangible home runs Albert Pujols launched throughout the second half, they’ve more than replaced the lost production.
Willson Contreras will deliver considerably more punch behind the plate than the Cardinals have gotten from Molina any time in the last five years. The Cards’ answer to Jackson Chourio is Jordan Walker, a fast-rising outfield prospect with elite power who will break camp with the team and slot right into their thunderous lineup, which had two MVP-caliber cornerstones last year in Nolan Arenado and Paul Goldschmidt. Lars Nootbaar, Tommy Edman, and Brendan Donovan balance out those right-handers, and even their extra bats are fairly imposing.
If that all sounded a bit too imperious and intimidating, though, take heart: there are lots of potential pitfalls for this team. While Oliver Marmol made a net favorable impression last year as a rookie manager, he lost much of his coaching staff, and one of the guys the team hired to replace the lost talent (Matt Holliday, who was slated to become the bench coach) abruptly changed his mind shortly after his appointment. It’s not yet clear that Marmol’s smiling, seemingly collaborative approach to his job is going to be a successful one. He had a manager-proof roster and clubhouse last year. That’s much less true now.
It’s much less true, in part, because Contreras is a much better hitter than Molina, but nowhere near the same kind of leader or trusted companion to a pitching staff. Whatever noises he made about the Cubs being the problem after leaving them via free agency to sign with St. Louis, Contreras is a limited defender who doesn’t frame pitches well, call a great game, or manage difficult situations the way great catchers do. No one questions the sincerity or ferocity of his intentions, but he might never be capable of converting those intentions into impact.
Nor are the team’s other dependable veterans as dependable as they might seem. Adam Wainwright has had a brilliant career, but its final season has begun with diminished velocity in both the Grapefruit League and the World Baseball Classic, and with a groin strain that will sideline him to open the season. Wainwright’s absence only exacerbates and illuminates the major weakness of this team, which is a thin and unimposing starting rotation. Rarely do teams with starting staffs this weak get past 90 wins. Goldschmidt and Arenado are a combined 66 years old, and they each slumped badly at the end of 2022.
The Cardinals aren’t invincible. They never are, really. They’re favorites in the division, but there remains room to rush past them and win the title. The Brewers just have to play to their own potential and take advantage if St. Louis stumbles.
Let Ricketts Be Ricketts
When the Brewers won the division in 2021, they did it in part by being the club who pressed the detonator button and completed the overdue implosion of the pseudo-dynasty the Cubs forged from 2015-20. The Crew went 15-4 against the ragged remnants of the championship team that gave them such fits over previous seasons.
Last year, alas, was a very different story. The Cubs took 10 of 19 from Milwaukee, and the six-game difference in the Brewers’ record against their top rivals was more than the gap by which they missed making the playoffs for a fifth straight season.
After an offseason spending spree that brought them new long-term fixtures at shortstop and in the starting rotation and some short-term help in the heart of the lineup, Chicago hopes it’s back in the periphery of the playoff hunt. They still didn’t spend as aggressively as they could have, though, and they didn’t make any significant trades to effect a real turn of the proverbial corner. The Brewers remain comfortably better than their nearest neighbors. This year, they just need to do a better job of proving it in direct confrontation.
Will the Pirates’ or Reds’ Bright Futures Light Up Their Dreary Present?
Now well into what will be long rebuilds, the Pirates and Reds are not dangerous to any team fighting for a playoff spot in 2023. The only shame for the Brewers is that they have 12 fewer contests against those two teams this season than they’ve had in each of the last several. As with the Cubs, though, it’s imperative that Milwaukee assert its superiority by actually seizing each opportunity to beat the have-nots. That affects their outlook when it comes to any Wild Card contest, because they’ll have to tangle with more of the tough teams in the American League in place of those should-be easy wins against Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.
Nor will either of those teams roll over as easily this year as they did in the last couple. The Reds hope their young starting pitchers, whose eventual upside is something akin to what the Brewers enjoy now, take the expected steps forward in their second full seasons in 2023. Hunter Greene is the hardest-throwing starter in baseball. Nick Lodolo is a solid left-hander who could give the Brewers fits, and Graham Ashcraft is the kind of high-upside mid-rotation guy the Reds have missed even when they’ve assembled adequate top-end hurlers in recent years. Their positional depth is not yet ready to support that group consistently, but on any given day, they’ll be a more dangerous opponent.
By contrast, the Pirates made some significant free-agent investments (by their standards) this winter, the better to support a big-league core that is getting close to respectability. They elected not to trade Bryan Reynolds, despite his request that they do so. Oneil Cruz will get a full season to prove himself as a shortstop and a dynamic slugger. Ke’Bryan Hayes could return to stardom with better health. We could see one or both of the team’s highly-touted catching prospects before the year is out, and the team already has a viable rotation and a sneaky-good bullpen, led by Team USA relief star David Bednar.
Summary
Instead of 76 games, the Brewers will only face the NL Central 52 times this year. That makes each of those head-to-head showdowns more important, not least because of the depressive effect that schedule shift could have on the team’s overall record. Still, in an absolute sense, it means that their division rivals will have a smaller impact on that record than in past seasons. As long as the team takes care of business the way it should, the Brewers will either succeed or fail this year based on how they do against their other opponents. Tomorrow, we’ll briefly check in on the rest of the NL, to further contextualize our expectations for the team.
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