The Brewers Will Be Here Again

The dust is finally settling on the Brewers’ World Series win in Tampa Bay last week. Since Jake Bauers secured the final out of Milwaukee’s first championship and stuffed the ball in his back pocket last Wednesday night, it’s been a nonstop celebration. The Brewers partied in Tropicana Field’s visiting clubhouse. They returned home and partied at various Wisconsin sporting events. They partied during a championship parade estimated as the largest single-day public gathering in state history. Some kept partying around Milwaukee, while others continued traveling media tours.

The Brewers should be celebrating. They earned every second of this. For most of them, it’s their first World Series championship. For fans, the end of a 57-year title drought might seem like a once-in-a-lifetime event.

On the contrary: It will happen again, and much sooner than 57 years from now. The Brewers will return to the World Series much sooner than the 44 years since their last pennant in 1982, too.

The word “dynasty” gets thrown around too often in sports, but here, it fits. The Brewers have a talented and controllable core. Jackson Chourio, Cooper Pratt, and Luis Lara are all under 23 years old and signed to long-term contracts. Jacob Misiorowski and Logan Henderson could lead their pitching staff through 2031. Milwaukee also has one of baseball’s deepest farm systems, with talented prospects like Jesús Made, Luis Peña, Tyson Hardin, Blake Burke, and Josh Adamczewski progressing toward the big leagues.

More importantly, they have a process that makes them a perennial World Series contender. David Stearns’s “bites of the apple” metaphor ignited a short-term PR disaster in 2022, but that strategy worked. The Brewers have made the postseason eight times in the last nine seasons. By getting into the dance nearly every year (and perfecting their roster construction along the way), they gave themselves so many chances that the dice eventually had to fall their way. Everything finally came together for a World Series title.

While the Brewers acquire and utilize the right players to win every regular season, they also stay competitive every year because of the players they don’t retain or acquire. Under Stearns and now Matt Arnold, they’ve operated ruthlessly and efficiently, often eschewing sentimentality. The Brewers acquire talented players before they become established major leaguers and maximize their best seasons. Instead of paying to keep those players past their primes, they restart the cycle by trading them before free agency for younger, more controllable players or accepting a compensatory draft pick when they sign elsewhere.

Under this strategy, the Brewers declined to keep former stars Josh Hader, Corbin Burnes, Devin Williams, and Willy Adames beyond their original years of club control. “Bites of the apple” was Stearns’s explanation when they traded Hader for Robert Gasser and Esteury Ruiz, whom they later flipped for William Contreras. The following offseason, they traded Burnes for Joey Ortiz and DL Hall. Next, they traded Williams for Caleb Durbin, then traded Durbin in a six-player deal to acquire Kyle Harrison, Shane Drohan, and David Hamilton. They also let Adames walk in free agency after the 2024 season.

Most of those deals were panned outside of Milwaukee, but they paid off this year. Gasser made three postseason starts to stabilize a shallow rotation, allowing one run in 15 innings. Hall owns a 2.52 ERA as a full-time reliever over the last two seasons and tossed eight scoreless frames as part of a dominant playoff bullpen. Drohan and Harrison threw the second- and third-most regular-season innings, respectively, and Hamilton was one of the Brewers’ best hitters in October.

Meanwhile, Hader, Burnes, Williams, and Adames signed lucrative contracts. Hader has been the most successful but missed time in two straight seasons with shoulder and biceps injuries. Burnes underwent Tommy John surgery last spring. Despite strong peripherals, Williams has limped to a 4.65 ERA over two seasons after the trade. Adames was worth only 1.7 rWAR in the second season of his seven-year deal with the Giants.

Instead of retaining those players, the Brewers invested in scouting and player development. They have an excellent presence in Latin America, where they scouted and signed Chourio, Lara, and Made. In 2019, they renovated their spring training complex into a state-of-the-art player development hub. They employ large coaching staffs at all levels of the organization. Instead of spending on good players, it’s smarter to invest in resources that consistently turn most players into good ones.

Extra revenue from playing in and winning a World Series opens more short-term doors for the Brewers to be opportunistic this winter. They can afford to re-sign Jake Bauers to a two- or three-year deal. They could make more expensive one-year signings this year, as they did for Mike Moustakas and Yasmani Grandal before the 2019 season. Arnold made a serious bid for Tarik Skubal at this year’s trade deadline, a sign the Brewers feel confident enough in their infrastructure to make a splashy exception.

That doesn’t mean they should abandon the approach that got them here. The Brewers should not pony up to extend Contreras, sign a marquee free agent to a nine-figure deal, or trade their best prospects for a star (unless that star comes with several years of control). They spent years building an efficient, cohesive, well-oiled machine. It works. Tearing it down to satisfy the baseball world’s expectations of how a championship winner should operate would be foolish.

The Brewers can’t rest on their laurels. They should keep trying to improve their existing process. Potential changes to years of club control and revenue sharing in the next collective bargaining agreement could force them to alter how they operate. But even after winning it all, the Brewers will still act like the Brewers. They should. If they stay the course, they’ll be the champions again in the relatively near future.

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