Brewers Video
Hmm. Ah. Well... uh-oh. The annual PECOTA projections roll out at Baseball Prospectus this week, and they are (to say the very least) unfriendly to the Milwaukee Brewers. Despite coming off two straight NL Central titles, the Crew come in with just 80.2 projected wins. The model only estimates that they have a 26.1% chance to reach the postseason, and it sets the rival Cubs a full 10 games ahead of them.
At first blush, this is crazy. While the Brewers have failed to build out their core this winter the way some might have hoped, and while they did trade Devin Williams in December, they return a lot of the players who have helped them win 185 regular-season games since the start of 2023. They have one superstar whose season was cut short last season, but who should be back as some facsimile of his former self, in Christian Yelich; another just tapping into his full potential, in Jackson Chourio; and a third already in full bloom, in William Contreras. They still have a deep bullpen, and they added rotation depth in the Williams trade, acquiring Nestor Cortes from the Yankees.
PECOTA isn't buying it. It doesn't like Chourio to explode, the way most of us expect. On the contrary, with a .251/.301/.413 line (103 DRC+, where 100 is average and higher is better), the system expects him to take a step back. It's fairly easy to reject that projection, not as some product of bias or incompetence (after all, head PECOTA architect Jonathan Judge is a noted Brewers fan—and a BF reader! Hi, Judge. Good luck today, buddy) but as one of the errors a good model has to make in order to better fit the data and career arcs of a multitude of players. Sometimes, to project 1,000 players as well as possible, you have to get a few badly wrong, and Chourio might be such a case.
Even if you mentally bump Chourio's production up a couple bushels full of runs, though, the Crew doesn't magically leap up to the Cubs' level. This model is calling them out for being built too much around depth, without being especially deep; too much around defense, despite having a player sliding up the defensive spectrum into a key defensive position; and too much around contact, at the expense of power.
Pitching-wise, the system sees them as above-average. The problems lie on offense, where they have the ninth-lowest projected runs total. Only Rhys Hoskins and Contreras project to reach 20 homers, and in Contreras's case, it'll be close. Eight different Brewers are projected for sub-.400 slugging averages in at least 250 plate appearances, and of those, a staggering five (Tyler Black, Brice Turang, Sal Frelick, Blake Perkins, and Oliver Dunn) have sub-.350 figures.
It's not hard at all to cobble together a case that the model is underselling the Crew. Garrett Mitchell (.665 projected OPS) could outperform his projection by a huge margin, as could Chourio. The system is not blind to the team's good defense, but it seems to be pessimistic about Turang's glove, projecting just 1.7 Defensive Runs Prevented from a player who was a run better than that by that framework in 2024—and is estimated, by other sources, as being worth as much as 15 or 20 runs with the leather. Projection systems aren't always right.
Still, this sends a pretty important early signal. The Brewers will have a tougher path to the NL Central title this time around, if they can manage to win it at all. They have some flaws that they have allowed to fester, heavily prioritizing the traits they believe they can acquire and develop best with their limited financial resources and excellent support staff. Maybe they need to get more aggressive in the endgame of the offseason than previously thought. Maybe they're already much better than this system can see. Either way, though, you'd prefer to see them sitting higher on the projected standings than they are, with spring training right around the corner.
EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this article erroneously stated that PECOTA projected the Brewers to win the division last year. That was incorrect. Although they later rose in the projected standings as Opening Day approached, at this time last year, PECOTA had Milwaukee pegged for third place; it was FanGraphs's projections who were high on the 2024 Brewers. We apologize for the mistake.
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