We're Starting Over: Brewers Catch Cubs in NL Central, and the Marathon is Now a Sprint

The 162-game grind of an MLB season is a marathon. But here's the thing: sometimes, early in a marathon, you get tangled up with another runner and take a digger, or you're waylaid by a bathroom break, or you just can't get loose. If that happens to you, you can either give up on keeping the pace and meeting the goal you set throughout your training, or you can accept a bit of extra pain and push your way back to that goal. And at some point, if you elect the latter, you have to stop thinking of it as a marathon. Once you're behind your pace, it's a sprint, and it stays a sprint until you cross the finish line.

The Brewers ate Chipotle the night before the 2025 MLB season, and they got locked in a portable toilet three miles into their marathon. Ever since, they've had to run slightly faster than they'd planned, to catch up to the buddy they expected to run with. Now, though, they've done it. It's no longer a 162-game sprint. Both the Brewers and the Cubs play 63 games over the next 70 days. They have identical 59-40 records. From here, it's a sprint.

What the team has already accomplished is remarkable. FanGraphs still has the Cubs as favorites in this head-to-head battle for Central supremacy, but the margins are much smaller than they were two weeks ago—and obviously, those probabilities only matter if you think the projection systems on which it's based accurately capture each team's true talent.

Both the Brewers and the Cubs can make the playoffs, of course, and that now looks like a near-lock. Notice that the Crew's chances to reach October had sagged into the 12% range in the second half of May, before they began this steady gathering of momentum.

By the projections' reckoning, then, the team now has over a 90% chance of making the playoffs. Just two months ago, they had chances roughly equivalent to flipping a coin and getting heads three times in a row. The big difference between winning the division and not doing so is avoiding the Wild Card Series that has been such a bane for the Brewers the last two years. Whether they can outlast the Cubs or not, though, the Crew benefit from having gotten this hot for this long. They're now in good position to win the first Wild Card berth even if they don't claim the divisional crown, which would mean hosting the Wild Card Series again. If we lock in on the chances for each team to reach the NLDS, we can see a similar magnitude of improvement in the last two months by Milwaukee.

Sticking with our coin-flipping analogy, two months ago, the team was four flips coming up heads from the NLDS. Now, they're better than 50/50 even on the first flip. For many Brewers fans, it would provide at least some psychic relief just to break out of the new outskirts added to the postseason by the recent changes in format. The odds of that have dramatically improved of late, not only because the Brewers have caught the Cubs, but because they've swept the Dodgers in their season series, giving them a leg up on Los Angeles if the two finish with similar records. Home-field advantage throughout the playoffs is becoming a distinct possibility.

Let's talk about the level of success that would provide even more catharsis, though. The Brewers haven't been back to the NLCS since they lost Game 7 to the Dodgers in 2018. At their lowest, the Crew were equivalent to needing six straight coins to land on heads in order to get back to the doorstep of the World Series. Now, they've (metaphorically) won four of those already; they just need to win two more.

The Dodgers have been in a class of their own since this year's projections came out. Below them, though, there was a lot of uncertainty. For a long time, once things began to separate out, there was one group a bit behind Los Angeles and close to one another (the Phillies, Mets and Cubs) and another farther back, but within shouting distance (the Giants, Padres and Diamondbacks). Now, the Brewers have surged up from just below that second cluster to a legitimate member of the first. They're playing well enough to get even the statistical models to view them as the equals of big-market behemoths from New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and L.A. It's a huge change.

On nine of every 10 days for the next 10 weeks, the Cubs and Brewers will each play, and (when not playing each other) fans will obsessively check standings and scoreboards. The long season has been condensed to a short burst of major heat and intensity. The stakes of the trade deadline are rising fast. This is going to be an electrifying final 63 games.