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I think they have viable solutions in house for every potential roster hole. The problems are just some holes in what we know, which may or may not also be holes in what the organization knows: Catcher: How do Quero’s shoulder and Naylor’s bat look once spring training finally starts? I assume Contreras will be back for a final season. First base: do you give Bauers the QO? I don’t see why not. He’ll probably get a multi-year offer somewhere; if he takes the QO, the Brewers can deal for a year financially, and he’s probably worth it. Does Vaughn’s power return a year out from the hamate injury? If so, he’s a perfectly credible regular. If Bauers takes the QO, then just trade Vaughn. Then you’ve got three guys in Adams, Burke, and Fischer, who are very strong prospects with upper minors experience already. When is one or more of them ready? Third base: Ortiz and Hamilton make a perfectly fine platoon. (BTW, I think it’s much more likely that Ortiz plays significant innings at shortstop for the Brewers in 2027 than Williams.) Made is a question of when rather than if. Outfield: For the Brewers more than other teams, you can look at the outfield holistically, because most of these guys can move around. I think this is actually where the roster may be softest. The only fully trustworthy regular is Chourio. Can Mitchell stay healthy and effective? Can Frelick return to health and effectiveness? Will Lara hit enough yet to play regularly? Are you comfortable with Lockridge as your next depth option? This is where I think Williams might find a place if they think he’s ready to help. DH: Does Yelich collapse? If so, you’ve got plenty of guys who could stand to be rotated through this spot. Pitching: We should be just fine barring bad health news. Biggest questions in the rotation are whether they can get Harrison back to mid-rotation form and if/ how soon Priester can come back strong. Also, is Hardin ready to contribute?Then it’s just a question of which of the depth guys develops fastest. In the bullpen, the big question is whether they trade Megill and bump Uribe rebate up to closer. Wagoner appears ready to contribute.

I took a quick look at World Series winning teams’ regular season fWAR over the past 20 years (ignoring 2020 as all reasonable people should).The 2026 Brewers put up 50.4 fWAR. Seven winners put up more fWAR: the three Red Sox champs, the two Astros champs, the 2009 Yankees, and the 2016 Cubs. So that’s three repeat champs (the Yankees won recently before the 20-year window) — three of the four big-market behemoths of the 21st century — and our friends to the south. The Dodgers are a strange story. The 2024 champs posted about 47 fWAR, the 2025 repeaters who waxed the Brewers only 42. The 2026 iteration was the best version, posting 52.6 fWAR, but it didn’t matter. (BTW, the 2025 Brewers put up more fWAR than the Dodgers, 47.1). The only other repeat champs in this period, the 2010-2014 even-year Giants, put up the worst, third-worst, and fifth-worst fWARs of the 19 winners. (Second and fourth on that ignominious list are the 2011 Cardinals and 2021 Braves, both of course infamous Brewers heartbreakers.) This all likely means nothing. However, it seems a little interesting that the most talented teams have been repeat winners, and the less talented teams have been one and done, with the exceptions in either direction of the Cubs and Giants. The 2026 Brewers weren’t miles better than the 2019 Nationals or 2021 Rangers, but they were better. It seems like the Brewers, by this measure, are in a very realistic position to contend for more titles in the next several years, especially when you consider how young their core is and how little value they’re losing to free agency this winter.

May ranged from barely passable to bad. He couldn’t even give us length. Brewers in postseason games started by anyone other than Dustin May: 11-0. Brewers in postseason games started by Dustin May: 0-2. Brewers pitchers with worse postseason ERAs than May’s appalling 5.73: Woodruff and Drohan, each of whom only pitched one inning to May’s 11 and each of whom had a reasonable excuse for not pitching better. May constantly looked scared and/or annoyed, and I never heard anyone say a kind word about him, unless “his stuff is theoretically good“ counts as kind. He’s in the running for my least favorite Brewer since Matt Garza, which i’ll admit is a little unfair to May in that we only had to put up with him for a couple of months. The May part of the trade was an abject failure, a classic stupid deadline overpay for a player who was meaningless at very best. The Romero part of the trade almost makes up for the May part. Yes, he actually took the loss in that ill-fated May start in San Diego, but a non-power hitter beat him on a perfectly good pitch. If you give him that one Mulligan, he was nails the rest of the postseason. Ultimately I still hate the trade, because I’m not convinced the Brewers actually needed Romero as opposed to getting one of their other guys going – but Romero did what he did, and what he did helped meaningfully to win a championship.

This is exactly where I am. Baseball history is littered with successful teams that got less successful by running it back. The whole foundation of the Brewers’ success is understanding the difference between the past and the future. Catchers age terribly. I think Molina was vastly overhyped, but even if we take Molina‘s early 30s as a positive example, there’s no particular reason to think Contreras will have similar success.

This is beyond belief. The Milwaukee Brewers are World Series champions. I know you all know this, but I’m gonna need to keep writing and saying it until it starts to seem real.

An article fully worthy of a championship team. My favorite Brewers interview moment since Brice Turang sadly stopped sounding like a less articulate Jeff Spicoli came tonight from Cooper Pratt, looking thoroughly bewildered: “It only took four months.”

How many loud outs did we have and still win? I can think of two Frelick, Turang, Mitchell, Chourio . . . did the Rays have any?

IMHO that’s not how baseball works at all. Process plays out over a much longer time frame, and performance can shift dramatically from game to game. They’re still a team that won 98 games in the weaker league and took six games to shake the Guardians. We’re still a team that won 103 games in the stronger league and swept the Dodgers. Both teams’ players are still the same guys they were two days ago. The difference now is that they need four wins and we only need three. They nearly stole game one, but they didn’t, and the ground they gained yesterday doesn’t count today. Rasmussen will be tough, but Henderson’s no slouch.

Another fantastic article.

The Martinez choice objectively makes this game easier compared to Rasmussen, but for the same reason it amps up the pressure. Miz versus not one of their top two guys in Milwaukee. We have to win this.

It’s for the culture.

Brilliant work as always. I’ve gotten so tired of the narrative all summer that’s gone “The Brewers can’t hit homers / Only teams that hit homers can win in October so the Brewers are doomed / Oh look the Brewers are hitting homers and winning in October / See I was right about everything.” The big fallacy is that hitting homers off great pitchers is inherently easier than other kinds of scoring off great pitchers. What we’ve seen is that different great pitchers have different vulnerabilities. Homer-dependent offenses like LA have nowhere to go when the homers stop flying. A balanced offense like the Brewers can make adjustments in different directions to take advantage of different opportunities. This piece fills in exactly how they’ve achieved that versatility.

If the man can throw one inning with his fastball at 92, that’s likely to be a better inning than any of Patrick, Drohan, May, Harrison, or Senzetella can give you. The question is just which of those five to dump. Senzetella is a real RH relief pitcher who seems to have found his footing. The others are all length guys. Harrison looked great in his last appearance and could actually make a difference. Patrick if he’s right can give you three good innings. I’d keep both of them. Drohan may just be out of gas. If so, dump him. But if you have any hope that he has a pint left in the tank, May is the guy to dump. Yes, he has great stuff, but he hasn’t shown that he has any clue about how to get guys out with it. Beyond that, he can’t handle adversity. He’s the one guy on this team who doesn’t deserve his place. If the Brewers think he’s better than Bryse Wilson or Grant Anderson, fine, they know more than I do. But there’s no way he’s better than Shane Drohan with a pulse or Brandon Woodruff with a prayer.

My parents were lovely people, but they had issues. Our house at night could be a scary, lonely place for a bewildered only child. I got into baseball and the Brewers at age 10, just in time for the 1978 explosion. Through all the bad years after 1982, all the numbing losses and false starts and nights spent fiddling with radio dials around the country to try to pick up staticky broadcasts, I never forgot that feeling of discovering baseball and having it seem touched with grace. My parents cared about my passions. They got into the Brewers. Ueck was on at our house all summer, lifting us up and calming a lot of the chaos at night. Once I was away at college, Mom and Dad started going to quite a few games themselves. When Mom was recovering from a heart attack at 60, I went to a game in Detroit and passed a note to the broadcast booth, and Ueck gave her a shout out. She couldn’t believe it. They both passed away in 2017. It was their time, and I’m glad they didn’t have to endure Covid and MAGA and social media. But the night we drove up to Milwaukee to start cleaning out the house, the Brewers traded for Christian Yelich. Mom and Dad would have loved this, and as I process my joy, all I can do is carry them in my heart.

Matt, thanks for bringing your A+ stuff. I love reading it. I realized last night when Bauers used the word of which you wrote that I’d never seen/heard a player use it before — FCC and all that. I could get used to it!

That’s not a problem. It’s a way of keeping a culture alive and bringing new people in. It’s kind of the whole point.

As I understood the reports at the time, the Tigers wanted a package built around a pitcher and a position player. The Brewers offered Pena as the position player, and the Tigers wanted Henderson as the pitcher. Literally the only pitcher the Brewers own with more value than Henderson is Miz, so you can’t improve the package on that side. The Brewers’ only minor league position player with more value than Pena is Made. I don’t think even the most extreme “prospects have no value except to other teams“ people argued for trading Made, who has a very real chance to be better than Chourio. Maybe I’m missing something – maybe the Tigers would’ve settled for Fischer and the Brewers refused to part with him — but it seems unlikely that both of those things were true. I’ve heard no indication that the Tigers were interested in quantity over what they perceived as quality. So I literally can’t see any way to get the deal done without Henderson.

If, as reported, the Tigers were insisting on Henderson, then Harrison’s status was irrelevant. The “upgrade” from Henderson to Skubal was negligible either way. Maybe the postseason upgrade would have been worth five years of Henderson . . . but then maybe Harrison is back to being useful now.

Miz needs three strikeouts for 250 and fewer than six hits allowed to stay under 100. I don’t think Turang cares about 20 steals. I’m guessing he hasn’t been running for health reasons. I do kind of hope he’s swinging for the fences to get the RBI without any complications.

Please stop using “regular season” like this damning-with-faint-praise qualifier. It’s greatness, period. Winning a few short postseason series is another, different measure of greatness. I swear people are starting to get into this mindset like the real, 162 game season is some kind of long exhibition series or extended spring training. If I ask you who the MVP was in any given year, you’re not going to come back with the World Series MVP. If I ask you which pitcher had the most strikeouts in a given season, you’re not going to talk about the pitcher with the most strikeouts in the postseason. We don’t call those guys the “regular season“ MVP or the “regular season“ strikeout leader. We call them the MVP and the strikeout leader. The Brewers are the best team in baseball.

That’s super interesting. Thank you!

On the broadcast last night, Ben McDonald was talking about how the Brewers’ offense is built to win in the postseason, because it gets difficult to hit home runs off great pitching so you need to be able to play small ball. Of course, that’s the exact opposite of the conventional line, repeated over and over again this year, that only home runs win in the postseason. Has anyone done an actual, thorough analysis of postseason offense? I’ve heard over and over the stat that teams that hit home runs win more postseason series, but that’s not useful information by itself. I suspect that teams that hit more singles or doubles or steal more bases also win more postseason series, because all of those things contribute to winning games.

Oh, then I bet I’m missing others, because I missed that one. I was having a hard time finding a good list – did you find a comprehensive one, or did you just see that in some Brewers info? I’m really curious about this.

I first started noticing baseball in 1977 and became a full-fledged fan just in time for the first great run of Brewers success in the late 70s and early 80s. IMHO there hasn’t been a better Brewers team than this one, ever. At one time or another, we’ve had better players at just about every position, but these teams over the past few years have been the most complete Brewers teams I’ve ever seen, and they keep refining the formula. There’s a reason they’re likely to break the franchise record for wins for a second straight year.

I have to say, as a Brewers fan who has put up with living among Cardinals fans for almost 20 years now, that I’m very happy the Cardinals have become a different kind of team. Mármol likes to provoke conflict, and that’s annoying. But the whole “Cardinal way“ thing seems to have receded into humility. The present team is young and hungry. I can’t think of any of their players who irritate me, although they’re young and have plenty of time to ingratiate themselves. Seeing how they reacted to this made me happy for the team, their fans, and the rest of us.