“We’ve capitalized on pretty much every error, every defensive mistake and every pitching mistake,” Brewers hitting coach Connor Dawson said this summer. “That is our philosophy. That is our identity.”
“We want to make people play the game and we want to drag them through hell doing it.”
If there’s a better way to describe the offensive ethos of the 2025 Brewers, we’ve yet to hear it. Milwaukee finished 22nd in home runs, 25th in hard-hit rate, tied for 27th in Statcast’s quality of contact metrics, and with the fourth-highest ground ball rate. They struck out a little less than average, sure, and walked a little more than average, yes, yet neither mark was off-the-charts great. Really, none of this suggested an offense that’s going to be very good at scoring runs. It suggests, in some ways, the White Sox.
And yet: the Brewers scored 806 times. It was the third most in the game, behind only two of baseball’s best power lineups: the Yankees and Dodgers. It was 159 more runs than those White Sox, or about one per game, every night. It worked, until it didn’t; in September, Milwaukee scored the eighth-fewest runs of the 30 teams.
All of which leaves us with two questions: How does a team spend five months scoring so many more runs than their underlying performance would have you expect? More importantly, with the Brewers preparing to kick off the National League Division Series against the Cubs on Saturday in Milwaukee: Can they do it again?
All those runs didn’t score by magic, but they mostly didn’t score on big blasts, either. Milwaukee pushed across 101 unearned runs, by far the most in the Majors. (Miami was a distant second, at 83.) That’s about one-eighth of their run total for the entire season coming, by the strictest description of the phrase, without earning it. (An unearned run can also come in via the automatic runner in extra innings, though the Brewers were just middle of the pack in extra-innings scoring, and not all of those runs came via that automatic runner anyway.)
Of course, that entire terminology — a run, not fully earned — exists for the pitcher. It helps prevent them from unfairly getting their ERA inflated due to poor defense behind them. Maybe the pitcher didn’t earn that run being put on his ledger. Maybe the offense, however, did.
That’s because there’s more than a little something to making your own luck, both in baseball and in life.
Statcast’s top fielding metric is called Fielding Run Value, which takes all sorts of defensive measurables (range, outfield arms, various catching metrics, turning plays, etc.) and puts them on the same scale. You can use it to show that the best defensive teams this year were the Blue Jays, Cubs, and — yes — Brewers, while the weakest teams were the Angels, Nationals, and White Sox, all of which ought to match the eye test.
Given that knowledge, you can also flip it to the batting team’s POV and look at the performance of defenses against lineups, too. (That is: If you know when a fielding team made a great play that earns defensive credit, then you also know who was hitting that day, too.) For this, we’ll exclude the catcher inputs, and just look at the infielders and outfielders. As it turns out: No team in baseball had worse defense played against them than the Brewers did.
Worst INF/OF defense against when hitting, 2025
There was a 58-run gap between the team helped the most by bad defense (Brewers) and the team hurt the most by good defense (Pirates). Given the shorthand of “10 runs is a win,” well, you might say there’s six wins to be had here at the extremes, and nearly three wins above average.
Now, you might say that some of this is simply good luck, and without taking anything away from Milwaukee, assuredly that’s true to some extent — you’re not going to outscore such unimpressive power stats if things don’t go at least a little the right way for you. Other than putting bat on ball, there’s probably not a great deal of skill involved on things like Rhys Hoskins (June 21) and Jackson Chourio (Aug. 31) lucking into “doubles” because the opposing outfielder lost the ball in the sun.
But surely they had something to say about it, too. While the Brewers swing less than any other team, they chase outside the zone less than almost anyone else, too. When they do swing, they make more contact than any other club. If we’re into “making your own luck,” that’s a good place to start.
There is another aspect, too. While you may be familiar with Statcast’s hard-hit ball metric, you might not know that there are categories for poorly-hit balls, too. On those, Milwaukee had the most hits and tied for the best batting average. That is, of course, still just a .146 average — they’re “poorly-hit” for a reason. But if you can turn those very low-probability outcomes into an extra 70-something hits more than the average team, and an extra 100-plus hits over the teams that don’t find such outcomes, well, there’s value on the margins there.
“I think we create those good things by creating pressure,” Dawson had said.
It’s easy to see how. Milwaukee’s offense was tied for baseball’s second fastest, and their average home-to-first time was the fastest. No team had more infield hits — there’s Miami again, in second — which also undersells it a little, because the 164 infield hits the Brewers pumped out was more than any team in a decade.
Most team infield hits since 2015
Putting pressure on an opponent looks like the example below, in which Brice Turang went home-to-first in 4.04 seconds, one of his best hustle plays of the year. That forced Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson to fail to make a play that was graded by Statcast as being 80% likely given the opportunity.
“All the things we do all year kind of match up with how you’ve got to go about this,” said manager Pat Murphy. “And I think that’s going to be — even though nobody believes it — I think that’s going to be a big plus for us, because we’re playing this type of baseball all year.”
That was echoed by an advance scout for an NL East team. “Teams [today] don’t really have identities,” said the scout. “The Brewers are, for me, the team that has the most profound identity, and they know what kind of baseball they want to play.”
But there is a historical headwind that’s directly in their way. If there’s one postseason truth that never never stops being true, it’s that you can’t win in the playoffs without power. Small ball might play to get you to October, yet it doesn’t get you a title — as the Guardians have proven in recent years. Over the last 10 postseasons, teams that outhomered their opponents have won 82% of their games.
That’s at least in part because defense gets better in October. (Unsurprisingly. Each of this year’s top five defenses made the playoffs, yet only one of the nine weakest defenses, Seattle, made it.) It’s easy to see this simply in terms of how often batted balls find gloves; you can clearly note that batting average on balls in play goes down in October, as shown over the last decade.
At the same time this is happening, strikeout rate also goes up, with a 22.3% regular season rate jumping to 25% in the playoffs during that span. It’s no wonder, then, that the homer is so valuable.
“It’s hard to score in the postseason no matter what kind of team you are,” Christian Yelich accurately noted, “if you’re the Brewers or the Dodgers or whatever. … Our offense works when we get on base. It doesn’t necessarily have to be slug, but we can slug, for sure. It’s in there.”
They did, for a time, slug.
The Brewers were in the bottom third of the league in slugging percentage in each of the first two months, but they rose to average in the next two, and by the time the calendar turned to August, they were, dare we say, powerful. The August Brewers slugged .480, second-best in baseball, making it the team’s best slugging month since the Prince Fielder/Ryan Braun team of 2008. They hit 45 homers, more than any other team that month aside from the Mets and Yankees.
That was, in part, because Turang — who added more bat speed year over year than anyone else in the game — had the best month of his life, slugging 10 homers and winning the National League Player of the Month award. (Turang, when asked, demurred about the power, saying “I’m not trying to hit homers, I’m not really trying to hit more power. I’m just swinging at good pitches to swing at and trying to hit the ball hard.”)
The power uptick, however, didn’t quite last, falling all the way to 23rd in slugging in September and a matching 23rd in runs scored, as midseason breakout star Andrew Vaughn cooled off, ending his season with 119 consecutive homer-less plate appearances and Turang followed up his 10-homer August with a two-homer September. Contreras, too, is dealing with a bruised hand, and didn’t go deep once in the season’s final month.
“I think we’re at our best when we get on base, and any way that happens, doesn’t matter,” said Yelich. “If we do that in October, then we’ll have a lot of opportunities to score.”
“This has got to be the most fun baseball I’ve played,” said Turang, “going out and competing with these guys every night.”
The Cubs are going to find out. So will we.
