Understanding how the Brewers' brand of baseball works, and whether it can last

Only four teams in the Majors have scored more runs than the Brewers have, and it’s tight enough that the Brewers might end up with a top-3 run-scoring offense in baseball by the end of the year. At the same time, every team has outhomered the Brewers, who have a Majors-weakest 120 dingers and just one 20-homer hitter, Jake Bauers.

Small market. Small players. Limited power. Lots of runs. You can basically write the headlines yourself: Small ball is back, baby!

Well, kind of. The truth, as always, is a bit more complicated. They’re not playing powerball, that much is true. But there’s some nuance here. Let’s get into what the Brewers are doing, and why it works every year. (Until it doesn’t, which we have to get into as well.)

It’s not about making contact, because Milwaukee’s strikeout rate is essentially league-average. It’s not about sacrifice flies (they’re tied for 15th). It’s not really about sacrifice bunts (they’re third, but 30 over more than 5,000 plate appearances is hardly needle-moving, because giving away free outs is rarely a good idea).

It’s not even about leaning into pitches, trading pain for bases (they’re last in hit by pitches), though they do add considerable value on the bases once they’re there thanks to their speed.

Nor is it about an inability or unwillingness to swing the bat fast or hit the ball hard. Milwaukee is 7th-best in hard-hit rate and roughly average in barrels (the perfect combination of exit velocity and launch angle) this year, and that comes with the fifth-fastest bats.

Other than speed, there's a lot of traditional 'small ball' stuff that just isn't happening. So what is?

1. They’re zigging oppo, when everyone else is zagging to pull.

This isn’t all of it, but any time the other 29 teams are doing one thing and you’re doing a different thing – and succeeding at it, we’re not talking about the recent history of the Colorado Rockies here – it’s worth highlighting.

Every single team in baseball has a pull-side bat orientation, or attack direction, which shows the horizontal approach of the bat at the closest point to the ball. Pull is where you find power. Every team has some pull.

Every team, that is, except for the Brewers.

The Brewers do that, in part, by letting it get deep. As we explored last year, power is found out front – 36 inches in front of the batter being ideal – but contact is found a little deeper, more like 30 inches in front of the batter. The Brewers, this year, are making contact 29 inches out front, or letting it get deeper than 28 of the other 29 teams.

In a baseball world obsessed with pulling the ball in the air – mostly correctly, if you remember how Cal Raleigh had an all-time great season last year, or how Fernando Tatis Jr. turned around his miserable start to 2026 – the Brewers do not, because that’s really hard to do when you let the ball get that deep. No team in baseball hits a lower share of their batted balls in the air, pull-side, than Milwaukee does. That’s underselling it more than a little; no team in a decade has a lower pull-air rate than the 2026 Brewers do.

No regular Brewer has an above-average pulled-air rate. Not one. Only a single Brewer, Gary Sánchez, has even a league-average pulled-air rate, and even he, at 18 percent, is down massively from the 27 percent he ran as an Oriole last year. (There are always trade-offs; while his strikeout rate has dropped, so has his hard-hit rate.)

That isn’t necessarily about finding the secret key to success. No team in baseball this year has a higher pull-air rate than the Cubs, who are quite likely to end the season as baseball’s highest-scoring team. It’s more, we think, about what it takes to get there.

“The hardest thing to do, as a hitter,” said six-time All-Star and likely future Hall of Famer Joey Votto to ESPN recently, “is to pull the ball in the air.”

That echoes almost exactly what Ted Williams told Peter Gammons 40 years ago, saying in 1986 “the toughest thing is to pull the ball and get it in the air ... that's the premium, par excellence hit.”

Quite right. When hitters as accomplished and thoughtful as Williams and Votto talk about the craft, you should probably listen.

Only 18% of batted balls (and 3% of all pitches) are pulled in the air, because it’s indeed quite difficult to time a pitch up like that. It’s generally perceived as worth the effort, because when you can do it, it’s incredibly valuable contact, leading to a .538 average and 1.209 slugging percentage. There’s a reason why Kyle Schwarber, Pete Crow-Armstrong, and José Ramírez annually rank among the leaders here. It’s hard to do, but the returns are massive.

What the Brewers seem to have done, instead, is to focus on getting on base, trading in the high-value difficult outcome for the lesser-value but more easily attainable outcome. Slapping the ball to the opposite field sacrifices much of a chance of hitting a homer, but it makes it more likely your batted ball will find grass, because it allows Milwaukee hitters to do something thought difficult, or impossible: Become indefensible.

In the same way that Statcast’s defensive metrics allow us to see which fielders are getting the easiest or most difficult chances, we can do the same for hitters, too. In much the same way that Brandon Marsh's BABIP success was about making it hard for defenders to set up properly against him, the Brewers are tied for having the most difficult chances for opposing defenders to turn into outs.

Put another way, this is an indefensible ball.

So is this.

That’s all good news, though the downside here is clear. This has all led to baseball’s highest ground ball rate, and in fact one of the highest of the last decade, and that’s still not really a good outcome. For one thing, most of the other teams high on that list had terrible offenses; for another, it’s not really the goal. As manager Pat Murphy said to Brewers Nation last year, "If I hit a ground ball in today's game, you're probably out."

While the Brewers do have the fifth-best average on grounders, hitting .264 isn’t going to set off any parades, and there’s almost no correlation between this and success anyway. (The Marlins, Royals, and Rangers are three of the four teams with better averages here; the Yankees, Padres, and Nationals are three of the five worst. We can tell you which group of lineups we’d rather have.)

What this all lands on is this: It’s difficult to pull the ball in the air, and expensive to acquire players who do. If you can do it, and well, you’ll have some elite offense. But it might be better to do something else entirely than to do it poorly, and that’s what Milwaukee has done.

2. Don’t swing.

“They don't swing a lot,” said Cubs manager and former Milwaukee skipper Craig Counsell to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel last fall. “Like, their team doesn't swing a lot. Because [Murphy] tells them not to swing.”

Back in 2022, Eno Sarris wrote about a study that MLB.com’s Sr. Data Analyst Tom Tango had run, which boiled down to “don’t swing,” or, at least, “swing less.” If not an aesthetically pleasing style of play, it’s an analytically sound one.

“There are very few players who have a positive contribution with their swings,” wrote Tango, a feeling echoed by Kyle Boddy, founder of Driveline Baseball and recently a Red Sox front office employee, who said “hitters should not swing.”

There’s merit to that – it’s hard to miss that the two players who have cut their swing rate the most this year are Crow-Armstrong and Junior Caminero, who ought to each gain significant MVP support – but even harder to miss how hard Milwaukee is leaning into it. They have the lowest full-season swing rate of any team since 2019, and the third-lowest of the last 10 seasons.

That’s led, in some part, to an excellent walk rate, essentially tied with the Cubs for baseball’s best. If you think that’s a coincidence, realize that Milwaukee’s top four affiliated Minor League teams are, collectively, tied for the highest walk rate of any organization.

But it’s not about chasing or not, because they have one of baseball’s lowest in-zone swing rates too. (Which has led to a whopping 200 more called strikes than the No. 2 team.) It’s more about swing decisions and finding the right pitch to go after, particularly understanding that the shape of Bauers’ faster, more vertical swing is different than the shape of Sal Frelick’s slower, flatter hack. So the ‘right pitch to go after’ isn’t the same for each of them.

It’s difficult to quantify swing decisions, though many have tried, and it’s clearly something Milwaukee values highly. One version has them as the second-best in baseball this year. It seems pretty likely there's something to this.

3. It’s not the number of homers. It’s when they come.

Surprise! It actually is about the homers. Even though they rarely hit them. It’s weird, we know.

Milwaukee, as we said, has the fewest homers, 120. It follows that they have the fewest solo homers, at 59, or about 30 fewer than average.

You’d think, then, that a team that doesn’t hit homers overall, and also doesn’t hit homers when no one is on base, would have the fewest homers with runners in scoring position, because how could they not? But in reality, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Milwaukee has 39 homers with runners in scoring position, and that’s the fourth-most of any team in baseball.

Put another way:

• 49% of Milwaukee’s homers are of the solo variety, which is one of the 10 lowest full-season marks of the last 20 seasons.

• But 33% of their homers come with runners in scoring position, which is one of the five highest full-season marks of the last 20 seasons.

We can’t even say there’s an obvious answer to this; they don’t clearly change their swings or an approach in any way we can find. It might just be that with runners on base, pitchers are forced to be more careful and deliver more of the pitches that Brewers hitters deem crushable. (That they swing at 64% of pitches in the heart of the zone with runners on compared to 60% with bases empty isn’t a zero change, but it’s not a big one, either.)

The elephant in the room, then: What works in the regular season doesn’t necessarily work in the postseason, because baseball above all other sports just plays a very different brand of game in October, when you’ll never see a fifth starter and bullpens can be used more aggressively.

You’ve probably seen some version of this stat before, but it keeps coming up because it’s true: When a team outhomers their opponent in the playoffs, they win roughly 80% of the time over history. That’s 78% since 2000, and 84% over the last decade, and 30-5 (86%) last season. When the pitching gets harder, and the defenders get better, and the balls don’t fall, you end up with things like Milwaukee scoring four runs in four games while hitting .118/.191/.193 in an NLCS sweep, as happened last year.

Remember: It was a myth that Toronto’s 2025 run to the World Series was based just on contact, because they also crushed the ball.

In the last 40 seasons, only two teams have finished last in the Majors in homers and still made the World Series – the 2012 Giants and 2014 Royals, who played in what seemed like an entirely different version of the sport. It’s been nearly 70 years since a team did what these Brewers hope to do, which is to have the best record and make the World Series with the fewest homers, dating back to the 1959 “Go-Go” White Sox.

Over the last six seasons, only one team has more regular-season wins than the Brewers. What Milwaukee does works for six months; that’s been proven beyond argument. They also haven’t won a playoff game beyond the Division Series since 2018. Power, as always, wins in October. It's up to the Brewers to prove it doesn't have to.