Brewers are winning with the opposite of small ball

The Brewers are up three games to zero on the Dodgers in the National League Championship Series, with a trip to the World Series on the line in Thursday night’s Game 4. They won a franchise-record 103 games this year -- as well as five of the past six division titles in the National League Central -- by doing it their way.

It’s the team slogan this October, and it’s simply good business. It’s how a team that finished 29th in home runs also finished second in runs scored, not so much because of a dedication to making contact -- the Brewers are merely a league-average strikeout team -- but because of a willingness to find other ways to win. What does that mean? It means things like hitting to the opposite field, pressing their advantage on the bases or simply becoming one of the most modern “Moneyball” type teams you can find, mining every source for the smallest edge.

If they were never quite "small ball," they’re at least small players, and certainly their style of play feels a lot more like a throwback than that of the Yankees, Dodgers or any of baseball’s other massive, modern mashers. That they’re so thoroughly dominating Los Angeles, the same team that swept Milwaukee out of the playoffs a year ago in an embarrassing four-game dismantling, only adds to the intrigue. You can’t play exactly like the Dodgers do, with all their advantages, because if you do, you’ll probably lose.

They’re still not playing like the Dodgers, because they’re absolutely demolishing them. But they’re not playing like the team you think they are, either. These Brewers are the 228th different team to participate in a League Championship Series since the format began in 1969. No team, ever, has posted a higher "three true outcomes" rate -- that’s strikeouts, walks, and homers -- than this group has.

Milwaukee (31%) has struck out more than Los Angeles (23%), and in fact, it has whiffed more in each one of the first three games. The Brewers have outhomered the Dodgers, 5-0. They tied for the regular-season lead in walk rate (10.6%), and that’s only increased in the LCS (14.7%).

Nearly one-half of Brewers plate appearances in the LCS have ended this way: walk, strikeout or homer.

Obviously, a huge part of the Brewers' success has been how fantastic their pitching has been. But the lineup has played a significant role, too, and they're doing it with a style that's pretty far away from “small” ball.

The "three true outcomes," as originally coined years ago by Christina Kahrl, now sports editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, is a way to describe the percentage of plate appearances that end without the action of a ball in play. It's generally used to note the sport’s transformation from a put-it-in-play affair to a walk, whiff or dinger approach. Ironically, the poster boy at the time was a former Milwaukee slugger, Rob Deer, who led the Majors in strikeouts twice in his five seasons on the team between 1986-90.

Deer, who still rates in the top 15 of the all-time Brewers home run list as well as eighth on the team’s strikeout list, had a 48% three true outcomes rate as a Brewer. That was second highest in the Majors in the span, and also basically exactly what Milwaukee has done in the first three games of the LCS. The Brewers have gone, in other words, full Deer -- and it’s working.

It’s not inherently good or bad, more a shorthand description of style. This year, the four teams with the highest rate of the three true outcomes had two playoff clubs (Yankees, White Sox), and two disappointments (Reds, Orioles). The other end had the Rays, themselves having an incredible year, and a team far more likely to wear that "small ball" label, but also the Blue Jays and Royals, who had forgettable seasons. The Brewers, for their part, were a slightly higher-than-average 10th most, even with the lack of homers.

You can be extremely good this way (Munetaka Murakami, Nick Kurtz and Kyle Schwarber are the three players at the top), and you can still be plenty valuable at the other end, too (Luis Arraez, Chandler Simpson).

The Brewers are still winning their way, and part of that is simply adapting to what’s necessary at the time, and what’s available to achieve. It’s the entire point of what "Moneyball" was about in the first place, though that lesson has been lost to time. It’s not about winning in any particular way. It’s about winning, in whatever form that takes. It would surprise no one if the bunt came back as a weapon -- the Brewers put down two sacrifices in Game 1, one of which set up a run -- because the skill to do different things is, in and of itself, a winning skill.

No team in baseball this year has done that more than the Brewers. It just looks a whole lot different, right now, than their reputation of small players from a small market would have you believe.