The Brewers have their first title in franchise history, and it comes with no strings attached.
The Brew Crew was the best team in baseball this year, then had one of the most dominant playoff runs in recent memory – crushing the two-time defending champion Dodgers along the way – and the whole thing ended up being so good that you might end up remembering them more like the 2018 Red Sox or 1998 Yankees than, say, the 2006 Cardinals. They’re one of just seven full-season teams this century to take the ring after also posting the most regular-season wins.
Given that everything about them seems "small" – market, ball, and players – and that this is, as ever, a copycat sport, you can be sure that the entire thing is going to generate some opinions around the game about what wins now, and how to do it. To just say “it’s old-school small ball” entirely misses the point, given how they got here, and that their pitching was outstanding in a very modern way, which is to say: Starters don’t go deep, bullpen takes over the game.
What, then, should we take away from the success of this team?
Realize that this didn’t happen in one year.
This, above all else.
The 2026 Brewers may be special, but their title is the culmination of nearly a decade of work. After the 2016 team went 73-89 in Craig Counsell’s first full season, Milwaukee has spent the ensuing years being elite, not having a single full-season losing record since, and posting the fourth-most regular season wins in baseball over the last 10 seasons. If postseason ball is in some ways about “giving yourself a bite at the apple, knowing most times it won’t work but maybe sometimes it will,” well, this is the eighth season out of nine Milwaukee has played in October.
This may be the year it ended right. It’s not the year that they suddenly started figuring out how to play good baseball. They’re not “David,” really – unless you mean David Hamilton.
Go back to those good teams from 2017-18, the ones that really kick-started this era of Brewers baseball excellence. The only remaining players from those years are Brandon Woodruff, who debuted late in ‘17, and Christian Yelich, who was acquired via trade prior to ‘18. Every other player from those teams is gone – and, with all due respect to how much Woodruff and Yelich have meant to this franchise over the years, neither was exactly a major on-field contributor to the 2026 team. While much of the front office and support staff has remained, the roster turns over, the president of baseball operations and manager depart, and they just keep on winning.
It is very much our expectation that some other team (or teams) will look at this group and say: We want that style of play too, without the years of buildup to make the organization function that way. It might mean leaning into opposite-field hitting, or contact at the expense of all else. But if it comes without the other things Milwaukee has, like excellent defense and the most dominant starter alive, or the high quality support and coaching staff, it's not going to work the same way.
It’s not a thing you can just do, not overnight, anyway. Someone’s going to try that, and it’s not going to go well.
You can win without power – but everything else had better be great.
Milwaukee, famously, had the second-fewest homers in baseball this year, then hit just three in five World Series games. Given all the talk about how power wins in the playoffs, you might consider this to be a massive sea change.
That’s not exactly true; teams that out-homered their opponents in games this postseason still won at a high rate (.815), just like they always do. Hitting a homer is something of a cheat code, as it is, of course, the only thing guaranteed to put a run on the board. It gives you cushion in case other parts of your game aren’t quite as strong as you’d like them to be. Just look at individual hitters; no one cares that Kyle Schwarber strikes out at a massive rate, because he makes up for it with homers.
What that means for a team like Milwaukee is that it raises the difficulty level elsewhere. Relatively few homers? Your defense better be excellent. (Theirs was.) You’d better make up for it with speed on the bases (They’re baseball’s fastest team), and the willingness to steal. (They have it.) It absolutely requires tremendous pitching (They had that), a youthful roster comfortable with all of this (They had that, too), and coaching and support staff capable of putting it into action (Maybe you’ve noticed Pat Murphy is the two-time defending Manager of the Year, possibly on his way to a third).
It’s not, suddenly, that power doesn’t matter. It’s just that if you don’t have it, you need a lot of other things to go well. It’s why the Angels, who hit exactly the same number of homers, went 62-100.
If you try to win like everyone else, you probably won’t.
If there was a real lesson from “Moneyball” that’s long been forgotten, it’s this. For all the nonsense about how the Brewers and Rays were old-school teams that rejected advanced thinking, that’s clearly not true, as we just saw a World Series between two of the most progressive-thinking groups in baseball.
If you think “advanced metrics” are just “exit velocity and spin rate,” then you’ve missed what Milwaukee has done. For example: It became clear several years ago that there was value to be extracted by simply not swinging, so they posted the lowest full-season swing rate of any team since 2019. As the sport lurched away from fastballs, Milwaukee lurched back, as the value of having multiple fastballs became clear. No team had a higher fastball rate this year, and when they were thrown, they were thrown hard, tied for second.
You think changeups are supposed to have low spin rates? Most do. Milwaukee’s, though? High spin, the highest in baseball, actually.
Even the "going oppo" aspect falls under this umbrella. As pitching velocity continues to rise and rise, Milwaukee’s hitters seem to have adopted a strategy of being on time to non-fastballs but where it’s OK to be late to the fastball. Why? Because that will let you go to the opposite field, where you may sacrifice power for a better chance of hits. They’re deep in the box, they let the pitch get deep, they have fast bats and they destroy breaking balls. It’s how they drive in runs without the ball going over the wall. It’s not just "making contact" so much as it is "making smart contact."
What this means is not, “Do what the Brewers did.” It’s, “Try to find the next thing.” The problem for everyone else is, the Brewers themselves might be the ones to find it first.
Be able to win in more than one way.
Related to the previous point, but there’s a reason that "chameleon" may be the best way to describe this position player group.
In the regular season, they didn’t win with power, clearly, but it also wasn’t about avoiding strikeouts (they were basically average there), and in fact they started whiffing more as the season went on. It was about walks and getting on base, as they led the Majors in walk rate and OBP, and then about being able to drive those runs home.
That’s not always how it went in the playoffs. Against the Dodgers in the NLCS, the Brewers' rate of strikeouts, walks and homers was so high – i.e., the "three true outcomes," or plate appearances that end without a ball in play – it was merely the highest in history. They struck out more than the Dodgers in every game, but also out-homered them, 7-1.
In the World Series, it went a different way. The power wasn’t there, and neither really was the exceptionally clean defense and baserunning. They committed 13 errors in 12 games and made a number of mistakes on the basepaths. Instead, they hit the ball so hard (the fourth-highest World Series hard-hit rate on record) that it resulted in plenty of traffic on the bases, including a historic eight-run, two-out rally in Game 3. Given how outstanding the pitching was, that was good enough.
Depth matters.
Not that this is news, of course. This has always been true. But it was a stark point of comparison in the World Series. On the one hand, the Rays featured a top-heavy lineup that could never get anything going once Yandy Díaz and Junior Caminero were limited and unproductive. They ended up with the fifth-weakest offensive performance by any team in the World Series. On the other hand, the Brewers actually got more production from the bottom of the lineup than the top.
In the regular season, the bottom four spots in their order were the third-best in baseball. In the second half, they were the best in baseball, by quite a bit (32 points of OPS better than the second-best team).
Put another way, only four players garnered any notable playing time for Milwaukee this year while accruing negative Wins Above Replacement. Two of them, infielder Luis Rengifo and outfielder Blake Perkins, didn’t last the regular season on the roster. One, rookie Luis Lara, was mostly a bench player in the postseason. The fourth, Sal Frelick, had enough of a track record to fall back upon that his unimpressive regular season could be overlooked somewhat – a choice that paid off handsomely for Milwaukee in the World Series.
“There aren’t a ton of holes, and these are also guys who play good defense, too,” GM Matt Arnold told Michael Baumann of FanGraphs after the win. “It’s really on both sides of the ball. They’re really talented. They’re athletic. It’s kind of old school, but it’s athletes that can hit. Don’t overthink it – find a bunch of those guys, especially if they’re good dudes.”
But also, have two generational superstars and a good reliever on the best run of his life.
Look, it’s not all deep thoughts and role players. This is the part that “Moneyball” conveniently omitted, actually – which serves only to strengthen this comparison.
Milwaukee drafted Jacob Misiorowski in the second round in 2022, then helped him develop into a likely Cy Young Award winner who’s something like the most dominant per-inning starter on record. They signed Jackson Chourio as a highly-touted international prospect out of Venezuela in 2021 and have been rewarded with three straight 20-20 seasons – making him the only player ever to do that through age 22 – and a bunch of Cooperstown comparisons, as well as one of the most productive World Series on record.
Aaron Ashby, meanwhile, has been an effective reliever for the last three seasons, after recovering from several injuries that interrupted his starting career. (We actually had him as a “reliever who could take over the postseason” in both 2024 and 2025.) He merely went off and set the record for longest postseason scoreless streak in history, at 18 innings, surpassing Andrew Miller, who in many ways was the Ashby of a decade ago.
It helps, too, that the Brewers turned Brice Turang from a glove-first contact hitter into an MVP candidate, that the painful trades of Josh Hader, Corbin Burnes, Devin Williams and others brought back impact players, that Cooper Pratt went from high school prospect to starting big league shortstop in three years and that their farm system is still arguably the best in baseball.
Sometimes, it’s just this. “Have great players, put them in position to succeed, understand the conditions of the game you’re in, and get just a little lucky about hot streaks at the right time.” It’s so, so much more difficult than that to do. It’s also, at a high level, not more complicated than that.
You can’t just be the Brewers, unfortunately. It’s taken a long time to get here. There’s no reason to think they’re going away any time soon.