PHOENIX -- Minutes after the Brewers surprised everyone by trading away their entire depth chart at third base, including a 25-year-old, Caleb Durbin, who was coming off a third-place finish in NL Rookie of the Year Award balloting, Milwaukee’s principal owner, Mark Attanasio, heard his cell phone ring. It was Attanasio’s predecessor as Brewers owner and the Commissioner Emeritus of MLB, Bud Selig.
“What are they telling you?” asked a mystified Selig, eager to hear how Attanasio’s baseball officials had justified trading an ascending, affordable, controllable third baseman.
Perhaps that best describes “The Brewers Way” – making moves so unexpected that they flummox even a former owner and MLB Commissioner. During Attanasio’s tenure, which is entering season No. 22, the team has ended a 12-year losing streak and a 24-year playoff drought. It has qualified for the postseason nine times, winning six division titles, developed one of the top-ranked farm systems and harnessed analytics in a way that has transformed the franchise from one perennially short of arms into a reliable factory for pitching.
The Brewers have also produced the last two MLB Executive of the Year Award winners (president of baseball operations Matt Arnold) and the last two NL Manager of the Year Award winners (Pat Murphy).
They have done that in baseball’s smallest media market with modest payrolls, under the philosophy that running a sound business and fielding a perennial contender, rather than bouncing between extreme cycles of “all in” and rebuilding, is the smart way to end a World Series drought that dates back to 1982. Other teams have taken notice of the Brewers’ methods.
“Being superstitious, when you start to read about this team’s ‘way’ or that team’s ‘way,’ and books are written about it, it’s usually the beginning of the end,” Attanasio said. “There’s a lot of thought leadership in baseball. We’re looked at as thought leaders, but you can get very much put in a box.”
So, the Brewers have stayed outside the box. They have signed extensions (Christian Yelich in 2020 when he was at his peak, and Jackson Chourio in 2023 when he’d not spent a single day in the Majors). They have made the difficult decision to trade stars (Corbin Burnes, Devin Williams and Freddy Peralta in each of the past three offseasons) for prospects, but occasionally kept free-agents-to-be until the end (Willy Adames). They have struck gold on castoffs or undervalued assets (the Brewers won 19 consecutive Quinn Priester outings last season after acquiring him from Boston’s Triple-A team) and generally have made more good trades (Yelich in 2018, William Contreras in 2022) than bad ones.
They have not reinvented anything, but rather have borrowed best practices from other clubs while developing some of their own that other clubs are now trying to reverse engineer. And they have found the right balance between analytics and character while evaluating players.
“You can get too analytic and have too many inputs, and lose the forest for the trees,” Attanasio said. “I see this in my investment business. I have 35 years investing in Wall Street, and we have an exceptional track record over a long period of time because we do what I’m saying here; you somewhat stay in your lane, you know what you’re good at, but you have to be open to what others are doing.”
So it is, Attanasio says, with the Brewers and analytics. They didn’t lean hard in that direction as early as teams like the Rays and Dodgers, but they did beat a lot of other clubs. That helps explain how modest Milwaukee has MLB’s fourth-highest winning percentage since the start of 2017, trailing only the Dodgers, Astros and Yankees.
“We feel we have to get up this way every morning, that whatever the system is, however it looks like the cards are stacked against us, we’re going to compete. We’ve done that for 21 years.”
Even Attanasio is occasionally surprised by a proposal from baseball ops and relies on his sons, Dan and Mike, to lead him beyond a player’s surface-line numbers. Someday, Mark Attanasio plans to pass control of the franchise to his sons, and while there is no timetable, MLB recently asked clubs to submit a succession plan. They are working on that now, Attanasio said.
The sons helped Dad process the Durbin trade, for example.
“Maybe the hardest thing about Matt’s job is he has to make hard decisions,” Attanasio said. “The thing about this player is he not only super-performed above expectancy, but in a very tough [NLCS] against the Dodgers, he super-performed there, too, and he was a fan favorite, all the way up to Commissioner Selig. The easy decision is to just say, ‘Go as she goes,’ right?”
The coming season will start to answer whether it was the right move to flip Durbin with two other infielders and a premium Draft pick for pitchers Kyle Harrison and Shane Drohan and infielder David Hamilton. Attanasio and the Brewers believe 2026 will be another winning season, and so do the fans, judging by ticket sales. President of business operations Rick Schlesinger said the Brewers have seen double-digit percentage increase in sales over this time last year.
“Somebody asked me to remind our fans who might be a little nervous about how we want to compete,” said Attanasio while conjuring last year’s World Series teams, “that we did beat the Dodgers six out of six last year in the regular season and we beat the Jays two out of three [in Toronto]. Now we’ve got to get over this last hurdle.”