Fifty-Six Hits Is Too Damn Many

Miguel Cairo, interim manager for the woebegone Washington Nationals, recently referred to the Milwaukee Brewers as a "pain-in-the-butt team." He'd just watched the Brewers rough up Washington's helpless pitchers in the first game of a weekend series, and struggled to put his observations into admiring terms. "They make contact. They put the ball in play. They find a way to create runs." It's all true: The Brewers have the best team batting average and on-base percentage in the National League. They don't do a lot of slugging but they swipe a lot of bases, and they will absolutely doink and small-ball your ass all the way to death. Per Statcast, the Brewers have the lowest barrel percentage and the third-lowest average exit velocity in all of baseball. These guys love to hit a baseball so softly that the bat makes a sound like the snapping of a stale breadstick, and the ball flies into the outfield grass at velocities that would not earn a speeding ticket on any interstate highway in America.

Who am I to judge? After all, it works: The Brewers today boast the best record in all of baseball. If their offense is broadly outperforming the quality of the balls they put in play—Statcast says their expected weighted on-base average on contact is fourth-worst in the majors, and their team batted ball profile is remarkably unsexy—I am inclined to credit them with making some of their own luck. They're disciplined: They see a lot of pitches, and they don't chase, and because they're very zippy on the bases they put a lot of pressure on an opposing defense. For a team like the Nationals, one that runs out a bunch of sad-sack juiceless pitch-to-contact bozos and backs them with deeply lousy defense, the Brewers are basically a nightmare. Well-placed soft liners accumulate at what certainly feels like an exponential rate, overwhelming your very sorry and helpless baseball team the way flood debris conquers the pilings of a flimsy old bridge.

Brewers hitters banged out a truly unreasonable 25 hits in the first game of this weekend series, the most they've tallied in a single game this season and the most the Nationals have ever allowed. Five different Milwaukee starters had at least three hits, for crying out loud. There were some big knocks in there, to be sure—the Brewers socked four dingers and added three doubles—but I would like for you to use your fingers to count the 18 freakin' singles they collected on the day. To me, that is right on the edge of sadism. The Brewers scored enough runs on dingers, one of those doubles, and a sacrifice fly to outscore the Nationals; they could've given back a dozen of those singles and still won the baseball game.

Poor suffering Nationals starter Mitchell Parker was tagged for 12 hits and eight runs in four innings, and that was after pitching a scoreless first. In the third inning, it started to feel like the Brewers were being actively rude, piling up liners and doing a conga line on the bases for the sheer joy of humiliating an opposing pitcher. It was a blessing that this game was broadcast only on the Apple TV streaming service, so that it was watched live by fewer than 10 humans.

The Brewers continued this abuse into Saturday, tagging Washington pitcher Jake Irvin for eight hits and five earned runs in four innings, and then heaping punishment onto an already beleaguered Nationals bullpen. Their hit total, after two games, was up to a gaudy and frankly ostentatious 40. You would think good manners, if not a core of basic human decency, would moderate this behavior on Sunday, which after all is a holy day, one of coming together in fellowship. Not so! Before the first out of the sixth inning, the Brewers had collected another eight hits and five runs, and they added another eight hits and nine runs over the final three innings. This is assault! Criminal assault! We used to have ourselves a community!

Over the last 100 years, a baseball team has accrued 56 or more hits over a three-game span just 36 times, and it has happened just nine times in the 21st century. The 56 hits in three games is a first for the Brewers franchise. Generally speaking, it's a formula for success: Teams in the sample are 85–23 while in these berserk fugue states. Only four of these teams lost two or more times during the span. The latest example was (naturally) the Colorado Rockies, who in 2019 lost two of three to the Padres despite scoring 39 total runs. The unluckiest was the Philadelphia Phillies, who in 1930 lost three straight to the Cubs and Pirates despite putting an astonishing 75 runners on base. The 2025 Brewers aren't exceptional among this cohort of too-many-hits-havers: I would like to take particular note of the 2004 Seattle Mariners, who went 3–0 over a September span in which an outrageous and morally indefensible 50 of their 56 hits were singles. It's no wonder the cosmos smote that team to a last-place finish in the AL West.

The Brewers will not finish last in their division. They are kicking the shit out of everyone with no end in sight. They've won 11 of 15 since the break, and have the best run differential in baseball, and are now a couple of games up on the Chicago Cubs in what has evolved into the best divisional race going. The Brewers beat the hell out of the Nationals despite having to shelve their best damn pitcher, fire-breathing 23-year-old Jacob Misiorowski, who recently took a comebacker off the leg and will be on the injured list for a little while.

Manager Pat Murphy cycles everyone into and out of the action, as if tempted to discover whether even he has the power to slow these rascals down. He does not. Their mojo levels are downright unreasonable. They are having a kind of fun that you do not usually notice from a baseball team in the sweltering back half of summer. During that Friday massacre, a grinning Murphy—whose weathered face could easily be misunderstood as the telltale of a lifetime of joylessness—shared with a sideline reporter a munch from what can only be described as a folded pocket pancake.

You hate to think of Milwaukee's luck turning, and all those flares and dribblers converting into the ho-hum outs and rally-killing double plays indicated by their humble exit velocities! You hate to imagine an asleep-at-the-wheel deity awakening to the horrors of our blasphemous era and heaping the Brewers into the burn pile, among all the other bad actors of the day! These men are enjoying themselves more than is seemly, and they are doing it at the expense of others, and absent divine intervention we as a society have to decide whether that is something we can continue to condone.