When Ray Ratto told you that you could get "hard mathematical reasons" for the Milwaukee Brewers' inexplicable win streak "wherever Nerd Stuff is sold," he was referring to me. At the same time I must necessarily acknowledge that for whatever hard mathematical explanations apply to the Brewers' debatably sustainable success, they still obey the critical law of baseball: There is always some bullshit going on. An 11-game win streak sustained primarily by incredible run suppression is one matter; an 11-game win streak followed, eight games later, by an entirely separate 14-game win streak is a separate problem altogether.
If you could distill the Brewers' season down to one player, you could do worse than Andrew Vaughn, a former White Sox refugee who went from bona fide bust to Babe Ruth after a June trade sent him to Milwaukee. Despite slashing .327/.391/.611 to the tune of a 176 wRC+ for two months now, Vaughn was so bad on the White Sox that as of this writing he still sits at -0.5 rWAR on the season (FanGraphs is more generous toward him, with 0.3 fWAR). There aren't huge, substantial mechanical changes that you can pinpoint for his abrupt success. As Michael Baumann writes, Vaughn's resurgence is a combination of tweaking his swing to be a bit flatter and faster, getting set up to face more left-handed hitting, and, presumably, escaping the Chicago White Sox. There's not enough real indication to predict that Vaughn will continue to be a 1.000+ OPS guy, but that doesn't take away from him being miraculously good from June through August. That feels suitably Brewers-y to me.
As expected of America's team, the Brewers started their ludicrous streaking on the Fourth of July. The pre–Independence Day Brewers were astonishingly average: about dead average in both offensive production (by wRC+) and pitching (by fWAR). They also had, per Statcast, the lowest barrel rate in baseball, and the third-worst hard-hit rate in the league. Fast-forward a month and a half, and the stats you normally would expect to have changed by modern, homer-heavy baseball standards haven't, well, really changed.
The Brewers haven't managed to conjure power or good contact out of nowhere, or out of anywhere. Their overall barrel rate, as it was on Aug. 8, is still the lowest in MLB; isolate it down to just their post–Fourth of July sample, a stretch of time in which the team has gone 29-5, and they still have the fourth-worst barrel rate in baseball. Their pitching has improved by some margin, but they're still, despite the electric addition of noted tall man/Pokémon guy Jacob Misiorowski, just the eighth-most valuable pitching staff in baseball.
The hitting figures are perhaps understandable for a team powered by such names as Brice Turang (Brice presumably an alternate spelling for Bryce and not some weird portmanteau of Ben Rice), William Contreras, Isaac Collins, and Sal Frelick, on top of Christian Yelich and Jackson Chourio. With the exception of Yelich and Chourio, none of the other named Brewers have broken or are on pace to surpass 20 home runs this season. This is not a moral judgment. WAR is WAR and good for many things, as they famously say. In spite of this general lack of power, the Brewers still have had the second-best offense in baseball post–Fourth of July. So what gives?
While the Brewers are not barreling the ball—which requires improved launch angles—much more than before, they are still hitting the ball harder. During their post–Fourth of July run, the Brewers have managed a solidly average hard-hit rate. Without the barrels, those hard-hit balls aren't necessarily appearing as homers, but they are cropping up in the team's overall production. The Brewers notably have the highest BABIP, the generally luck-driven stat of batting average on balls in play, and second-highest number of hits in that timespan. They, along with the Toronto Blue Jays—who have unpatriotically been the best offense since the Fourth of July—may just be the ethical, hit-heavy team you've been looking for. Results over process, baby, that's what we're talking about.
Where the Brewers separate themselves from the Blue Jays is in their pitching. In keeping with results as the primary measure of Milwaukee's success, the Brewers may have merely the eighth-most valuable pitching staff by fWAR in baseball, but they boast the second-lowest ERA. (Famously, FanGraphs WAR uses FIP in its calculations, as opposed to ERA or RA9.) On the simple, results-focused level of not permitting runs to score, the Brewers have been immensely successful. And they have resulted their way from a mere 60-percent chance to make the playoffs on the Fourth of July to a full 100-percent chance, according to FanGraphs. Who cares about whether any of this is sustainable? The hard work—the lucky work—is already done.
Go through the Brewers' 14-game win streak, and scattered among the reasonable, given wins against bad teams like the Pittsburgh Pirates, you can find some real bullshit through some grotesque usage of win-probability graphics. There were three consecutive New York Mets collapses in which the Mets had and squandered, sequentially, a 77-percent, 70-percent, and 93-percent chance to win the game; then the first two games of the Cincinnati Reds series, where the Reds lost a 98- and 87-percenter, and nearly did it again on Sunday night, before rallying to bring the Brewers' reign of terror to an end.
If we could return to Vaughn and the 2024 White Sox, this is the other side of it. Historically bad seasons require historic levels of bad luck. By roster value, the 2025 Colorado Rockies actually have more players with less than -0.5 rWAR (a phenomenon originally observed by Sam Miller) than the 2024 White Sox, and yet they are hardly on pace to match the White Sox for losses. It is only reasonable that success should also sustain itself on, at least in part, magic. Which is to say: Don't look too hard into whether the Brewers are sustainable before the playoffs come; until then, they are happening, and that fact is unavoidable.
