Admit it: The Milwaukee Brewers were beginning to torque you off, right? Every night a win, every night a different way, every win powered by metrics that make them look like the deteriorating St. Louis Cardinals (2025 version) instead of the best team in baseball. Until the streak came to an end on Sunday, the Brewers had won 14 in a row, after previously winning 11 in a row and eight in a row before that; their most recognizable players are Christian Yelich and ... mostly it's Yelich. It didn’t make sense, and it just kept on happening.
The Brewers seem to do nothing of enduring consequence except win their game, almost every night. They try to see how close to the final out they can get before doing so, and then celebrate with a round of Pokémon. It was actually a national talker a week ago when the team’s seven-year-old pitching phenomenon Jacob Misiorowski smothered the Mets and then pulled a rare Charizard afterward, apparently because all the cool kids are following the similarly Pokémon-besotted Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Matt Strahm's financial advice: "Pikachu's not going to tear his ACL . . . Charizard isn't going to get a DUI." That this story has devolved into a festival of mad-bastards-all Pokémon references is appropriate. The Brewers seem every bit as real and felt every bit as arbitrary, and here we are all the same.
There are no hard and fast reasons that fully explain why the Brewers are winning in ways that defy their payroll (23rd), their modest home run totals or their even less impressive ancillary metrics. None of that explains why there seemed to be such a sigh of relief around the Defector hot stove when the Brewers finally failed to pull yet another game out of their hinders on Sunday. They nursed a 1-0 deficit in Cincinnati until William Contreras, of the famed catching Contrerii, hit a two-run homer with one out in the ninth off closer Emilio Pagan, surely proving that despite the admonitions of Little League International, the gods are betting the Brewers hard.
This time, though, the Reds tied the game in the ninth and won in the 10th thanks to an error, two singles, a walk, the ghost runner, a sacrifice bunt, two intentional walks, and another single. The Brewers are dead, long live the Brewers.
It made for a fitting end to a weird run of good play, good luck, and the odd Shining Mewtwo, but there's no reason why this should be the end of everything. While the team’s 14-game winning streak grabbed attention, Milwaukee has been doing this for more than a month now, and for nearly three months if you want to be pedantic about it. They are 29-5 since the Fourth of July; they are 53-17 since May 24. After a four-game losing streak to start the season, which included a 20-9 loss to the Yankees, the Brewers have slowly but surely gathered the momentum required to suddenly become the best team in baseball whose second- (Rhys Hoskins) and third- (Jackson Chourio) highest-paid players are currently injured.
We'd like to provide hard mathematical reasons as to why this is happening, but you can get that wherever Nerd Stuff is sold. It's more fun to imagine the Brewers as possessing a set of mystical cheat codes that allow them to win their game each day without any of the splash and dash of those teams who have fallen away in recent days. The Cubs were the best team in the NL Central until the Brewers got ridiculous, and are now eight games behind them in the standings; Cubs fans booed faltering hero Kyle Tucker for not running out a ground ball on Sunday in a win over the godawful Pirates. The Dodgers fell off the turnip truck awhile ago, and needed the return of Blake Snell and a sweep of the Padres to climb back into first place in the NL West. The Yankees have crapped out, the Mets are even more forlorn, the Tigers gave back half of a 13-game lead in the AL Central by losing 12 of 13 last month, and Cal Raleigh has been reduced to a Home Run Derbyesque caricature of himself. On Sunday, before Seattle’s loss to those still-forlorn Mets on ESPN, Raleigh signed his name on a toilet seat handed to him by a fan.
All of baseball has been bat-guano crazy the last month or two. The Colorado Rockies, who were doing a spoof of the 2024 White Sox, are 13-15 since the All-Star Break. Maybe this makes them the new Orioles, which would be convenient, given the rate at which people are swearing off the Orioles we already have. Maybe it’s just August. Maybe we are all doomed, and this is merely the pregame show.
Only the Brewers have been reliably reliable during this period of chaos, if weirdly so. Their best starter, Freddy Peralta, has been with the Brewers his whole career; Yelich has been a Brewer for the last eight years since being paroled from the Marlins. Everywhere else is a new kid, a retread, or a Snorlax. Brandon Woodruff is not new, but before his recent return to action hadn't been seen in a Brewers uniform since 2023; starting pitcher Quinn Priester came over from the Red Sox on April 7 for Yophery Rodriguez and John Holobetz, and the sort of people who know their Yopherys from their Holobetzes considered it an overpay. Current hot-bat-for-hire Andrew Vaughn arrived in a white elephant swap with the White Sox a month ago for failed investment Aaron Civale. Jose Quintana used to be a Met. Reliever Abner Uribe is the first recorded MLB Abner since Dalrymple of the 1891 American Association Milwaukee Brewers; Tobias Myers is only the game’s second Tobias since Sandy Griffin of the 1893 Browns. Manager Pat Murphy is a sprightly 66-year-old who made his name at Arizona State, and whose previous big league gig, managing a bad Padres team, was nine years ago. In his own way, he is their Professor Oak. Taken altogether, this crew makes no sense as a winning team.
And yet, in the ways that matter, they make perfect and undeniable sense. Yesterday's loss, which was absorbed in part because the bullpen had been used to exhaustion in Saturday's 6-5 11-inning win and Friday's 10-8 slapstickapalooza, only adds to the greater zaniness. They have a day-night doubleheader against the Cubs on Monday, and we can pretty much expect at least one ridiculous victory to go along with a more routine one. The Brewers are not necessarily what we deserve as a nation—they’re far too endearing for that—but they may be the best we can hope for while everything else enshittifies itself. They are not the stuff of marquees, but they are as well-positioned as any to achieve the ultimate goal in October: the Big Umbreon.
