The Milwaukee Brewers are in the National League Championship Series, looking for their first ever NL pennant and World Series title. After coming into the playoffs as the No. 1 seed and dispatching with the Chicago Cubs in the NLDS, the Brewers will face off against the Los Angeles Dodgers Monday night for the first game of the best-of-seven series.
No matter how the run turns out, it’s worth recognizing what an incredibly well-run organization the Brewers are. It starts at the top. The Brewers are playing in the smallest market in the majors, yet they sat 24th in payroll this season. They’ve pulled off extensions for superstars like Christian Yelich (and don’t forget Ryan Braun) and top prospects like Jackson Chourio. Sometimes they let big-name players walk in free agency, as they did with shortstop Willy Adames heading into this year. Sometimes they trade them before free agency, as in the cases of ace starter Corbin Burnes and ace relievers Josh Hader and Devin Williams.
Sometimes they miss, but it’s rare. They usually make the right move, whether we’re talking about the front office, the manager in the dugout or the players on the field.
At this point, for me, the Brewers are who people believe the Rays are. The Rays made the playoffs five years in a row from 2019-23. It was a hell of an accomplishment. The Brewers? They’ve made the playoffs seven of the last eight years.
You know the old joke about how teams should never trade with the Rays because that front office wins every deal? Well, the Brewers got Adames from the Rays and then his career took off. It wasn’t a horrible deal at the time for the Rays, who got Drew Rasmussen back, but the point here is that the Brewers so often end up making players into the best versions of themselves.
There’s frequent roster churn in Milwaukee due to financial constraints and the Brewers just keep finding new players to plug in and make productive.
Take the Andrew Vaughn trade this season. The former No. 3 overall pick was awful for the White Sox, maybe the single least valuable player in baseball to that point. In his 64 games with the Brewers, he hit .308/.375/.493 with nine homers and 46 RBI. He hit a monster three-run homer against the Cubs during the NLDS too.
Or how about Isaac Collins? The Brewers got him off waivers from the Rockies in December 2022. He was one of the best players on the Brewers when Chourio was hurt. Caleb Durbin was in “the Devin Williams trade” and had a productive year. Jake Bauers, a former top-50 prospect who found no success with the Rays, Guardians, Mariners or Yankees, is having the best year of his career. Quinn Priester was a former first-rounder who didn’t work with the Pirates or Red Sox and just put up a 3.32 ERA in 157 ⅓ innings with the Brewers.
Do you remember William Contreras coming up with the Braves? He was then part of a three-team trade between the Brewers, Braves and Athletics. The most ballyhooed branch of the deal was catcher Sean Murphy going to the Braves. Contreras is younger and better. The Brewers only sent out Esteury Ruiz and they got back both Contreras and reliever Joel Payamps.
The Brewers grow their own players, too. Brice Turang was a first-round pick. So was Sal Frelick. Jacob Misiorowski was a second rounder. Freddie Peralta has been with the organization since he was a 20 year old in Class A. Chad Patrick had a 5.59 ERA between Double-A and Triple-A in 2023 with the D-backs and A’s before the Brewers got ahold of him.
It isn’t just players where there’s turnover. The Brewers lost executive David Stearns to the Mets and Matt Arnold is running the show without having missed a beat. Manager Craig Counsell defected to the Cubs and now Pat Murphy has won two division titles in two years and very likely will take his second straight NL Manager of the Year (Counsell, for what it’s worth, never won it there).
We could keep going, both with off-field personnel and with players. The Brewers just bring out the best in everyone these days, whether it’s through player development, drafting, scouting or some combination of it all. The biggest takeaway here is that the Brewers machine is much bigger than any one player or person. The operation is incredible. No MLB organizational system is ever going to be perfect, but the Brewers can be counted on to get the absolute most out of their personnel at this point. They must be trusted, no matter which players, managers or front office people leave.
It’s truly the old cliché where the machine as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The Brewers do everything well, organizationally and on the field. It’ll all be on display in the NLCS. The Milwaukee Brewers are a winning organization and one of the most well-run ballclubs in sports. It’s time — past time — to give them their proper due.
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