Low-Payroll Brewers Buck the Math, Clinch First MLB Playoff Berth

The small-market Brewers are the first MLB team to clinch a postseason slot, and manager Pat Murphy has a modern spin on the classic nobody-believed-in-us trope.

After Milwaukee had another dramatic walkoff win Saturday against St. Louis to seal its seventh playoff berth in eight years, Murphy took specific aim at the annual PECOTA, analytics-based projections in the preseason from Baseball Prospectus that had the team with just 80 wins, regressing sharply from last year’s 93 victories.

“PECOTA had us at 80.2 [wins] and everybody else had us [at] 80, 79, 71,” Murphy said, referring to the site’s Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm. “Nobody over .500, so for these guys to pull it together and complete like that is special beyond belief.”

Even after Sunday’s loss to the Cardinals, the Brewers are 91–59 and are MLB’s best team, and while the club has a long history of competing far beyond what their market size would suggest, this year’s results are even more remarkable. 

Small, but Mighty

Milwaukee remains MLB’s smallest media market, at least until the new A’s stadium in Las Vegas is done, with the Wisconsin locale ranking at No. 38 with Nielsen. The Brewers also have just the No. 20 luxury-tax payroll in the league at $141.7 million, an outlay standing increasingly on the wrong side of a fast-growing financial disparity in MLB. 

A particularly fruitful summer, however, that saw a 16–9 record in June, a 17–7 one in July, and 21–9 in August, helped the Brewers reverse from a 25–28 start and vault to an entirely different level. Milwaukee is now targeting a franchise record of 96 regular-season wins, set in 2011 and 2018.

“We have bigger goals and want to have many more celebrations, but from where we were at the beginning of the season, we dug deep and found a way to compete and turn this thing around and play really good baseball,” said designated hitter/outfielder Christian Yelich.

The Phillies followed with their own postseason clinch on Sunday.

Remembering a Legend

The Brewers, meanwhile, also took the occasion of the postseason clinch to again remember iconic broadcaster Bob Uecker, who died in January. In a clubhouse celebration, Murphy read an emotional letter written by Uecker before he succumbed to cancer.

“Never a doubt you would get this invitation,” Uecker wrote. “You did it by believing.”