The Milwaukee Brewers have won the NL Central four years in a row. This should be a bigger story than it is.
Milwaukee clinched its fourth straight division title this month, joining the Los Angeles Dodgers, Tampa Bay Rays, New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves as teams that have secured postseason spots. The Brewers can clinch a Wild Card Series bye and home-field advantage in the NLDS with a win over the Orioles paired with an Atlanta loss to Houston.
Four Straight in the Least Forgiving Way Possible
Here is what makes the run remarkable. The Brewers do not operate like a team that wins divisions repeatedly.
Milwaukee is a small-market organization that develops pitching, trades it before it gets expensive, and then develops more pitching. They do not sign the biggest free agents. They do not run a top-five payroll. They keep winning the division anyway.
The Dodgers, by contrast, just took their 13th NL West title in 14 seasons while spending like a sovereign wealth fund. Both records are impressive. Only one of them required actual roster ingenuity every single winter.
The Bye Matters More Than the Banner
Milwaukee’s real prize this week is the Wild Card Series bye. The three-game Wild Card round is the single most random event in American professional sports, and skipping it is worth more than any regular season accolade.
That is where the last few Brewers seasons have gone wrong. October arrives, the sample size shrinks to three games, and a team built on depth and pitching consistency gets beaten by whoever is hot. A bye removes that trapdoor.
The Rest of the Picture
Atlanta remains in control of the NL East, with Philadelphia, the Cubs, San Diego and Arizona fighting for the Wild Card spots. In the American League, Tampa Bay leads the East with the Yankees behind them, Cleveland and the White Sox are locked in an AL Central race, and Houston holds a slim lead over Texas in the West.
Boston is positioned to be the next team to clinch, which would set up the Wild Card matchup with New York that everyone in both cities is already dreading.
Give Milwaukee Its Credit
National coverage treats the Brewers as a nice story rather than a serious one, and the reason is that they have not won a World Series. That is a fair standard for legacy and a terrible standard for evaluating a front office.
Four consecutive division titles in a league where the Dodgers spend four times as much is an organizational achievement. Milwaukee has built something that reloads rather than rebuilds, and it has done it without a single offseason that generated national headlines.
If they get the bye and a healthy rotation, this is the best chance they have had.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.