“Milwaukee Brewers Baseball 2023: Regular Season Wrap-up & a Postseason Secret Weapon”
The 2023 Milwaukee Brewers are officially headed to their fifth Major League Baseball postseason in the past six years. This year’s Brewers are benefiting from strong starting and relief pitching, exceptional team and individual defense, and of late, improved plate discipline with resultant timely hitting. Craig Counsell and the rest of the Brewers coaching staff have both their players and Brewers Nation believing this could finally be THE year. The soon-to-be National League Central Division champions (barring an epic meltdown) are playing their best baseball of the season right now. They have top-of-the-line starting pitchers, a sizeable munition of power arms in the bullpen, key in-season additions that have been detrimental to the team’s recent strides at the plate, and a youth movement at multiple positions around the diamond. Combine those factors with a farm system that’s brimming with major-league ready talent, and what you have is an organization where both the short and long-term future looks bright. What are the keys to 2023 postseason success? Something that makes this year’s team particularly special is a secret weapon that everyone in the dugout and front office is aware of, but very few people seem to be talking about. I’ll be discussing the team’s secret weapon and more in this Brewers round-up, and hoping that the success they’ve enjoyed here in the late stages of the 2023 regular season will be a sign of things to come in their pursuit of a Division title, National League pennant, and (daresay) World Series Championship.
Against all odds: How the heck have the Brewers made it this far?
When you consider the batting struggles that the Brewers have endured this year, especially during the first of half of the regular season, it’s nowhere short of a miracle that the team is sitting in their current position and primed to win the National League Central Division crown. How easy it is to forget that up until the August 1st trade deadline, this was one of the worst-hitting teams in all of MLB. Aside from Christian Yelich and William Contreras, they haven’t maintained another consistent hitter from their Opening Day roster. Players who the team acquired in the offseason like Jesse Winker, Brian Anderson, Luke Voit, and Blake Perkins have not panned out. Everyday starters from seasons past like Willy Adames and Rowdy Tellez have struggled all year long. There have been growing pains for younger, albeit promising rookies Brice Turang and Joey Wiemer. And then there are the injuries. Luis Urias was never able to recover from his hamstring strain on opening day, and was ultimately shipped to Boston at the trade deadline. Tyrone Taylor spent all of spring training and most of the regular season on the injured list with elbow inflammation. Garrett Mitchell began the year looking sensational, but was lost in mid April to a season-ending shoulder injury. Tellez missed extended time with forearm and finger injuries. Starting pitcher Andy Ashby has been out all year. Eric Lauer has missed the better part of the season. Brandon Woodruff was out for nearly four months. Adrian Houser has been on and off the injured list, as has Wade Miley. Injuries are part of the game, and all teams must deal with them. They’re even more difficult to overcome for small-market teams like Milwaukee, and the challenges of 2023 have seemed exceptional in comparisons with seasons past.
To the footsteps of the postseason: How the Brewers have done it.
There have been heroes on this year’s Brewers team from places you’d expect. Christian Yelich is putting together a resurgent season on offense. William Contreras has been everything the team could’ve asked for and more from the Esteury Ruiz trade (don’t feel bad if you haven’t heard of Ruiz, because I hadn’t either). Devin Williams is one of the league’s top closers. Corbin Burnes has been short of spectacular, but still steady as the team’s #1 starting pitcher. Equally important are some of the unsung heroes in this year’s group. Julio Tehran, Colin Rea, and Adrian Houser kept the team afloat by putting together stretches of strong starting pitching during the early and mid parts of the season when the offense was anemic, injuries were piling up, and their fellow starting pitchers were struggling to find their groove. Miley has been as good of a #4 starting pitcher as you’ll find in all of baseball. If the Cy Young award was given based solely on pitching performances since the All-Star break, then Freddy Peralta would be a leading NL candidate. In-season additions Carlos Santana, Mark Canha, Sal Frelick, and Andruw Monasterio have been paramount in turning around the team’s plate approach as members of the everyday starting lineup. As a team, the Brewers are working pitch counts to make life difficult on opposing starting pitchers, increasing their on-base percentage, swinging better with runners in scoring position, adding on runs with crooked numbers in late innings of games, and (finally!) playing small ball without a complete reliance on trying to bash homeruns. The culture change and resultant success of their entire lineup has come, in large part, from the contributions of these four new players, and with postseason play looming just around the corner, the timing of their arrivals couldn’t be better.
The keys to 2023 postseason success.
Anyone who’s been paying attention to the Brewers during the past month should’ve noticed how well their starting pitching has been. Burnes, Woodruff, and Peralta (and to some extent, even Miley) have been pitching at not just good, but elite levels. They seem to have taken the “next step” on their journeys as pitchers. How long they’re able to maintain their current level of play remains to be seen. The way the MLB postseason is designed, a three-pitcher rotation can carry a team into November. Combine next-level starting pitching with a bullpen of power arms at the setup positions (Joel Payamps, Trevor Megill, Elvis Peguero, and Abner Uribe) and a premier closer in Williams, and you have a team that could conceivably win a lot games with as few as three runs. The Brewers offense will still struggle at times. They’re going to require Yelich and Contreras to continue their consistent productions at the plate. They’ll need newcomers Santana, Canha, Frelick, and Monasterio to keep pushing the line with quality at-bats and patient approaches. They’re also going to (probably) need an underperforming everyday player like Adames, Tellez, or even Tyrone Taylor (who’s been hot of late) to bust out and help carry the team on their back. The Brewers have won A LOT of one-run games this year, making them a team that’s proven to be able to perform when the margin for error is small. Even having one player step up their usual offensive production could go a long way towards the team reaching their goals. Combine that with Burnes, Woodruff, and Peralta staying healthy, and no more wall-punching incidents from Williams (or anyone else), and I like this team’s chances.
The secret weapon.
A big part of the Brewers’ success in 2023 has come from how Craig Counsell has finagled the team’s batting lineup, defense, and pitching rotation with the mastery of a world-class, smoke-and-mirrors illusionist. Critics will claim Counsell has a tendency to push his starting pitchers too far, and that he’ll occasionally substitute the wrong pinch batter than a given situation may call for. The fact remains that Counsell has worked the Brewers out of far more jams than he’s gotten them into, all while playing the cards that general manager Matt Arnold has dealt him for a team ranked 19th in MLB payroll. No one in baseball has ever competed in all 162 games of a season with a perfect batting average, ERA, or game-management track record. To expect otherwise is ridiculous. Counsell isn’t a perfect manager, but his acumen for the game is as sharp as anyone’s, and the Brewers wouldn’t be where they are right now without him. What a lot of casual, and even dedicated Brewers fans might not be aware of is that Counsell is in the final year of his coaching contract. At the beginning of the 2023 season, Counsell made the decision that he doesn’t want to talk about the possibility of an extension until the end of the year. This is an unconventional approach to contract negotiations in the modern age, but contrary to what many national baseball pundits might believe, there’s an under-the-radar opinion as to why he chose to pause on speaking about a contract extension, and the reasoning has nothing to do with his speculated allure of coaching in a larger baseball market, like New York City. There’s widespread belief among Brewers players, front office personnel, and team media, that Counsell intends to step away from baseball in order to spend more time with his family. He has two sons who’ll be playing college baseball this year (University of Minnesota & University of Michigan), as well as two younger daughters. Whether he chooses to spend more time with his family, or to follow former Brewers general manager David Stearns to the New York Mets remains to be seen. The current Brewers players know this could be Counsell’s last dance in Milwaukee, at least for the foreseeable future, and many of them have made it clear that they want to go out and win the World Series for him. Combine the tools, talent, and collective motivation of an entire team and what you end up with is a formidable postseason opponent. I won’t go so far as to reprint Jake Taylor’s famous quote from 1989’s Major League on what this year’s Brewers should try to do from here, but I’m pretty sure his words would speak for the entire group.
Thanks for reading everyone. Let’s hope the 2023 postseason will at least fare better for the Brewers than it did for the Bucks! Either way, it’s been a fun journey to watch. May the ride continue!
- Todd
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