YES, it's kind of a big deal. (Quoting the Raven--or those raven-haired temptresses that AI has made bewilderingly interchangeable...)
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| Bailey, Spencer, Kookie and Roscoe--what a rotation! |
Those Milwaukee Brewers, bucking to be a viable "anti-sabermetric" alternative to the overlords of nattering numerological nuance, have just completed a 69-game stretch (hey, there's no eliding the entrendres here!) in which they won in just under 77% of the time (giving us a perfect excuse to festoon this entry with a image of
Louis Quinn, the talky "tout" of that smirky "martini noir" TV series that was
not set in Wisconsin).
This has naturally attracted a lot of attention, particularly from the "phenomenological" wing of post-neo-sabermetrics (coughSamMillercough) who leer over the "old-style" apparatus of winning when it happens to coincide with a hot streak of rare and epic proportions. What follows from that is an effort to apportion the "luck" (which wriggles provocatively in the manner of those "AI babes") that we can see undulating in sabermetrics' "sanity check"--the Pythagorean winning percentage.
IT looks like Sam has found a way to apportion all of the trace elements which have coalesced into an unusually long, hot summer for the Brew Crew into a semi-convincing argument--but we look at what happened to the 2023 Atlanta Braves and wonder if all of that phenomenological virtuosity is simply a cadenza for cadenza's sake.
To put the Brewers' gaudy 53-16 stretch in proper perspective, we need to look at all the teams who have equaled or surpassed it in baseball history. And, as always, we're the only ones who do that (as others fiddle while Rome burns).
First, the generic context: how rare is such a feat? The TimeGrid™ chart (at left) tells us.
And, yes, it's plenty rare--only twenty times (not counting duplications*) in baseball history.
THE question that then arises is what type of team has such an incredible hot streak? Is it a random kind of thing, where a team that previously was merely good, or possibly even mediocre (or worse) had some kind of miraculous turnaround? (And you might fix your eyes on that "1" in the slot representing 1914 for an example of such a team, the "Miracle Braves" who went from last place in July to the pinnacle of baseball success in October.)
But when we look at the full list of the twenty teams to meet or exceed the Brewers' .768 WPCT over 69 games, it becomes clear that most of these teams were much better overall than those Miracle Braves. That list shows that the Braves have one of the lowest full-season WPCTs of all the teams with this type of "twelve-week scald"...
ALMOST all of the other teams on the list have a much higher WPCT than the Braves (the exceptions: the 2013 Los Angeles Dodgers and the 2022 New York Yankees). Like the miracle team of 1914, the 2025 Brewers were under .500 when they began their extended "scald"--if we extrapolate their W-L record at the end of the scald out to 162 games, we'd see that they'd finish 103-59. That still places them deep in the lower echelon of overall quality amongst the teams who've flown so high for twelve weeks.
And there's no guarantee, of course, that they'll even do that well, as even a basic look at their stats will verify. We're not going to "go phenomenological," of course--we leave that to those who aspire to be more baroquely overwrought. What's clear from a look at the personnel on the Brewers' roster is that they have a solid but unspectacular group of offensive performers buttressed by the short-term transformation of Andrew Vaughn, whose performance in the past four weeks has given them superstar-level performance that has boosted their run-scoring ability to accelerate their success (29-4 in the last thirty-three games of the scald, as opposed to 27-9 in the first thirty-six).
On the pitching side, the Brew Crew is getting a hot year from Freddy Peralta, and has been boosted further by the advent of Jacob Misiorowski and the triumphant return of Brandon Woodruff. But Quinn Priester is clearly not as good as his won-loss record (11-2). The no-name Brewer bullpen has improved over the course of the season, particularly the middle relievers.
FLIP all of that into a prognosticative blender (now on sale at your nearest Target...) and we figure a cool-down, though one not as lukewarm as the Brewers were during of 2025's first third. A 20-16 finish over the final six weeks would bring them in at 99 wins, which would validate some portion of the outsized veneration they are receiving as the game's most recent "Mudville success story."
What we may find, however, is that in 2026 the team will encounter an elevated level of adversity that they were able to elude for much of 2025, and like other teams that blossomed in unexpected ways (our long-ago favored 1969 Mets), were unable to sustain the lofty levels they touched. Teams that looked indestructible and downright monolithic in one year can crumble the next (1970 Reds, 2023 Braves). Some will regroup, others will not. It could be instructive for the reader to examine the list of "twelve-week scald" teams and see how many of them remained near to their overall season performance in subsequent years.
AND note also how few of these teams wound up winning the World Series in the cool autumn aftermath of their scalds...
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*There are many iterations of these high-flying spans that accrue from a search in the Forman et coeur database--we've removed all but the final manifestation of the "scald" for purposes of providing the essential lists of teams. (There's also a list that can be compile for such spans that extend from one season to the next, but that's a whole other story...)
