The Brewers Are Turning Back the Clock—and Moving Baseball Forward

ST. PETERSBURG — Woe to the Brewer who muscles up on a batting practice pitch and hits a rollover grounder to the pull side. All others within earshot of the cage or indoor batting tunnel will harrumph derisively, “Classic!”

It’s the sprig of parsley between your teeth, the unzipped pants fly, the turn signal left blinking, or, in Wisconsin parlance, a meal without cheese. It’s the faux pas of Brewers’ offensive baseball.

“You just don’t ever do it,” Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers says, “and if you do, everybody knows to call you out. It goes back to spring training. We reinforce our approach all the time.”

The Milwaukee Brewers are one win away from the franchise’s first World Series championship after a 10–1 shellacking of the Tampa Bay Rays in Game 3 Monday that included the most sublime sequence of hitting the World Series has ever seen. Like stringing pearls on a necklace, the Brewers threaded seven straight two-out hits in a span of just 22 pitches to produce eight runs. Twenty-two pitches that changed the world. Just you wait.

Milwaukee bashed 16 hits in all. Only four of them were hit to the pull side. None of them were home runs.

The 22-pitch barrage was just an extreme example of what the Brewers have done all year. They are reinventing baseball. Like padded shoulders and acid-washed jeans, they are bringing back a style of 1980s baseball that the analytics revolution made déclassé. The Brewers are destroying everything in their way including accepted wisdom with a staccato symphony of groundballs, singles and opposite field hits.

The homer-happy, pull-side air game that analytics and hitting labs pushed for years? The Brewers have one word for it:

“Classic!”

“I’m curious as to what spring training next year is going to look like around the game,” Bauers says. “I think it’s going to be different.”

To quote Mahatma Gandhi when it comes to those like the Brewers who cut their own path, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Then they copy you.

The Brewers are proving that ground balls and opposite field hitting, anathema to the way the game has been played for a decade, can be the bedrock of championship baseball. As fastball velocity and breaking ball spin rates have risen, trying to catch the ball in front of the plate—the preferred method for seeking pull-side air—is becoming more of a higher-risk, losing proposition.

“It doesn’t win anymore,” Bauers says. “It may work once in a while. But it’s not something that’s sustainable consistently with the way pitching is today. And when you rely on that kind of hitting, and it’s not working, you have nothing. No other way to win a game.”

The top five teams in MLB at hitting the ball in the air to the pull side did not win a playoff game this year: the Cubs, Twins, Astros, Diamondbacks and Rockies.

The Brewers ranked last in pull-side air. They make contact with the baseball deeper on its path to the plate than every team but the Yankees, who are much more home run and fly ball dependent.

You must go all the way back to the 1986 Mets, one of the great rally teams of all time, to find a team that plays offensive baseball like this. Back then, the Mets were simply the best at what was the common style of the day. Today, the Brewers stand as an innovator.

Already the Brewers hit the fewest home runs (154) to win at least 103 regular season games since those ’86 Mets (148). And with another homerless victory in Game 3, they are 39–30 in games without a homer. No world champion finished above .500 and with so many wins without a home run since the ’86 Mets (44–32).

Winning 103 games already proved the Brewers’ method works. But winning the World Series this way? It becomes a wakeup call for the rest of baseball to stop playing an outdated game as pitching only gets more extreme. Brewers manager Pat Murphy says he already has heard from the general manager of one team who was called on the carpet by his owners and asked, “What do we need to do to be like the Brewers?”

The Brewers are not just bending the norms of modern baseball. This is pulling a powerslide of a U-turn in the middle of Wisconsin Avenue at high speed with tires smoking and rubber burning. Milwaukee led baseball in ground ball hitting and opposite field hitting. Look how drastic of a change that philosophy is compared to the previous six World Series champions:

“I'm not here to say you can change baseball or you can’t,” says hitting coach Dan Vogelbach. “I think you can win in so many ways, right? But I think in whatever way you win, you just have to be convicted in who you are. And this group is convicted in the player that they are as an individual, and they are convicted in the team that we are as a group. And I think that when you know who you are, and you don't try to be something else, that turns into wins. And that's what this team does so well.”

The fifth inning of Game 3 was an avalanche of conviction. Former Brewers righthander Freddy Peralta should have been off the field when he obtained a pulled groundball (Classic!) from William Contreras with runners at first and second. But third baseman Junior Caminero made a poor, fateful decision as he spun with his back to the plate. Instead of turning to throw to first to get the slow Contreras, he threw to second to try to get the speedy and smart Christian Yelich, who had properly lengthened his primary and secondary leads as the trail runner. Yelich beat the throw, as a replay challenge overturned.

That was the tiny snowball that fed the huge avalanche. Lefty Cam Booser relieved Peralta. Brice Turang smashed a ground ball single toward the opposite side of second base. Garrett Mitchell lined the next pitch for an opposite field single. Cooper Pratt improvised and pulled a double down the line, a third straight hit on a first pitch. Sal Frelick kept the line moving with an opposite field double, then David Hamilton with a single up the middle and then Jackson Chourio with an opposite field double.

“Nobody went for the big swing,” Vogelbach says. “Nobody went for a homer. It's just continuing to take what they give you, take what they give you. They bring the lefty in to face Brice. Brice gets to two strikes and just gets on top of a ball and doesn't try to do too much and hits a single up the middle, right? So that's just what these guys do. They know that they don't have to be the hero, and they just give it to the guy behind them.”

Pearl after pearl. It was madness. At least one Brewers runner touched home plate on six consecutive plate appearances. Third base coach Matt Erickson used his arm almost as much as Booser, who was charged with four runs while throwing only 12 pitches.

“Barreling balls is great, but staying inside and staying through balls, that gets you hits,” Vogelbach says. “If you start cheating to the fastball trying to barrel it, you're really in trouble, and this team does such a good job of avoiding that.”

It begins in spring training. Vogelbach and the staff pay strict attention to ball flight. The Brewers don’t try to hit ground balls; they try to hit line drives. They don’t want the ball sky high off the bat. Milwaukee had the lowest average launch angle in baseball this season—9 degrees, the lowest by any team in the past nine seasons. 

“I think it's just back spinning the ball through the whole field, using the whole field,” Vogelbach says.

The copycats that will come in Milwaukee’s wake will need two other factors to pull off this ’80s-style approach. 

One, they need a convicted manager like Murphy, who at age 67 is the second oldest first-time World Series manager and comes by way of college baseball, not a hitting lab. When his analytics department told him to play Luis Lara against Peralta instead of Frelick based on sheer numbers, Murphy didn’t think twice about starting Frelick because of how hard Frelick competes.

And two, you need unselfish players who will hold one another accountable if someone starts swinging too big or, good heavens, hits a selfish, soft rollover.

“It's not hard to get this team to buy into anything,” Vogelbach says. “They're just ... it's so cliché to say, but they're just such a team that believes. If you tell them something, and you're convicted in it, and they're convicted in it, they just buy into it, right? And that's a credit to Murph and the leader that Murph is. That goes into the clubhouse. You can just see guys just buy into it. And when they buy into something, and they buy into it as a team, they just believe that nothing can stop them.”

The Brewers are the only franchise to come within one win of a World Series championship without ever winning one. They were on the doorstep in 1982, when they took a 3–2 lead into the bottom of the sixth inning of Game 7 against the Cardinals, only to lose, 6–3. So close.

Here they are again, 44 years later, one win away from fulfillment, playing 1980s baseball again but this time as an innovator. With one more win, the Brewers will become only the third team to win 103 games and the World Series with more stolen bases than home runs. You must go back to the 1975 Reds and the 1942 Cardinals who were this good and this convicted in playing such a varied style.

The team with the greatest ground ball rate, the greatest opposite-field hitting rate, the lowest pull-side air rate and the lowest average launch angle is redefining what wins. One convicted swing at a time, the Brewers are changing the game.