MILWAUKEE (AP) The Milwaukee Brewers have grown accustomed to outperforming forecasts every year, but this season might represent their most remarkable accomplishment yet.
During a season in which they have built the best record in the majors, the Brewers reached their latest milestone by becoming the first team to clinch a playoff berth.
According to MLB, the New York Mets’ 3-2 loss to the Texas Rangers on Saturday sealed at least a National League wild card for Milwaukee. The Brewers responded by displaying the tenacity that helped get them to this point, as they rallied from a five-run deficit to beat the St. Louis Cardinals 9-8 in 10 innings Saturday night.
The Brewers then celebrated with a champagne toast in the locker room.
“Hopefully, this is the first toast of many,” outfielder Christian Yelich said.
This marks the seventh time in the last eight seasons that the Brewers have qualified for the playoffs, though they haven’t won a postseason series since reaching Game 7 of the NL Championship Series in 2018. They had made a total of two postseason appearances from 1983-2017.
Milwaukee now will chase its third straight NL Central title as well as the top overall playoff seed.
The Brewers lead the division by 6 1/2 games over the Chicago Cubs, who lost 5-4 to the Tampa Bay Rays on Saturday. The Cubs own the tiebreaker.
Milwaukee has a two-game lead over NL East-leading Philadelphia in the race for baseball’s best record, and the Brewers hold that tiebreaker.
This was supposed to be the season in which the Brewers took a step back.
They traded two-time NL reliever of the year Devin Williams to the New York Yankees and lost one of their top position players when shortstop Willy Adames signed a seven-year, $182 million contract with the Giants.
“Who believed before the season that we were going to be over .500?” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said. “You can’t find a prognosticator that said we were going to be over .500 before the season, not one.”
The Brewers were 25-28 and 6 1/2 games behind the Cubs on May 24, but they’ve gone 66-30 since.
Milwaukee entered Saturday ranked second in the majors in runs and ERA. That combination has the team poised to challenge for the best record in franchise history. The Brewers already set a club mark with a 14-game win streak this summer.
“We knew that we could right the ship,” Yelich said. “We knew we had to do it quickly if we wanted to get to where we wanted to go. I think we believed in ourselves. It was a matter of going out and doing it. And once you get that momemntum, you get that formula and kind of find your identity as a team, it’s easier to kind of win because you just know how you do it.”
Milwaukee’s top regular-season finish was 96-66 in 2011. The Brewers have made only one World Series apeparance, back when they were in the American League and lost to St. Louis in seven games in 1982.
A couple of early-season trades paid huge dividends.
Quinn Priester was pitching for Boston’s Triple-A affiliate at the start of the season when the Brewers acquired him. Priester, who had a 6-9 career major league record before the trade, has gone 13-2 with a 3.25 ERA for Milwaukee.
Priester won his 12th straight decision Friday, and the Brewers have won each of the last 18 games in which he’s appeared. According to Sportradar, the last pitcher to win at least 12 consecutive decisions within a single season was Gerrit Cole, who won 16 straight with the Houston Astros in 2019.
In mid-June, the Brewers traded pitcher Aaron Civale to the White Sox for first baseman Andrew Vaughn, who had been sent to the minors after hitting .189 in 48 games with Chicago. Vaughn entered Saturday with an .860 OPS in 54 games with Milwaukee.
Plenty of others also have contributed.
Brice Turang was the NL player of the month in August. Isaac Collins entered Saturday with a .372 on-base percentage as a 28-year-old rookie. William Contreras has surged since the All-Star Game and remains one of the game’s top-hitting catchers. Jackson Chourio has continued to emerge as one of baseball’s brightest young stars. And rookie Caleb Durbin, one of the players acquired in the Williams trade, has solidified Milwaukee’s third-base situation.
Freddy Peralta had a string of 30 straight scoreless innings. Yelich is on pace for a 30-homer, 100-RBI season. Brandon Woodruff made a successful return from the shoulder injury that sidelined the two-time All-Star pitcher for the entire 2024 season. Jacob Misiorowski, one of the game’s hardest throwers, made enough of an impression to earn an All-Star Game appearance after getting called up in mid-June. All-Star closer Trevor Megill and setup man Abner Uribe form one of the majors’ best bullpen duos.
They’ve all come together by living up to Murphy’s season-long message: Win tonight. The idea is that it makes no sense to worry about what happened in the past or to look too far ahead. Just worry about taking care of business right now.
The plan has worked better than just about anyone outside Milwaukee’s locker room could have expected.
“For these guys to pull it together and compete like that is special beyond belief,” Murphy said. “I can only tell you that’s just who they are, you know what I mean? They want to compete.”
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AP freelance writer Andrew Wagner contributed to this report.
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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/MLB
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