Brewers roll to second 10-game win streak of season, 30 games above .500

MILWAUKEE -- You could zoom in on the details of the Brewers’ 7-1 win over the Pirates at American Family Field on Monday, from Brice Turang hitting the first leadoff home run of his career to Christian Yelich making it 22 home runs this season for No. 22, to a surprise squeeze bunt from slugger Andrew Vaughn and culminating with Milwaukee becoming the 10th team with multiple 10-game winning streaks in a season during the Divisional Era (since 1969).

Or, with the Pirates in town, you could zoom out and reflect on how the Brewers got here.

It was a good night to do that because this crazy run began against the Pirates on May 25, a Sunday getaway day at PNC Park. The Brewers woke up that morning with a 25-28 record, having already held two postgame meetings and with manager Pat Murphy wondering aloud where his team had misplaced its edge. It was not what you want.

They were four outs away from absorbing another loss when rookie Caleb Durbin fouled off five straight pitches before delivering a game-tying two-run double on an 0-2 count in the eighth. Turang followed with a go-ahead double to break a 1-for-24 funk.

When the Brewers finished a 6-5 win, it was their first multi-run comeback victory all season.

“That,” Murphy said afterward, “is how we’ve got to play.”

Since then, it’s exactly how they’ve played.

Starting with that Sunday in Pittsburgh, the Brewers have vaulted to the very top of the MLB standings by winning 49 of their next 65 games, including the current stretch of 25 of the last 29 with an 11-game winning streak on the front end and now, a 10-game winning streak and counting.

It’s a rarity to string together multiple double-digit winning streaks in a season, much less over the span of five weeks. These are the only teams since baseball expanded in 1969 and organized into divisions who have done it:

• 2025 Brewers
• 2019 Astros
• 2017 Dodgers
• 2015 Blue Jays
• 2013 Braves
• 2001 Cardinals
• 1978 Pirates
• 1977 Royals
• 1969 Mets
• 1969 Astros

“I think I said it was going to be all right, that it was all part of the baseball season,” said Yelich, who led team meetings in San Francisco and Cleveland as the struggling Brewers sought their identity. “They weren’t even bad team meetings, it was just like, ‘Hey, guys, what’s going on?’

“It was talking, it wasn’t anybody yelling or anything. We needed to play better. Obviously, we knew we needed to play better, and we knew we still had a lot of time to right the ship. I don’t know if we knew we were going to go on this kind of run, but we knew it was going to get better and we were going to be in it in the end.”

They’re not just in it, they’ve become baseball’s pace car. The Brewers improved to 30 games over .500 at 74-44 on a night the Cubs were idle and the Reds lost, which extended Milwaukee’s lead to 6 1/2 games over second-place Chicago (67-50) and 13 games over third-place Cincinnati (62-58).

How have they done it? Not with home runs, but with pesky rallies like the one which followed Yelich’s tiebreaking solo shot in the third inning, when the Brewers tacked on three more runs, all with two outs, via four singles, a sacrifice bunt and generally aggressive baserunning, including a Joey Ortiz stolen base that produced a run-scoring error.

For Murphy, that’s the good stuff.

“We have to play up-tempo baseball in all facets,” the manager said. “We’re not going to sit back and slug. That’s not our game, even though I hear that that’s the only way to win in big situations. Whatever. We have to do what we have to do to be who we are.”

And there was more for Murphy to like in the fourth, when with one out and runners at the corners, Vaughn surprised everyone by pushing a squeeze bunt to the right side of the infield to make it 6-1. There was some dispute in the dugout whether third-base coach Jason Lane had actually put the sign down for a bunt, but Vaughn saw it that way and he executed it for his 29th RBI in 26 games since coming up to the Brewers.

How many times has Vaughn squeeze bunted in the big leagues?

“I don’t think any,” he said.

But he practices bunting every day in batting practice, so why not?

“I’m trying to do anything I can to help the team win,” Vaughn said.

There’s a very long list of players who have helped do that during this long stretch of winning baseball, going all the way back to Durbin in Pittsburgh. He still remembers the at-bat that started this thing, partly because he was facing a pitcher, Pirates left-hander Ryan Borucki, who’d attended one of Durbin’s rival high schools in northern Illinois.

“I knew of him, obviously, and I had faced him a couple of days before and had a good battle,” Durbin said. “I was confident in that situation.”

Still, he had no way to know that it was the start of something so big.

“That started an eight-game win streak, and then from there, we’ve maybe only lost one or two series since then,” said Durbin, who was in the ballpark -- the Brewers are 16-4-1 in series play since that afternoon. “We knew we could play better. Now we want to keep it going.”

And that means looking forward, not back.

“Nobody cares what we’ve done in the last month,” Yelich said. “It’s all great, but we have bigger goals than 74 wins.”