How the Brewers built MLB's best team out of castoffs and unknowns

The Brewers have the best winning percentage in the Majors, and they’re on track to break the all-time franchise wins record by kind of a lot. When they open a series at Cincinnati on Friday, they will have a chance to tie for the longest win streak in franchise history (13, set back in 1987).

After yet another year of being underrated headed into the season – we had them at 13th in a before-the-season World Series draft, though accurately noting it was “well past time to give them the benefit of the doubt” – the main question all anyone wants to know is: How? How are they doing this, again?

Maybe it’s pocket pancakes or the prospect of free burgers. Maybe it’s the power of friendship. Maybe it's "Uecker Magic." What it’s not, mostly, is stars.

• Brewers lead the way in NL-heavy Power Rankings

That's because long-time studs Willy Adames and Devin Williams now play elsewhere, and bigger names like Jackson Chourio, Rhys Hoskins, and Brandon Woodruff have all missed time at points, while breakout rookie Jacob Misiorowski is currently on the injured list. Veteran bats Christian Yelich and William Contreras had each been more solid than stellar -- at least until the team’s red-hot recent run. Contreras' 3.2 WAR, per FanGraphs, leads the team ... but ranks tied for 46th in the Majors.

The how of it all is an intriguing question. A more interesting one might be the who of it all. (All numbers below are as of Wednesday.)

The Brewers, contrary to what you may think about the way a smaller-market team needs to compete, aren’t really “homegrown,” at least not in the way most people consider that phrase. On the current 26-man roster, the Brewers have a mere five drafted-and-developed players, which is tied for fourth-fewest. Their first-round picks over the last decade have been relatively unremarkable; only Brice Turang has managed to reach a comparatively modest bar of adding 6 career WAR for the team, or less than Aaron Judge did for New York just in the first four months of this season.

It’s been nearly 20 years since Milwaukee used a first-round pick on a player who’d make the All-Star team wearing Brewers colors, and even that wasn’t straightforward, because it was reliever Jeremy Jeffress, who pitched for three other teams and was on his third stint with the Brewers before being named as an injury replacement in 2018, a dozen years after being drafted in 2006. In the last 20 years, only five Brewers Draft picks in the top five rounds made a significant impact on the team, which we’re defining as “at least 6 WAR as a Brewer:” Ryan Braun, Corbin Burnes, Williams, Jonathan Lucroy, and Turang. It’s not a great hit rate.

Misiorowski and some more recent picks may later change that, of course, but instead, nearly half of the Brewers' 40-man roster was built via trades. That ranks fourth most behind notoriously roster-churning clubs in Tampa Bay, San Diego, and Seattle. While they mostly ignore waivers – they’re currently one of just three teams without a single waiver claim on the 40-man – and generally don’t go after the biggest fish in the free-agent sea, there’s more than one way to add valuable ballplayers.

In Milwaukee’s case, that might be what sets them apart the most, the ability to identify some lesser-loved talent and polish it into diamonds. (Or maybe it’s really just the pancakes.) So let's explore the winding paths that seven of our most interesting and unexpected Brewers took to be here, in no particular order, and identify one lesson we can learn from each of their journeys.

1B Andrew Vaughn

Lesson: It’s rarely a bad idea to give a top-three pick a second chance.

Vaughn was the No. 3 pick in the 2019 Draft, behind Adley Ruschman and Bobby Witt Jr. While he hit for some empty power in Chicago – 77 homers in parts of five seasons certainly isn’t nothing – he’d also fallen off so badly that one of the weakest teams in baseball sent him to Triple-A in May before shipping him to Milwaukee for a pitcher who’d just asked for a ticket out of town (Aaron Civale).

Vaughn was hitting .189 with a .531 OPS for the White Sox when he lost his job. He wasn’t doing much better for Triple-A Charlotte, hitting .211 with a .679 OPS. After two weeks of mashing for Milwaukee’s Triple-A Nashville affiliate, he’s hit .348 with a 1.041 OPS for the Brewers. It’s one of the six best lines in baseball since his arrival. The Brewers are a stunning 26-4 with him on the active roster.

That’s not entirely because of him, of course, nor should he be expected to keep this up. But Vaughn has more than doubled his walk rate and significantly cut his strikeout rate in Milwaukee, mostly due to a huge decrease in chase rate. He’s just 27, with two more years of team control remaining, acquired for a pitcher who didn’t want to be there. There’s something to said about new coaching teaching new approaches. There might also be something to be said about going from a team that just lost 121 games to one on track to glide into the playoffs, too.

OF Isaac Collins

Lesson: You can get value from the Rule 5 Draft. Even the Minor League Rule 5 Draft.

It’s hard to find a more unusual path to high-level play than Collins, who was a Rockies ninth-rounder in 2019 and was selected by Milwaukee in the 2022 Rule 5 Draft – but not even the big league version that requires a player to be kept on the Major League roster all year. Instead, it was the Minor League cousin that’s a level even lower than that. He spent most of the next two seasons in Milwaukee’s system. He just turned 28 years old. He might be the 2025 NL Rookie of the Year.

Consider that path to the Majors, and then realize this: Of all the hitters this year with at least 300 plate appearances, only seven -- most of them stars such as Judge, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Shohei Ohtani -- have a higher on-base percentage than Collins' .387. This is not exactly a new skill for him; in 2021, while still a Rockies farmhand, his .399 OBP was a top-five mark in High-A ball. You’ll be unsurprised to know that he’s running an elite chase rate, too. On defense, his reaction times are so elite that they’re third best, behind only Ceddanne Rafaela and Pete Crow-Armstrong, otherwise known as two truly talented outfielders.

C William Contreras

Lesson: Being the third team in a three-team trade can yield massive results.

We’ll keep this one quick, because it’s not exactly an unknown story. In the winter of 2022, the A’s and Braves were negotiating a deal that would send All-Star catcher Sean Murphy to Atlanta. When the deal was announced, it was a three-teamer, with Milwaukee sneaking in to acquire a catcher of its own – plus reliever Joel Payamps, who was a big part of the 2024 playoff team – for a speedy outfielder who had little future in Milwaukee (or, as it’s turned out, in the Majors).

It looked like an absolute steal the moment it was made – and even more so in retrospect, as Milwaukee has the most valuable catching situation in baseball over the last three seasons. As Ken Rosenthal wrote at the time: The Braves and A’s couldn’t find a match. Enter the Brewers, who turned a player they didn’t need into one of baseball’s best backstops and two pitchers.

P Quinn Priester

Lesson: There’s a reason that teams look into deeper pitch data.

After an early-season run of injuries, the Brewers were barely into April before needing to find some rotation reinforcements, and their search led them to Priester, who’d been Pittsburgh’s first-round pick in 2019 but had posted a 6.46 ERA in parts of two years there before being swapped to the Red Sox organization for Nick Yorke, who has yet to appear for the Pirates. Priester hadn’t made the Red Sox Opening Day roster. He’s now thrown 118 2/3 innings of 3.49 ERA ball for baseball’s best team.

Some of this wasn’t hard to see coming, if you knew where to look. When Priester was traded to Boston last summer, we noted it was interesting that a pitcher who could touch 97 mph was getting hit that hard; he’s now not thrown a single four-seam fastball since he left Pittsburgh. Four days after the trade, Mario Delgado Genzor wrote a prescient breakdown at Baseball Prospectus which highlighted the underlying skills beneath the ugly ERA, the emerging cutter, and ended with: “this is just a great match between an intriguing young pitcher …. who hasn’t proved it in the bigs and one of the better organizations in the Majors when it comes to pitching development.”

Maybe that would have happened in a lot of other places. Only one team actually took the chance to go out and make it happen.

P Jared Koenig

Lesson: There’s more than one way to get to the Major Leagues.

We are obligated to just list the transactions here.

• 2014: Drafted in 35th round by White Sox, did not sign
• Pitched for three colleges, went undrafted in 2016
• Played in four different independent leagues, plus Australia
• Made affiliated domestic pro debut in 2021 in A’s system
• Spent most of 2022-23 in Minors for three teams

Koenig, now 31 years old, signed a Minor League deal with Milwaukee prior to 2024. The 1000th player in team history, he’s provided the Brewers with a 2.86 ERA in 110 games over the last two years, thanks in part to one of the most valuable sinkers from a lefty reliever in that time.

OF Blake Perkins

Lesson: Another Minor League free agent success story.

When Chourio went down with a hamstring injury, his replacement was a player on his fourth organization, one just weeks away from his 29th birthday and who missed most of this season with a leg injury of his own. Perkins has been around for a while; drafted way back in 2015 by the Nationals and traded to Kansas City in 2018, he spent years in three systems before signing as a Minor League free agent with Milwaukee heading into 2023. The hitting, for the most part, has just been OK. The defense, however, has often been spectacular – in 2023-24, in somewhat limited time, Perkins rated as a top-10 outfielder in the Majors.

Since taking over center field, the defense is still there, as anyone who saw his game-ending throw to Contreras on Aug. 8 is aware of. But he’s been hitting, too. Since he took over center on a mostly full-time basis on July 30, Perkins has three homers and an .882 OPS. There’s not a whole lot of underlying data, to be clear, that actually supports that performance continuing. But the glove is special, and the hits all count the same.

2B Brice Turang

Lesson: Adding bat speed can help even light-hitting middle infielders.

Turang actually was a Milwaukee first-round pick, selected 21st overall in 2018, so we’re cheating a little here – he doesn’t quite fit the archetype of “found money.” Yet we’re including him because he’s gone, on offense, from nearly unplayable as a rookie (61 OPS+, where 100 is average) to still-not-great-but-good-enough-with-that-glove last year (87) to an objectively above-average hitter this year, posting a 110 OPS+. No one in baseball has added more hard-hit, and on a very related note, no one has added more bat speed, with Turang up nearly 4 mph from last year.

That’s not to say he’s a slugger now, and his bat speed remains below average. But there’s a world of difference between “below average,” as it is this year, and “one of the weakest in the game,” as it was last year. It's also hard to ignore how massively he narrowed his stance, cutting down an entire foot of difference between his feet and standing up taller. He already has almost as many extra-base hits in 2025 (33) as he did in 2024 (35), with six weeks still to go. Improvements can come internally, too.

We'll stop there, but the thing about this roster is, we could probably go on indefinitely.

What about Chad Patrick, an early-season pitching standout who was acquired in an absolutely-nobody-noticed-this trade in the winter of 2023 before becoming the 2024 International League Pitcher of the Year? Or Nick Mears, plucked from the Rockies last summer, who turned around a rough introduction to become a valuable part of this year’s bullpen? Or Rob Zastryzny, who’s been around so long that he owns a 2016 Cubs World Series ring, then spent most of four years in the Minors before becoming another Minor League free agent in Milwaukee – who now owns a 1.71 ERA in 21 innings for the team? Or Grant Anderson, cut by Texas after an 8.10 ERA last year, but still deemed worthy of trading a prospect for – and who’s given Milwaukee 58 2/3 innings with a 3.07 ERA?

The only reason they have Freddy Peralta now, after all, is because a decade ago, they got him from Seattle in a long-forgotten deal for Adam Lind.

Or, if we can get wildly ahead of ourselves here: The most immediately confusing trade of the 2025 Deadline was the one Milwaukee made with Arizona, trading for pitchers Shelby Miller (who was injured) and Jordan Montgomery (who is also injured, and unlikely ever to appear as a Brewer). Taking on Montgomery meant that they didn’t have to give Arizona a prospect. Miller, since being activated from the injured list, threw two scoreless innings as a Brewer, averaging 96.3 mph on his fastball, before getting knocked around on Wednesday. He could be a big part of the bullpen down the stretch – and maybe beyond.

The Brewers aren’t this good, because they’ve been playing at a 120-win pace since the beginning of June, and no one is that good. They’re really good, though, and built in the most interesting of ways.