MILWAUKEE – No team lucks its way into the best record in baseball, not 116 games into a season. The Brewers, who weren’t supposed to be in this position based on the preseason projections, have earned every one of their 72 victories with good pitching and better defense and the sort of offensive approach that reminds manager Pat Murphy on a near-daily basis of the woodpeckers inhabiting the trees outside his suburban Milwaukee home.
But how can one watch this team night after night, win after win – eight in a row and 23 of the last 27 with Saturday’s 7-4 win over the Mets in front of another sellout crowd at American Family Field – and not at least acknowledge the presence of good fortune?
“You could say it’s going our way lately, but that’s the game of baseball,” said Brewers catcher William Contreras. “Earlier on in the year, nothing was going our way, it felt like. And now it is. Thanks to God, we’re getting some of those things going that way right now.”
Take the seventh inning of what was a back and forth ballgame, with the Mets taking the lead three times but the Brewers always pecking their way back before jumping ahead for good with a four-run outburst. It started with a single from Brice Turang, the second baseman who earlier had made it back-to-back games with home runs for the first time in his career, and continued with a Joey Ortiz bloop double that bounced into the stands, a Sal Frelick groundout that produced the tying run thanks to the contact play, and, after the Mets called upon Trade Deadline pickup Ryan Helsley to start firing 103 mph fastballs, an Isaac Collins grounder that bounced past third baseman Ronny Mauricio at 99.7 mph for what was ruled a go-ahead base hit.
If you thought any of that was fortunate, wait until what came next. Contreras jumped on Helsley’s next pitch and hit a hard lineout that for a moment appeared to end the seventh inning with the Brewers boasting a narrow 5-4 lead. But only for a moment, because home-plate umpire Ryan Additon signaled a pitch timer violation and summoned Contreras back to home plate with new life.
“You never want to do that and give away a pitch like that,” Helsley said.
“I didn’t realize it was a ball until the umpire came out and called it as such,” Contreras said. “After that, I maintained my plan for the next pitch. I was staying on the fastball there with Helsley.”
In the Brewers’ dugout, Friday’s winning pitcher Brandon Woodruff turned to veteran first baseman Rhys Hoskins and said, “This is going to be something when he hits a home run on the next pitch.”
Sure enough, Contreras smashed a two-run homer on the next pitch.
“That was one of the coolest things I’ve seen,” Brewers starter Tobias Myers said. “We were screaming.”
Was it a stroke of good luck for Contreras? Or was it incredible skill to recenter his focus against an All-Star closer whose fastball topped out Saturday at a blazing 103.8 mph?
For that matter, back in the second inning when sure-handed Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor muffed Ortiz’s high chopper for a two-out error that spotted the Brewers two unearned runs, was that luck? Or was it Ortiz being rewarded for laying off Frankie Montas’ two-strike splitter in the dirt on the previous pitch and then putting the next one in play?
As hitting coach Connor Dawson sees it, there’s nothing wrong with a little of both.
“I think we create those good things by creating pressure,” Dawson said. “I mean, we’ve capitalized on pretty much every error, every defensive mistake and every pitching mistake. That is our philosophy. That is our identity. We want to make people play the game and we want to drag them through hell doing it.
“People see that [seventh] inning. They see a flare by Joey and they see Sal’s at-bat and they see Isaac’s six-pitch base hit and William capitalize on the pitch clock, but all that’s set up from making Frankie Montas throw 72 pitches in three innings. We didn’t necessarily capitalize on Frankie, but the tone was set. That’s really where it starts. I don’t know how many at-bats we had that were six-plus pitches, but it seemed like a lot.”
The answer: Eleven of the Brewers’ 34 plate appearances spanned at least six pitches. Six more went five pitches.
“They’re a good team,” Lindor said. “They do things right.”
It adds up to 28 games over .500 for the first time since the end of the Brewers’ 2021 regular season, and the first season in franchise history with three winning streaks of eight-plus games. But as Murphy pointed out once again, “It’s Aug. 9, guys.”
Still, the Brewers will enjoy this run.
They’ve earned it.
“We’re going through a great moment right now, one of the better moments the franchise has gone through,” Contreras said. “It’s great vibes in the clubhouse when you’re going through a stretch like this and winning games. In any clubhouse you’re in, this is a feeling you’re chasing after.”