Rastall Ramblings: Brewers Flying High Into All-Star break
In mid-May, could anybody have anticipated that the vibes around this Milwaukee Brewers team would be this high going into the All-Star break?
Sure, a glut of pitcher injuries early on left obvious room for improvement once those arms started coming back, but this looked like a team with too many flaws (especially on offense) whose best-case scenario was probably scraping their way to a Wild Card berth and being an easy out in the first round of the playoffs.
Now? The Brewers are nearing a two-month stretch where they’ve looked as good as any team in baseball.
A loss to the Twins on May 17 (their fourth shutout loss in five games) left Milwaukee sitting at 21-25 with a -10 run differential. Since that time, the Brewers are 35-15 with a +91 run differential that is easily the best in the MLB over that stretch.
There is so much you can talk about in a positive light with these Brewers right now, but the most obvious place to start is with their pitching.
Freddy Peralta has been rock solid as the No. 1 of the rotation, going 11-4 with a 2.66 ERA and 118 strikeouts through this first half of the season. Electric flamethrower Jacob Misiorowski has been everything he was hyped up to be and more through his first five starts in the big leagues. After some stops and starts, Brandon Woodruff is finally back following nearly two years away due to an anterior capsule injury in his right shoulder, and he’s looked fabulous in a small sample size of two starts.
The Brewers acquiring Quinn Priester early in the season elicited eyerolls from some, but, as they so often do, the team figured something out and he’s been a reliable rotation piece. Jose Quintana and Chad Patrick have helped shore up a rotation that, when fully healthy, has no real holes to speak of.
The bullpen is anchored by the 1-2 punch of Abner Uribe and Trevor Megill that gives the Brewers the type of shutdown setup man-closer duo that they seem to roll out every single season.
Guys like Aaron Ashby, Grant Anderson and Jared Koenig have thrived doing that middle-inning dirty work out of the bullpen.
Offensively, a team that looked like it might be fundamentally flawed at the plate now seems more like a robust lineup top to bottom with only a couple problem positions. Christian Yelich returning to an MVP form after a very slow start to the year appears to have led the wave for everyone to follow.
As noted by Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, seven of the team’s nine hitters with at least 200 plate appearances currently have an OPS between .700 and .799. An eighth, William Contreras, is just a tick out of that range with an OPS of .699.
Just how great is everything going for the Brewers at the moment? They traded a disgruntled Aaron Civale to the White Sox and got first baseman Andrew Vaughn (the No. 3 overall pick in the 2019 draft who never really panned out) in return. All Vaughn has done is drive in 10 runs in his first five games as a Brewer to immediately become a fan favorite.
It all has come together to leave Milwaukee at 56-40 and just one game behind the Chicago Cubs in the NL Central standings going into the break. Those 56 wins are the most in franchise history going into the All-Star break, and as noted by MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy, their .583 winning percentage is the second-best at the break in Brewers history.
With a glut of starting pitching and one of the best, deepest farm systems in baseball to boot, one would expect Milwaukee to be active at the trade deadline. This team feels like it’s only a couple bats and maybe an additional bullpen arm away from being a bona fide World Series contender, and the front office should not let this opportunity go to waste.
This started as a season that figured it might be a bit of a down one for a club that’s become accustomed to annual playoff contention. Instead, it’s looking like perhaps their best shot at legitimately competing for an NL pennant since 2018.
