MILWAUKEE — Pat Murphy did not soften the message. With the Brewers in the middle of another strong run, he again framed Milwaukee as a club most opponents still underestimate, even as it keeps stacking wins and division titles.
Tom Verducci joined Danny Parkins to break down the Brewers’ dominance, and the numbers behind it are hard to dismiss. Milwaukee was 27-18 and 8-2 in its last 10 games, putting the club on pace for a 97-win season with the third-best run differential in the National League. The Brewers also had a $131 million payroll this season, just below the $132 million figure FanGraphs listed for 2019, when the club was already operating in a tight financial lane.
That mix of results and restraint has defined Milwaukee for years. The Brewers have made the postseason in seven of the last eight years, missing out only in 2022 when they still finished 86-76. They have won the NL Central three straight years and five times between 2018 and 2025, and they reached the NLCS twice in that span. In other words, this is not a scrappy surprise; it is a team that has made contention routine while staying near the bottom of the payroll table.
Murphy’s language about the Dodgers last October captured the tone. During last year’s NLCS, he said, “I’m sure that most Dodger players can’t name eight guys on our roster.” He followed that by saying, “No offense to them, they shouldn’t have to know the names, but these are some guys that hopefully they know their names by the time it’s over. You never know.” The Dodgers won that series of close games, and Shohei Ohtani finished it with one of the greatest individual games in baseball history.
That backdrop matters because Milwaukee keeps proving it can lose stars and still win. The Brewers have repeatedly traded away players they developed, including Josh Hader, Corbin Burnes, Devin Williams, Caleb Durbin, Isaac Collins and Freddy Peralta. Yet the results keep coming, which is the part that makes Murphy’s underdog act both believable and a little strange.
The tension is simple: the Brewers talk and play like a club built on proving people wrong, but the record says they are already one of the most reliable teams in the sport. Milwaukee’s payroll remains modest, but the wins are real, and the division titles are piling up. The question now is not whether the Brewers can hang around; it is how long they can keep doing this while continuing to send away the very players that helped build it.
This week, Milwaukee was at Wrigley Field, still moving through the schedule with the same blend of defiance and production that has defined the Murphy era. The Brewers do not look like a mirage. They look like a team that has found a way to make consistency feel temporary for everyone else.
