Brewers One of the Few Teams Caught in the Middle

As the Phillies chase a World Series title this week it’s easy to forget that a few weeks ago they were only one game better than the Brewers. After finishing the season as the National League’s sixth-best team the Phillies kicked off a magical run, in chase of a championship, upsetting two division winners on their way to the Fall Classic. The Brewers, meanwhile, were sent home when the postseason began.

The Brewers missed the playoffs by a razor-thin margin, but nonetheless find themselves in an increasingly shrinking middle ground. In baseball’s competitive and economic landscape there are often two tiers of teams: The ones that “go for it” and invest resources to pursue a championship, and the ones that deprioritize competitiveness to reap a greater economic benefit and likely get a higher draft pick to aid in a future rebuild.

As the postseason field expands and the number of less-competitive teams also swells fewer teams get “caught in the middle,” finding themselves with neither a championship opportunity nor the cost savings and high draft pick that come with a step back. This season there were only six teams that finished within 10 games of their respective league’s final Wild Card spots but did not advance to the postseason:

• The Brewers, at 86-76.
• The Orioles, who were one of baseball’s biggest surprises. They rebounded from at least 108 losses per season in 2018, 2019 and 2021 to go 83-79 and remained on the fringe of postseason contention until the season’s final week.
• The Giants, also one of the sport’s biggest surprises but in the opposite direction. A year after dramatically exceeding expectations with a 107-win season in 2021 they fell back to earth with an 81-81 campaign in 2022.
• The White Sox, who entered the season with high expectations but battled injuries and poor performance on their way to an 81-81 season.
• The Twins, another preseason candidate to contend that fell from that tier and landed on a 78-84 record.
• The Red Sox, a reasonably good team with the unfortunate luck of being in an American League East full of contenders and finishing in last place at 78-84.

Historically speaking, getting caught in the middle is not a new thing for the Brewers. They won between 73 and 81 games eight times in a span of eleven complete MLB seasons from 1989-2000, for example, not good enough to be a serious contender but also not bad enough to turn a poor season into a high draft pick. The franchise’s turnaround to contention didn’t start until 2005, when the draft picks from four consecutive 94-loss seasons brought a new core of talent into the organization.

In 2022, however, that group of teams on the fringe of contention was smaller than it’s ever been. Twelve teams lost at least 88 games in 2022, the most in a single season in MLB history. Even with an expanded postseason field, a dozen teams were all-but eliminated early. They’ll receive the first 12 picks in the 2023 MLB draft, while the group of six listed above will select from 13-18. In many but not all cases the non-contending teams also cut payroll and raised their profit margins by tens of millions of dollars. Not all of these teams were “tanking:” The Angels and Rangers, for example, both spent pretty significantly and were not rewarded with on-field performance. The large majority of these teams, however, simply opted not to invest the resources necessary to build a competitive team this season.

Baseball is better off when teams try to compete, even when they don’t succeed. Bad baseball simply isn’t as fun to watch, and a season with 12 non-contenders generated a lot of games between teams that were already dead in the water in June. This issue clearly wasn’t solved in the new collective bargaining agreement, and a system that rewards teams for not trying with higher profits and draft picks continues to create a perverse incentive to water down the MLB product.