Brewers win third NL Central title in four years

MILWAUKEE — The Milwaukee Brewers became the first major league team to clinch a division championship Wednesday when it sealed its third National League Central title in the past four years.

The Chicago Cubs‘ 5-3 loss to the Oakland Athletics enabled the Brewers to wrap up the division crown.

The Brewers’ clubhouse emptied with one out to go in the ninth inning in Chicago, a couple of hours before Milwaukee’s scheduled first pitch against Philadelphia. A muffled cheer could be heard after the final out when the Brewers won consecutive division titles for the first time in 42 years.

Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy said he watched the final outs of the Cubs’ game with 90-year-old longtime Brewers broadcaster Bob Uecker.

“We were doing our show and I watched it with him,” Murphy said. “What’s better than that? Awesome.”

This marks the Brewers’ sixth postseason berth in the past seven years — a remarkable accomplishment for a team that made the playoffs only twice in a 35-year stretch from 1983 to 2017.

But this run to the playoffs has been a little different from the rest.

“Nobody wants it to be easy, let’s just be honest,” first baseman Rhys Hoskins said. “Everybody that’s in that room cherishes challenges. The first challenge [is] down. We obviously have a few more ahead of us. We’re excited about that.”

Although the Brewers have grown accustomed to outperforming preseason expectations, the odds seemed stacked against them even more than usual this year.

Craig Counsell, the winningest manager in Brewers history, left for the rival Cubs. Corbin Burnes, the 2021 NL Cy Young Award winner, was traded to the Baltimore Orioles.

Two-time All-Star right-hander Brandon Woodruff didn’t pitch all year as he recovered from shoulder surgery, and two-time NL Reliever of the Year Devin Williams sat out the first half of the season because of stress fractures in his back.

All-Star outfielder Christian Yelich and pitchers Wade Miley and Robert Gasser suffered season-ending injuries.

None of it mattered.

“You can do all that to us, but it’s still about people, and you have no idea what their best is,” Murphy said. “These guys don’t know what their best is and didn’t know what their best was and still don’t. But they know one thing: Pulling together, competing, being doubted is something that can vault you forward into a championship.”

The Brewers took over first place for good at the end of April and never looked back. Now they’ve won back-to-back division titles for the first time since 1981-82. That 1982 season marked Milwaukee’s lone World Series appearance, which ended with a seven-game loss to the St. Louis Cardinals.

“We were all kind of written off, right?” Yelich said. “So that makes this one kind of special because we found a way. We faced a lot of adversity. We believed in each other. We came together as a group and got it done.”

The Brewers benefited from the leadership of Murphy, who had been Counsell’s bench coach since 2016. Rather than following Counsell to Chicago, Murphy stayed in Milwaukee and got his first full-time opportunity as a major league manager two weeks before his 65th birthday. Murphy’s only previous MLB managerial experience had come as an interim manager with San Diego in 2015.

Murphy has kept the locker room loose while guiding a team that hasn’t suffered more than three straight losses at any point this season. The Brewers are the only team that hasn’t had a losing streak of at least four games.

“They overachieved in every way, shape or form,” Murphy said.

The Brewers have succeeded with what Murphy refers to as an “all-hands-on-deck” approach.

Milwaukee’s had 17 different pitchers start games this season (only the Miami Marlins and Los Angeles Angels had more). Twelve different Brewers pitchers have collected a save, just two shy of the record of 14 set by the 2021 Tampa Bay Rays. Milwaukee entered Wednesday with a 3.65 ERA that ranked fourth in the majors.

Offensively, the Brewers rank fourth in total runs scored (733) and 11th in OPS (.735) after finishing 17th in runs (728) and 23rd in OPS (.704) last year.

Yelich was leading the NL in batting average (.315) and on-base percentage (.406) before back issues ended his season in late July. William Contreras has developed into one of the game’s best hitting catchers. Willy Adames is the first Brewers shortstop to have a 30-homer, 100-RBI season, something even Hall of Famer Robin Yount never accomplished in Milwaukee.

Jackson Chourio, who doesn’t turn 21 until next spring, is the youngest player to ever hit 20 homers and steal 20 bases in one season.

“This is exactly what you as a competitor want to be a part of, right?” Hoskins said. “It didn’t necessarily look exactly the way that maybe some of us thought, but what’s cool is that we still were able to find ways to get the job done.”