Are The Brewers A Playoff Caliber Team In 2020?

It’s been up and down for the Milwaukee Brewers in this strange 2020 season. Now sitting third in the NL Central, could the Brewers turn around and be a playoff ready team?

The NL Central has always been one, if not the most competitive division in baseball as we approach the rest of the month of September and the postseason. With the 2020 season being shortened, it’s quite literally now or never if the Brewers wants to make a postseason appearance.

After a tough loss in the 2019 Wild Card game and falling just a couple games shy of the World Series in 2018, the Brewers are looking to make franchise history; A third consecutive appearance in the postseason. A huge part of determining whether or not that happens is playing their division rivals. Playing the Pittsburgh Pirates, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds, and St. Louis Cardinals a total of ten times each, puts a huge emphasis on winning in-division games.

With the new expansion from 10 teams to 16 teams in the postseason, the first and second place teams within each division will advance to the postseason with the finals spots going to the teams with the next best records.

The Brewers have been, in a way, exceeding expectations; They did lead the NL Central through 60 games in both 2018 (37-23), and 2019 (34-26), which for a normal 162-game season is pretty good. However, with the shortened 60-game season, the Brewers are sitting at 18-21, 4.5 games behind the first place Chicago Cubs (23-17). Now that we’re in the month of September, this is usually the month where the Brewers shine, and fans are hoping that happens again this year.

But, after a tough 10-1 loss against the Detroit Tigers on Tuesday, things were not looking too promising. They left 12 stranded on base and only had one run thanks to Christian Yelich‘s solo homer. It seems to be an everlasting pattern with the Crew this season; One game, they’re on fire. The next, it’s like they forgot how to play the game of baseball.

The Brewers need an offensive explosion to happen like on August 19th when they won 9-3 against the offensively heavy Minnesota Twins, or on August 28th when they beat the Pittsburgh Pirates 9-1. In other games where the Brewers have won, it’s been by one or two runs, but those two games are notable thanks to their offense waking up. They don’t have room to be making mistakes and they don’t have time to continue to play from behind and allow the opposing team to score first.

There is still hope that the Brewers can prove people wrong and have an outstanding September as they’ve done the last two seasons, but the hope will start to dwindle if they continue to perform poorly.

But in good Milwaukee Brewers fashion, they always have surprises up their sleeves and pull out some miracles and can make it to the postseason.