Brewers Have Their Biggest NL Central Lead In Franchise History

In what has been an already magical year, the 2021 Milwaukee Brewers have once again etched their name in the club history books.

In order to set the franchise record for regular season wins (97), Milwaukee has to win just 11 of their remaining 21 games. Take that in for a second. If the Brewers win at a .523 clip for the rest of the season, they’ll become the best regular season team in Brewers history.

Now obviously, the goal isn’t to set regular season records. But it’s hard to downplay the success from a Brewers franchise that was not competitive for a long time.

The Milwaukee Brewers are on the cusp of making the MLB playoffs for the fourth straight season. To put that into perspective, they had only made the playoffs four other times in franchise history in a span of 47 years (1970-2017).

Now some may argue that the Brewers are playing in a weaker division, hence the large lead. Well, that take wasn’t the consensus at the beginning of the season when sportswriters were looking into their crystal ball for the future and taking the Cardinals or Cubs to win the division. Milwaukee was projected to win somewhere around 83 games and be in contention, but nobody saw the onslaught that would occur coming.

“But the Cubs sold everyone at the deadline and the Cardinals and Reds didn’t make any big moves to gain ground on the Brewers”, you may say. This is true, but maybe those clubs conceded because they knew they couldn’t make up the necessary ground on the Brewers. Giving up a big prospect or haul of good players for a superstar is quite the big risk, so they opted to stay safe and let the Crew run away with the NL Central essentially.

And if your argument is that Milwaukee will obviously have a good record because of playing against teams like the Pirates and Cubs so much this season, I have one statistic to reply with: 23-9 (.719). That’s the Crew’s record against the NL West, the division widely agreed upon as the best division in baseball. This team is a legitimate World Series contender.

In what might go down as one of the most talented rosters that the Milwaukee Brewers have ever fielded, it feels like this could really be the year. Inevitably, players will leave this offseason, but why not send off those players with a ring? The beauty of it all though, is that they still have team control of several key pieces moving forward, basically ensuring that David Stearns and his colleagues can send out a competitive team in the years to come.

Enjoy this Brewers fans. Because those that had to sit through those 40+ years of mediocrity and underachievement know how difficult a successful run like this over a span of a handful of years can really be. Let’s go make some more history.