How The Milwaukee Brewers Are Impacted By These 5 CBA Changes

New CBA Rule: Expanded postseason

The postseason has expanded yet again, going from 10 teams up to 12. This is leading to a whole new format.

With six teams from each league making the postseason, that means there are the three division winners and then three Wild Cards. The team with the top two records will receive what essentially amounts to a bye.

The division winner with the lowest record and the three wild cards will play a Best-Of-3 series in the Wild Card round. The winners of those series will move on to the LDS to face one of the top two seeds. There is no re-seeding to ensure the top seed will face the lowest remaining seed.

How this impacts the Brewers is simple: It makes it that much easier to make the postseason. The Brewers are the reigning NL Central champions and they won it pretty convincingly last year, but the Cardinals are still full of talent and the Cubs aren’t looking for another long teardown and rebuild. If the Brewers are unable to win the division, the third wild card spot will help give them more of an opportunity to reach October baseball.

If the Brewers are not one of the top two seeds and they have to play in the Wild Card round, they are well positioned for a three game series. Between Corbin Burnes, Brandon Woodruff, and Freddy Peralta, the Brewers will have the upper hand in the rotation against any team in baseball.

As we saw in October 2021, the best pitching in the world doesn’t matter if your offense can’t score, but the aforementioned Universal DH should also help the Brewers be better on that front as well.

There were rumors of a 14 team postseason plan, but thankfully that was not agreed to. That would muddy the postseason waters a lot, and even though it would give the Brewers an even better chance of making the postseason, that just makes it that much harder to achieve the ultimate goal of a World Series.

A best-of-3 Wild Card eliminates some of that tough luck you see in the win-or-go-home Wild Card we’ve had over the last decade. That 2019 Brewers squad might’ve been a World Series caliber club if not for the unfortunate luck late in that game against the Nationals.

There are other aspects of the new CBA that makes some changes, but not all of them impact the Brewers or how they operate. The league minimum salary has increased, plus there’s the addition of a bonus pool for pre-arbitration players who perform well.