Brewers' latest milestone is a sobering reminder of organization's unsuccessful past

Being a Milwaukee Brewers fan has been pretty fun for the last decade, as the Cream City ball club has done a lot of winning during that time. Playoff heartbreak aside, one could certainly argue that the Brew Crew is in their golden era, despite not making a World Series since 1982.

Over the last eight seasons, the Brewers have qualified for the playoffs seven times. However, many are soon to forget that Milwaukee was already knocking on the postseason door in 2017 with a young, upstart group of emerging prospects and veterans who were cast off by other teams. Despite missing the playoffs by one game that year, it was enough to get the front office to buy into their current group of players, and make a pair of moves that would end up completely changing the course of Brewers baseball.

After the additions of Lorenzo Cain and Christian Yelich in January 2018, Milwaukee went on to make the NLCS just nine months later, and have qualified for every postseason outside of 2022 ever since. Even in that 2022 season, the team still went 86-76 (the same record they posted in 2017), despite a catastrophic collapse after dealing All-Star closer Josh Hader at the trade deadline while the team was in first place.

All that to say, Milwaukee has been in a great spot as an organization for the last decade. However, as good as things have been over this time, it took until Tuesday, July 7th, 2026 for the Brewers to surpass a milestone that should serve as a stark reminder of just how brutal things had been for the franchise at various points over the last few decades.

Brewers finally move above .500 as member of the National League

Younger fans of the Milwaukee Brewers may not remember that for about half of the franchise's history, the team was part of the American League. In 1998, when MLB expanded from 28 teams to 30, Milwaukee moved from the AL Central to the NL Central to balance out the two leagues.

In that first season in National League play, the Brewers certainly struggled, finishing 5th in the division, with a meager 74-88 record. However, before a brutal finish to the season, Milwaukee was 57-56 on August 4th, 1998, which shockingly was the last time that the team had an above-.500 winning percentage as an NL team before Tuesday's first game of the Brewers-Cardinals doubleheader. With a win over the Red Birds yesterday afternoon, the Brewers, as a franchise, moved to 2,262-2,261-1 as a member of the National League, and improved on that record by a game with a win in Game 2 of yesterday's doubleheader.

It certainly has been an uphill climb, considering just how dismal some of those teams in the early 2000s were for the Brewers, including a franchise worst record in 2002 of 56-106, "besting" the previous worst record of 64-98 in the team's inaugural season in Seattle, back in 1969. The surrounding years weren't much better, as the team went 67-94 in 2004, and 68-94, in both 2001 and 2003.

The 2015 squad, following a nightmarish collapse down the stretch of the 2014 campaign, also logged a 68-94 record, which included a mere 7-18 start, prompting the firing of manager Ron Roenicke on May 3rd, 2015, leading to the team naming Craig Counsell as the new manager. The team hit their franchise worst mark of 196 games under .500 on August 13th, 2016, as noted by Mike Vassallo, the Brewers' senior director of media relations, in the post below.

Since that date in late August of 2016, it's been nothing but winning for the Brew Crew, aside from a 2020 season that really shouldn't count in the record books. As alluded to by Vassallo's report, in the nine seasons since the Brewers' NL "rock bottom," the team has been an unbelievable 197 games above .500, and though it has yet to result in a World Series championship, the franchise turn-around that Milwaukee has undergone is nothing short of spectacular.

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