Brewers Magic Number: Team insider reveals possible Tuesday night clinch scenario

The calendar only reads September 9, and yet the Milwaukee Brewers already have a chance to clinch a postseason berth.

What began as a season of uncertainty has become a season to remember for Brewers fans everywhere, who have had the pleasure of watching their record-breaking 2025 squad mow down the competition for the last few months. An Opening Series sweep at the hands of the mighty New York Yankees and the ensuing controversy over the legality of the "torpedo bat" now feels like a distant memory or even just a bad dream. The times of closed-door team meetings and troubling offensive inconsistency are no longer as the Brew Crew has cemented themselves as the best team in baseball, sitting atop MLB.com's power rankings for the last six weeks.

With a brutal stretch of 19 games in 18 days during the Dog Days of August squarely behind them, Pat Murphy's band of scrappy ballplayers and former cast-offs turns their attention to their next task: officially clinching a spot in the postseason. According to Brewers' insider Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that task could be completed before the end of the night.

According to Brewers insider Curt Hogg, Milwaukee can clinch a playoff berth with a win, a Reds loss, a Giants loss, and a Dodgers loss

Calculating the Brewers' magic number to clinch a playoff spot is much more complicated than deducing their magic number for clinching the NL Central. In the case of the division, the Brewers just have to look to the next best team, the Chicago Cubs, and determine how many games they need to win (or the Cubs need to lose) until it becomes mathematically impossible for the North Siders to surpass them in the standings before the end of the season.

However, when it comes to simply clinching a postseason berth, the Brewers have to look to the NL Wild Card standings, as the math becomes how many games do they need to win before they mathematically can't fall behind any of the teams currently sitting in playoff position.

As such, Brewers fans must turn to three NL contenders when engaging in scoreboard watching tonight: the Cincinnati Reds, the San Francisco Giants, and the Los Angeles Dodgers. The reasoning for each is explained in detail in Hogg's post above, but the gist is that if the ideal scenario shakes out for the Brew Crew tonight, they will mathematically not be able to fall out of the postseason picture even if they were to lose the rest of their games and the teams chasing them were to win out.

The Brewers' aspirations are far greater than simply reaching the postseason this year. As the holder of the best record in baseball by a margin of 4.5 games, the Brewers have their sights set on the top seed heading into the playoffs. Such an accomplishment would give them home-field advantage throughout the postseason, which could play an integral role in the team's postseason success.

Therefore, while it would be awesome to see the Brewers clinch a postseason berth on September 9, which would be the earliest that the team has clinched a spot in the playoffs in franchise history, it won't drastically change how Murphy and the Crew attack the remaining games. Sure, there may be some more days off for their regular starters should the team clinch the top seed before the end of the season, but until that happens, expect Murphy to treat each game the same way he has all season, with an unwavering, unapologetic desire to win.